It was during the summer of 1806, that I first introduced Jenny to Thomas and his family. Thomas and Marion already had one daughter, but Marion had not long given birth to their second child, a son this time, naturally enough named Thomas for his father. Thomas was to be his only son, although there were two more girls.
However, at the time I am writing about, Thomas and Marion must have anticipated the birth of a succession of strong sons, and they wished to have a fine christening cape made for this new and precious infant who had almost died, but had been brought back from the brink of death by his father’s care, and was now a very bonny, thriving baby. There was already a gown in the family, inherited from the Edinburgh side, perhaps the work of one of Mr Ruffini’s many orphan girls, but Thomas had promised his wife something new for the baby, an heirloom for the future. Marion was no great hand with her needle, but Thomas was prepared to pay handsomely and, through me, engaged Jenny to undertake the task. They had not yet met at that time, although I had spoken so often about Jenny to Thomas and Thomas to Jenny that they must have felt as though they already knew each other. I had certainly shown Thomas one or two examples of Jenny’s beautiful work: an embroidered muslin handkerchief that she had made for my mother and a sprigged waistcoat that she had asked me to deliver to the city merchant who had commissioned it.
That spring, when I was just recovering from my illness, Jenny came to the college with her father, who left her at our house while he went off on business about the city. He often did this nowadays and it was, so my mother said, a mark of the growing trust and respect that lay between us. Thomas had bought silk fabric in blue and cream and a selection of brightly coloured silken threads for the project, on Jenny’s explicit instructions and at great expense. I believe such excellent fine silks and gossamer thread for embroidering come from the land of China, although I had only the sketchiest notion of where that was at the time.
I looked for it on the globe of the world in Thomas’s library and I was quite stunned by the size of the place. It caused an instant’s dizziness, while my head was transported to wide foreign landscapes where unknown flowers and plants grew, flowers and plants that Jenny told me were used to dye the silks with colours which were quite unknown in Scotland, where the woollen cloth was more likely to be coloured with the natural subtleties of the Scots landscape: heather, whin and the dun of peat bog.
‘Is she telling me the truth?’ I asked Thomas.
He smiled at me. ‘She’s no fool, your Jenny Caddas, but then what else would you expect from a weaver’s daughter? They aye know what’s what! And she’s right. The silkworms, which are not worms at all, but insects, make the thread that makes the silk, and flowers and plants are used to make the most wonderful dyes. There are many interesting plants, medicinal and otherwise, that come from the land of China. They were a highly civilised people when we were still living in caves!’
‘Can that be true?’
I sometimes think I must have seemed such a simpleton to him but my innocence never seemed to annoy him.
‘Oh, as true as I’m standing here.’
And then he remarked, as he invariably did, ‘One day we might go there together!’ and I could picture us travelling the many miles across the world in company, as other collectors had done before us, bringing back a thousand magical plants to enrich the botanical collections of Scotland and England. Some of these collectors, so he told me, had even started out as gardeners, very much like myself.
I am not sure that I ever believed in the possibility of even one such voyage. But like the heavenly paradise that the minister preached about each Sunday, the very idea of it was a constant incitement to work hard, to win his praise. I would go so far as to say that the biblical paradise seemed a pallid and colourless place by comparison.
That day, he had left the parcel of silks at our house from where Jenny was to pick it up. Although I was still acting as intermediary, it was a matter of chance, merely, that they had not yet met. Her visits to my house and to the college garden had not yet coincided with Thomas’s. Even working through the light spring and summer nights it might take her a few months to complete the cape. Thomas had left her a sum of money as a deposit and had said that there would be a handsome payment once the garment was completed. She didn’t want to accept even that small payment in advance until she was sure that he was satisfied with her work, but he insisted, and her father – ever the realist – had told her to ‘haud her whisht and tak’ the siller’. What good was pride when they needed bread for the table?
That day, Jenny took the silks and a neat new pair of shears away with her. She had particularly asked for these because she feared that the big shears that her father used for trimming off the long floaters at the back of the cloth, when his weaving was finished, might mark the delicate fabric. While the days were long and light, she commenced work on the exquisite garment, which was intended to become an heirloom for the whole family, and which did indeed become a family treasure for all I know. They may have it still, for how could it be otherwise? But I can imagine that Thomas would not care to have looked at it very often. I can imagine that Thomas would not like to have looked at it at all, although it would have been too precious to be destroyed or even given away, and it may have been that he had to smile at his wife and dissemble and pretend that he still valued it as much as ever.
How often have I blamed myself for what happened? Times without number. I know it is not rational to think so. I know that things happen as they must. What’s for you won’t go by you, as my mother, with her auld wife’s wisdom, used to say. I wish it had not been so. I wish things could have been entirely different. But they weren’t. And if they had been different, I would not be the man I am today. Which is a disturbing thought, as though the minister is right when he stands up and declares that God’s plan is laid out before us, and we are powerless to change it. It is only how we respond to events, that alone is what we can alter, in that alone resides our free will.
I sometimes wonder, as I sit here in the enforced idleness of old age, what my life might have been like if I had indeed become a famous plant collector and botanist, the esteemed friend of Dr Thomas Brown. But that thought too induces a kind of dizziness in me at the largeness of it, much as the map of China did all those years ago, and I cannot bear to think about it for very long.
