SUSAN’S FINGERS FELT CLAMMY as she lifted the lid of the box that contained her wedding gown. It was folded in tissue and gently she unwrapped it, lifting it out by the bodice and holding it to the light, checking the colour was as she expected, the palest shale of tea. Mrs Babbington took it from her and exclaimed over the fineness of the stitching and the sheen of the silk. Together, they hung it from the top of the press to help the creases drop out of the long skirt and Mrs Babbington fluffed up the great puffs of the sleeves. Then Susan turned her attention to the other boxes. The first contained underpinnings made of the finest lawn, trimmed with rosy ribbons of silk, stockings, and a garter. Those made her feel strange, and hot, the fabric so thin as to be almost transparent, hard to imagine Robert looking on her in such a thing. The last box contained her slippers, made of the lightest satin, lined with cotton and trimmed with grosgrain ribbon and rings of pearls. No use for walking, of course, but then she had only to step into the carriage and out again at the kirk.
All was well made, restrained, entirely appropriate to an orphan girl who had once been the paid companion to the sisters of her betrothed. Mary and Jessie had insisted on that, fingering the fabrics and leafing through the pattern books with a practised eye, refusing anything extravagant or showy, steering Susan towards plain good quality and subtle colourings. They dressed more richly, as was their right, but perhaps they needed to; their standing might have been higher than Susan’s but neither had half her looks, Mary with a face like a mealy pudding and Jessie as scrawny as an old hen. It had never occurred to Susan that her beauty might be an affront to them; they were rich, after all, and with enough money any woman may be married well. Indeed, they never treated her any differently, Mary fawning as she had always done, the big lump, and Jessie smirking, although they were quick to strike a deal with the dressmaker for a lower price – perhaps the shoes did not need so many pearls, after all.
Robert’s mother had been dead a few months by then, that was why it had fallen to his sisters to support Susan in this way, since she had no one of her own. It was Jessie who had found her lodging with Mrs Babbington; she said it would not be seemly for Susan to be married out of Newington Place with Robert sleeping in the next room. Mary made a great show of agreeing with her – she was always the echo of her sister, slow and dull where Jessie was sharp and hard. She would never say anything nasty of her own account, but neither would she stand up to Jessie. Susan was a little offended at their fuss, she had never had any intention of staying once Robert had proposed. Father had seen her schooled as well as any lady and she knew she had nothing to be ashamed of in her looks or her manners. Robert’s mother would never have stooped to bring her into the Knox family home had it been any other way.
It pained Susan that Father had not lived to see her married. She knew he’d be pleased with her, engaged to a young man with brilliant prospects, one who’d travelled to the Cape and Paris, and who looked set to become one of the foremost anatomists of the day. But she did not think their backgrounds so very different, when all was said and done. Father was a merchant, not so very low, and Robert only the son of a schoolmaster. She did not understand – then – that those may be the very worst kind of families, the ones who desperately seek to improve their station in society. She did not see how they were sensitive to any slight, sought to stamp out any reminder of origins of the average sort. Robert was the family’s great hope; how could Susan have thought they were happy for him to take a servant girl as his wife?
Susan would have plenty of time to reflect on that later, but when Robert proposed, it had never occurred to her to doubt his motivations. He loved her, she was sure of that, and she also thought he knew himself lucky to get her. He had had the smallpox when he was a child, and it had pitted his skin and blinded his left eye, so that a full moon of milky white shone where in the other eye the iris was blue. A gentler man might have overcome the obstacle, attracted romantic interest even, by reason of his scarring, but Robert was not that man. His wit was as acerbic as his countenance was frightening. Jessie tattled that he was a bully at school, and often in trouble in the Cape, and slow, plodding Mary agreed, as she always did, but Susan had ignored that, thinking it jealousy speaking. And all the while they were sniggering behind their hands, waiting for the day she would be gone and Jessie would have the run of the house and the account books and no need to worry about husbands ever again, only clothes and sweetmeats and gossip.
Susan and Robert’s banns were read not, as Susan had imagined they would be, in the lovely new Hope Park Chapel where the Knox family worshipped, or indeed anywhere else on the south side of the city where their acquaintance lived. Robert said, instead, that he had arranged for the banns to be read outside the city, in the old kirk in South Leith, as Robert was registered as living at a cottage he had outside the city at a place called Lillypot, and Susan had been born in the parish of Leith. They would be married there too, he said.
