Chapter Twenty-five

Ellisland

Of a’ the airts the wind can blaw,

I dearly like the west,

For there the bonnie lassie lives,

The lassie I lo’e best:

There was no doubt about it: Ellisland was beautiful. In spring and summer it seemed picturesque beyond measure. The new house was going to be quite spacious for the home of a simple tenant farmer, so large that its shadow would fall across the River Nith onto the field opposite. There was a good spring to supply fresh water for the household; there was a garden a little way from the new house, and an old orchard, planted some years earlier, with a few still-productive apple trees. There was a riverbank walk, with lush grass and a view of trout and salmon rising to flies in season. A private path led to the folly known as the Hermitage at Friar’s Carse. Rab had soon begged permission from Robert Riddell to go there and write in the peace and quiet of the stone-built den. He and Riddell got on very well, their mutual love of books and reading making them instant friends. Ellisland was a poet’s farm, sure enough, but even as Jean could appreciate the surroundings and their appeal for Rab, she found herself wondering if that would be enough, if it would be a farmer’s farm as well. Of course, she would be supervising the cheese making, and there was the excise work too, which would be reasonably well paid. But he would have to cover a large area, and it would involve a very great deal of riding about the county for Rab, summer and winter alike, while the fields would have to be worked at the same time. She had the occasional twinge of misgiving about it all, about how difficult it might be to keep things going once they were installed here. Nevertheless, she could hardly wait to move.

The room in Mauchline had been a welcome place of shelter for Jean. She was endlessly grateful to Doctor Mackenzie for helping her in her hour of need, and she had come to appreciate it as somewhere to call home, the first establishment of her own she had ever known as a legitimately married woman, but it had never really been more than a stop-gap until she could join her husband in Dumfriesshire.

At first, Rab took shelter with an elderly couple, Davy and Nance Cullie, who lived on the edge of his new farm. Their cottage, if it could even be dignified with that name, was a cold, old, smoky hovel that he could not think of bringing his young wife to live in, never mind his growing son. The floor was of clay, the rafters were all black with soot, for the smoke found its way out as best it could rather than via any serviceable chimney. When the doors and windows were open, the sunlight trickled in as the smoke trickled out, making a sort of misty twilight of the interior. He wrote to Jean that ‘every blast that blows and every shower that falls gets in, and I am only preserved from being chilled to death by being suffocated by constant smoke.’ He coughed all the time. Davy and Nance coughed too, but they saw nothing unusual about that. Rab fancied they were preserved by the smoke, like a pair of herring. He would sit inside and interview labourers, and he had set up a desk where he could work on a poem or a song when he could find the time, but it was not a place to house his small family.

No wonder, then, that he was glad to ride back to Mauchline and his wife as often as he could, spending about half his time there, reading, writing and otherwise dallying with Jean, playing with Robbie and Betsy Paton’s Bess, or visiting friends and relatives. But he had to be in Dumfriesshire to get the farm up and running, clearing stones, sowing grass seed, trying hard to set in train some improvement of the land. He also had to supervise the building of his new house, often lending a hand when a big stone had to be lifted, for he had not lost the strength of his youth, the muscles acquired when he had, as he described it, worked like a galley-slave at Mount Oliphant and then at Lochlea.

Even so, the work progressed slowly. He had called down a blessing on the foundation stone himself, placing a pair of worn leather brogues beneath it for luck. He had ordered the necessary wood from Dumfries. To his embarrassment and secret delight, he had learned that some twenty-four carpenters had gathered around to see the signature of the famous poet on the order. Alexander Crombie was the stonemason chosen to undertake the project. He came highly recommended by James Armour, and he was making a good job of it. Jean would even have her parlour in which to receive visitors, wearing her fine silk gowns and caps, her pretty shawls.

There were other necessities to be ordered and procured, and Jean was excited by the novelty of it all: table and bed linens, better and cheaper bought by the yard and made up at home, so they were advised; cutlery and crockery and a cookery book for Jean – who was not a bad cook – but was anxious to improve, Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. There were recipes for sweetmeats, for preserving gooseberries and cucumbers, for making haggis and even lip salve. Rab declared that he preferred good plain meat dishes, but Jean was anxious to try new things and Rab – as he had promised so many months ago – had procured a second-hand copy from Edinburgh for her when he was ordering books for himself. He was always keen to extend his own library, even when they couldn’t really afford the additional expense.

Alongside all this frantic activity, he was collecting, writing and rewriting songs and always coming home to Mauchline with a budget of new songs that he wanted his ‘sweet muse’, as he had taken to calling her, to sing for him, so that he could change them or modify them to suit himself. Then he would get down his fiddle and she would sing, and between the two of them they would try this or that melody and this or that version of a song, and she found the whole process vastly entertaining. He never left off praising her voice.

In October, with the weather deteriorating, Rab thought that he couldn’t bear to stay in the hovel much longer. If doors and windows had to be kept closed, the air inside would become intolerable. But the house at Ellisland was nowhere near finished. Fortunately, a Dumfries lawyer named Newall came to his rescue, on the recommendation of Robert Riddell, and he was offered a furnished house called The Isle, situated nearby. Although it was a big, chilly place, a house that the Newalls only used during the summer months when they wanted to bring their children out of the fetid town, Jean said that he should take it and she would come and join him. Privately, she thought that if Rab didn’t need to spend quite so much time travelling back and forth between Dumfriesshire and Mauchline, unable to resist the attraction of Jeany’s warm bed and warm body, the building work might go more quickly, and she was right. Her father had said as much, and he knew all about stonemasons and carpenters and what might happen if they were left unsupervised for any length of time.