* * *
If the truth be told, I spent a couple of weeks of that summer of 1806 on rather poor terms with Thomas, even though I carried on finding plants for him. It might never have happened if I hadn’t got into the habit, especially while I was recovering from my illness, of spending as much time as I could in the library at his house, reading mostly about plants and their properties, but sometimes indulging in my growing taste for traveller’s tales. The servants, all except the fearsome housekeeper, had grown used to me and let me in without a murmur, showing me to the library and leaving me to spend my time as I saw fit.
Marion was either with her children or out and about in the town, paying visits to her friends. Thomas would be teaching or seeing patients, although sometimes he would come and sit with me in friendly silence and read or write, and those were the most congenial times of all. The first time this happened, I made as if to leave him in peace. Our arrangement was that I would use his library when he was absent.
He smiled and said, ‘No, no. I have come to keep you company. It’s good to read and study in friendly company.’
I found that he was right. We were at ease with each other and I think we both welcomed the occasional interruption when one or other of us had discovered something of interest or, more frequently, when I had questions for him. He was a good teacher and seemed pleased to give me the benefit of his wisdom.
He was one of the best respected doctors in the town and the ladies of fashion flocked around him. It must have been a very lucrative trade for him, although it didn’t strike me at the time. But I had seen it with my own eyes. Or at least heard it with my own ears. Sometimes when I was at his house, which was also where he had his consulting rooms, I would sit beside the library fire, in the threadbare armchair that was Thomas’s favourite. It actually had the scent of him, his tobacco, his hair oil, on it. From time to time the family cat, a fat and indiscreet tabby, would come and drape itself round my shoulders like a warm cloak. Thomas had named her Messalina after some strange, classical fancy. ‘Deadly’ was all he would say when I asked him who the original had been, although I later found out a good deal more about her, none of it very savoury. This shoulder hugging was a dubious favour the animal also tried to bestow on Thomas himself, although he was a less compliant victim and would wrestle the cat to the floor, where it would roll about with claws extended in protest.
I think Thomas’s female patients envied the cat. I would be sitting there with my mind on a favourite volume of botanical studies, memorising the properties of plants, absorbing all these wonderful illustrations, when I would hear a pair of young ladies or even a twittering group of them, like a flock of fieldfare, descending on the house, arriving to ‘see the doctor’.
Often enough he would visit them in their own homes, but they seemed to like to visit him as well. I think they made excuses to see him because the excursion provided them with some much-needed excitement. They were the wives and daughters of merchants, men of consequence in the city. They were invariably dressed in the height of fashion, fantastic costumes that Jenny and my sisters would have been ashamed to wear, topped by the most foolish hats you ever saw, with immensely tall feathers in them, more foolish even than my mother’s Lunardi bonnet. They never looked remotely unwell.
Thomas seldom if ever spoke to me about his patients and certainly never mentioned specific complaints. Once he said, ‘all these lassies, half their trouble, you know, is that they have too little to do and far too much time to brood. A minor ailment, which would be as nothing to a girl who had to work for her living, looms very large in their lives because there is nothing else to occupy their thoughts. The devil makes work for idle hands and idle minds too.
‘These things affect their minds as much as anything else,’ he continued. ‘Even the smallest imagined slight begins to loom very large for them. Their affairs of the heart concern them constantly. They have headaches and flutterings. They come seeking a measure of concern, of kindness, and – once you give them a little attention – these complaints evaporate into the air as though they had never been. But they need something to occupy them. They need to read, even if it is only novels. I’m sure your Jenny has no imagined complaints.’
‘No. She would not have the time.’
‘And from what you tell me, she would have far too much good, sound, common sense.’
‘I’m sure you’re right. But maybe you judge these young ladies too harshly. What choice do they have?’
‘None. And I’m wrong to be impatient since they give me and mine our daily bread. But all the same, I do grow impatient with them. A little.’ He laughed. ‘You know, William, sometimes, when I am in the middle of these consultations, it feels as though I am being bitten to death by midgies!’
I remember thinking how I wished that my mother, my sister Bessie, or Jenny Caddas had the troubles of these women instead of the weariness, the many aches and pains that beset them, the callouses and racking coughs, the weak eyes from overwork in damp rooms, the fatigue that was the result of poor food and little rest. I would look at my mother from time to time and think that she looked all spent, her skin sagging around her eyes, her teeth beginning to loosen in her gums. It wasn’t Thomas’s fault. He was not to blame for the injustice in the world, and he often gave his services to one of the charity hospitals in the city in an effort to relieve the woes of the truly poor. But it was the prodigious gap between rich and poor that struck me as it never had before, or not in this way. The college was a chilly, dusty old place and many of the professors who lodged there cared little for personal comfort. It was only when I was admitted to Thomas’s house and experienced what I thought of as its opulence that I became fully aware of how ill-divided was the world in which we lived. I saw the way in which the rooms were always warm and clean and comfortable, the way in which food seemed to appear on the table as if by magic. Well, there was no magic. It was down to the never-ending hard work for small reward of women like my sister, Bessie. I saw that those who are born and bred with even a modicum of wealth can have no idea of what it means to be poor. They say that money does not bring happiness and perhaps that’s true. But I tell you this. It is easier to be unhappy and rich than it is to be unhappy and poor.