At first, Susan had been disappointed, but Robert said they could not do more, not when they should still properly be in mourning for his mother. And in any case, Robert said the old Leith kirk was a fine building and the minister a remarkable man, another High School boy like Robert himself, although many years his junior. That had cheered Susan, at the time, as she had been worried at the thought of being required to marry in mourning attire.
On the morning of the wedding, Susan woke at dawn and could sleep no more. Mrs Babbington brought her tea and toast at seven, although she could eat nothing, her stomach was fluttering so that she worried she might be sick. Mrs Babbington helped her dress, curling her hair and styling it most prettily, then rubbing a little of her own rouge into Susan’s cheeks.
‘I’ve never seen a bride so pale!’ she said, and she rubbed Susan’s hands and then gave her a tot of brandy from a flask. It burned in Susan’s stomach as they walked down the stairs together. Inside the door, Mrs Babbington kissed her and wished her every happiness. She seemed a trifle misty-eyed, telling Susan that she remembered her own wedding day with fondness, and missed her husband still for all he had been dead near on twenty years.
Then Mrs Babbington opened the door and Susan stepped outside into the morning sun where Robert was climbing out of the carriage to supervise the loading of her trunk. Susan stood on the step, dazed, wondering whether she might fall, but then Robert finished instructing the coachman and his hand was firm on her back, helping her into the carriage and climbing in beside her, opposite Mary and Jessie in new dresses and bonnets. Susan felt she was floating free of her body, somehow, so she looked at them and seemed hardly to know them, Mary in an ugly brown frock and jacket that brought out the shadows under her eyes and the paleness of her skin, so she looked almost dead, and Jessie in a black and red striped coat and hat with a great plume of feathers, looking more like a pecking hen than ever, with her scrawny neck and beady eyes.
The sisters chattered away as they drove through Newington, past the university and across the North Bridge towards Leith. Susan said little, feeling still a stranger in her body, and Jessie laughed at her nerves and they chattered among themselves some more, Jessie with pert comments and Mary murmuring agreement, and somehow Susan didn’t notice that they had already passed the kirk at Leith until they were already at the Shore. Robert helped her out of the carriage then, before handing down Mary and Jessie, and ushered them into an inn. He told them it was an important place, where the Scots kings long ago had stored their arms, and then where a hospital for plague victims had been established, although Susan couldn’t see why any of that mattered when they should be at the kirk. Then they were seated at table and wine was brought and Robert began on a story of the odd things he had eaten in France with his friend Thomas Hodgkin, raw steak mixed with egg and caperberries, snails in butter with garlic, and the fried legs of frogs. Mary and Jessie laughed and gasped and professed themselves appalled.
When at last she could get a word in, Susan asked when they were to go to the kirk.
Robert smiled and took a drink of wine. ‘There’s no need of it,’ he said. ‘Under Scots law any couple may marry by saying they are married and setting up home together.’
Susan had no idea what to say to that, but it seemed she was not required to say anything. Jessie struck up to say yes, brother Robert was entirely correct, that was all that was required and given that both their families were in mourning, surely it would be the best and most appropriate thing in any case. Mary agreed, and then Jessie produced a ring which Robert put on Susan’s hand, saying it had been their mother’s, and then Mary and Jessie clapped and smiled, Jessie kissed Susan and called her ‘sister’, and Mary rose clumsily from her seat, offering her soft, damp cheek for Susan’s kiss. Robert ordered brandy for a toast and said Susan was ‘like the sun in its meridian, spreading a lustre throughout the world’. He explained this was originally said of the old king George, for all he was mad, which seemed to Susan less than romantic, but it provided an opening for Jessie to begin to reminisce about the new king’s visit to Edinburgh.
‘Do you mind on it, Susan? Did your father take you? So round in his kilt. And his stockings – pink stockings, of all the sights!’
And it seemed all was done and the others quite content with affairs.
The food came, and Susan still could not eat, but the rest feasted most heartily. Then Jessie took Susan upstairs to a room where her trunk was waiting and helped her out of the wedding gown, unlacing her corset so Susan stood there in nothing but the thin shift of lawn. She struggled with a sudden desire to cover herself with her hands.