Besides, being a clever and capable young woman, she had learned all that they could teach her about dairying at Mossgiel, and she wanted to be off to Dumfries, and living properly with her husband. By December of that year, she had given up the tenancy of the snug room in Mauchline, with all its memories, sad and joyful. Taking wee Robbie with her, her own dear lad at last, she travelled down to Nithsdale. She brought with her her mother’s young cousin, Elizabeth Smith, to help about the house, as well as a couple of farm servants from Ayrshire, chosen by Rab and his brother Gilbert. Fanny and William Burness, who were Rab’s orphaned cousins, would also be living with them. William was waiting to take up an apprenticeship as a stonemason with James Armour and had offered to help out on the new venture over the winter until the position became available in the spring.

Jean brought some furniture and furnishings with her, packed and roped into a cart, to be stored in the Newall’s house until they could be put in the new house: wooden tables and chairs that had been made in Mauchline, the mahogany bed, a long cased clock ordered specially from Clockie Broun, a copper kettle and some kitchen essentials. The family stayed at the chilly Newall house until June of the following year when they took official possession of Ellisland, walking the short distance to the new house in procession, wearing their very best clothes, with Elizabeth Smith in front carrying the family bible and a bowl of salt. Traditionally, a maiden must take possession of a newly built house, and Eliza’s father had been so worried about his daughter’s innocence and her moral welfare that before he had allowed her to go to Dumfriesshire, he had taken Rab to one side (Rab, of all people! thought Jean) and begged him to keep an eye on her and to hear her catechism regularly. To give Rab his due, he had scrupulously complied with the father’s wishes. Perhaps it was a novelty for him to be trusted like this.

Jean herself was very noticeably with child again. Her move from Mauchline to the Newall House had been almost instantly productive, since the chilly old building had meant long nights in the Newall’s big feather bed, with Eliza minding Robbie in another room. Sometimes Jean thought that she and Rab had only to look at each other for her to conceive. But she didn’t think it was twins again, and this was something of a relief to her, if only in that it might ensure a healthy child.

In the new house, a piece of oatcake was broken over Jean’s head, showering her dark curls with crumbs, to the delight of Robbie, who chuckled and tangled his fingers in her hair to pick them out. They drank to the success of the new house and the new venture and, in the evening, there was music and dancing. In honour of the move, Frances Dunlop had sent the very generous gift of a four poster bed with a new mattress, well stuffed with feathers, so the old mahogany and chaff bed could be used elsewhere, for visitors or for their growing family.

It wasn’t long before there were other arrivals and departures. Rab’s young brother William passed through on his way to learn saddlery in Newcastle. Rab’s cousin went back to Mauchline to take up his apprenticeship with James Armour, but his elder brother John came in his stead. There were some ewes, four working horses and nine or ten cows on the farm, including four of the new brown and white Ayrshires that gave such good milk and that Rab had brought with him from Mossgiel, the first to be introduced into Dumfries. And in early September of 1789, there was a new baby to bless the house as well, when Jean gave birth to Francis Wallace, a big, healthy boy, not shy of making himself heard when he was hungry or cold.

By December of that year, and in spite of the comfort of the new house, Rab was ill with a chill and a persistent headache. To Jean’s anxious eyes, he always seemed unable to shake off these illnesses, especially in winter, and the dark days did not help him at all. He needed warmth and sunlight. They all did, but Rab more than most. He seemed wretchedly downhearted for no very obvious reason, and nothing seemed to bring him ease, although he seldom lost patience either with his children or with his workers, his natural good nature always asserting itself.

He would have had good reason to be cross.

Wee Frank was howling a great deal, his mouth afire with thrush which he had communicated to his mother, or rather to her breasts, and she could have riven them apart with the miserable itching and the shooting pains whenever he suckled. Rab brought a bottle of wine vinegar back from Friar’s Carse, saying that the nursemaid there had suggested it might help, if diluted with water. Jean bathed her nipples and the baby’s mouth with a small quantity of it in warm water, and although he screwed up his rosebud lips at the taste, it helped.

In January, Rab was saying that the farm was a ‘ruinous affair’, but Jean didn’t know how else to help. She was already doing so much, while Rab concentrated on furthering his career with the excise, which she supposed made a kind of sense. If the farm failed, they would be reliant on his other work and they wouldn’t starve. But between running the house, organising the servants, cooking and cleaning, taking care of the two children, making sure everyone was well fed, and working in the dairy into the bargain, she was as exhausted as her husband. Perhaps more so.

‘But I think we must give it another year, at least, don’t you?’ he said.

‘Aye, I think we must. The house is so fine, even if the farm is not. I wish there was some way you could get more money for your work, though, Rab. You seem to spend so much time on it, and folk are always telling me what a great writer you are, what a credit to Scotland, so why does nobody pay you very much?’

‘I don’t want to be paid for the songs, Jean. I’m proud to do it, and I have a kind of feeling that they’re not mine at all, that they belong to everyone. It would be like you laying claim to every song you have ever sung while bouncing one of the weans on your knee.’

‘But I’m not sure you can keep working at this pace, between the farm and the excise.’

‘No. The riding half kills me in winter, and as soon as I’m recovered from that in some measure, I have the farm again. But we’ll give it another year and see what happens. I love it here, love the house, love its situation. I just can’t fathom how we can even begin to make it pay for itself.’