Jessie sat Susan down and began to unpin the pretty curls Mrs Babbington had fixed on her head. Susan winced as she pulled out the pins. ‘You know what happens between husband and wife?’ Jessie asked, as she raked in Susan’s bag for a brush and began to brush out the length of her hair.
Susan nodded. She was not entirely sure, in truth, but she could not bear to have Jessie’s gleaming eyes on her any longer; sitting on that hard chair in the shift that covered nothing, the woman seemed to be taking pleasure in her rough ministrations, and Susan wanted her gone. When she was alone, although it was barely noon, Susan climbed into the bed, where she lay shivering in a daze of confusion and fear, listening to the sounds of the inn and trying not to think of Father lest she begin to cry. At last, she heard Robert’s step in the hall outside and the door opened. He carried a bottle of brandy and two glasses which he placed on the dresser.
‘Poor Susan,’ he said, and he smiled. ‘This isn’t quite what you expected, is it?’
Susan didn’t speak; if she had, she knew she would have begun to cry.
‘Here,’ Robert said, and poured her a tot of brandy.
Susan took it and drank, the second shot of brandy today, and indeed only the second of her whole life.
Robert gave her another, and another, and she drank again. Her lips felt numb and she was light-headed, as though she had spun around and around and made herself dizzy.
Robert was watching her, and there was something in his expression she could not make out. He stood and began to take off his own things, sitting down on the bed again when he was dressed only in his shirt. He reached out a hand and touched Susan where the thin shift clearly showed the rosy tip of her breast. He pinched her there, hard, and then again, and asked her if she liked it. Susan didn’t, but she mumbled that she didn’t know. Then he pulled the shift down and began to kiss her, roughly, all the while pinching her breast so she felt an odd ache low in her stomach. Then he said the next would hurt, and it did, she felt something tear and it hurt her enough that she tried to fight him, but he seemed to like that, he held her down and redoubled his assault until she had to bite her lip so as not to cry.
Susan slept then, unaccustomed to the brandy, and did not wake until morning. Robert kissed her when she woke, and said it would not hurt so much the next time, and he would leave her to dress alone. There was blood on the new shift, and Susan bundled it into the trunk, knowing she would never wear it again. She thought about sending the wedding dress back to Newington Place, but then she realised she might need a good dress on their journey, and Jessie and Mary had been so careful to order her one that might be worn again! She cursed them then, in her mind, the bitches, picturing them lording it over the fine house in Newington while Susan slept in an inn – Mary lying abed waiting for toast and jam, no doubt, while Jessie clawed through her mother’s baubles for the best pieces to match that morning’s dress.
Susan put on a plain cotton dress and her boots and went to join Robert at breakfast.
After breakfast they set out in the carriage, on their wedding journey that was no wedding journey truly seen. Robert was solicitous of Susan’s comfort, making sure she was wrapped warm enough and had a comfortable cushion. He told her about the place they were going to, a region of wild hills and lochs where Walter Scott had written ‘The Lady of the Lake’. Scott seemed a great hero of Robert’s, being another High School boy like himself, and one who also had suffered an illness as a child that had provided an additional obstacle to advancement. This was the first time Susan had heard Robert refer to his own disfigurement; Scott’s, it seemed, was a disease that had left him lame. Robert was greatly interested in this disease, he said a surgeon called Underwood had written of it years ago, but he had retired young and his writings had been neglected since. Robert himself wished to study it further, but struggled for access to specimens for dissection with the characteristic marks of the disease – wasted lower extremities and strange twistings of the limbs. Then Robert remembered that Underwood had delivered the Princess Charlotte, who had died so sadly in childbirth three years back, and began to explain how he believed that catastrophe might have been avoided.
The road had become rough, and the carriage was rocky, and Susan found the line of conversation oppressive. Perhaps Robert realised this, because he changed tack and talked of the places they might see, and Scott’s novels, which everyone in Robert’s circles knew to be by Scott for all they were published anonymously. Susan had not known that and felt herself stupid. She had devoured The Heart of Midlothian, believing it to be by a woman, writing under the obviously made-up name of a schoolmaster in a made-up town in the Borders. She was almost sorry to find it was Scott, she had loved Jeanie Dean and thought only a woman like herself could have conjured up such a lass.
They stopped the first night at Linlithgow, where they saw the Great Palace before the carriage left again in the morning. The next day they travelled to a burgh called Airth on the banks of the Forth, where they saw a fine castle and a bonnie old kirk in poor repair. Susan felt she might burst into flames should she step within its walls, but anyway, Robert preferred to roam in the graveyard making jokes about the mortsafes and the graverobbers, and so she was spared that fate. By the third night, they had reached the great city of Stirling, and on the fourth they reached the crooked old inn at Brig o’Turk, where they would spend the coming weeks. Wherever they stayed, Susan and Robert were lodged as Dr and Mrs Knox and it seemed it was known they were on their wedding journey, for there were many congratulations and compliments for Susan as the bride. She burned with shame at these, but it seemed this was the way even for brides who were really married, and no one thought anything amiss besides Susan herself.
It seemed to Susan in those weeks that she no longer stood on solid ground. They exchanged the swaying of the carriage for the pitching of little boats and long tramps across wet earth, and everywhere they went, it seemed that something was designed to remind her of the lie on which her new life was built. At Balquhidder they saw the stone slab where Rob Roy MacGregor slept with his wife on his right hand, and Susan thought her lucky, that long-ago woman, for all she was married to an outlaw, she was married before witnesses, not carted off to an inn and defiled. At Aberfoyle they saw a tree that was said to be a minister of the place, transformed by the fairies as punishment for a book he wrote that revealed the secrets the little folk held dear. Susan felt her own secret burn within her, she had never planned to live as now she did, a fallen woman by her own lights, and whose lights mattered, if not her own? In a remote place, far from anywhere, they tramped across the moors to see some stones of great antiquity, some in a circle, one a great monolith, and others with curious hollows carved in them in ancient times. A place to punish transgressions, perhaps, streak sinners out and kill them with knives of stone. Susan wondered if she should lie down there, herself, and add to their blood with her own.
Robert maintained this was a fancy of Susan’s, he said they were married perfectly legally once they were declared as such in the eyes of all the world. He seemed determined to be patient, in those days, only falling into a temper once, when a guide maintained that water drunk from the hollows of some stone or other could cure a range of ailments, from the falling sickness to the measle. Robert said the measle was caused by infection in the blood and could not be cured by water, a man called Home had proven that almost a century past, and soon they would understand the falling sickness, too. He stamped off then, walking quickly, and Susan was left to struggle along behind.
When they had been in the place some three weeks, it transpired that Robert had some medical work to do at a place called Glengyle. He told Susan to pack her best dresses, for the people they were to visit were gentry, the Laird of the place and his Lady. The Laird had some ailment dating from his time in the militia and they were to spend five nights there while Robert did his best to effect a cure. Susan was glad then that she had brought the wedding dress, shook it out to check for spots and marks, and packed it ready for the journey.
They sailed across Loch Katrine in an eight-oared galley, through the waters in which Scott had set ‘The Lady of the Lake’, arriving at the old house at Glengyle in the middle of the day to be greeted by Lady Jane. Susan burned with shame at the thought that she should be complicit in deceiving this good woman, who understood she was receiving a married couple on their wedding journey, and it was with great relief that she saw they were to sleep in separate rooms, just as the Laird and the Lady were used to do themselves.
‘I well remember my own marriage,’ the Lady Jane confided in Susan as she took her up the stair. ‘It is a trying time, is it not? To go from being much alone, or with other women, to being all the time in the company of a man? I thought you might like a brief respite.’
Tears sprung into Susan’s eyes and Jane gave her hand a brief squeeze.
‘Have you a mother living?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Susan. ‘She died birthing a child when I was a little girl. And my father the summer before last.’
‘Well,’ said Jane, ‘I never had a daughter, only three sons, and so I will not scruple to dote on you for as long as you are here.’
They dined that night on venison and the Laird and Robert sat up together late talking of their travels, for John MacGregor had been many years in England and – his wife aside – rarely had a chance to speak with another who had travelled beyond these parts. Susan retired alone to her room and slept more soundly than she had done in all the nights since her marriage.
She and Jane walked all around the place over the coming days, visiting the small burial enclosure to the west of the house where Jane pointed out the memorial to Gregor Black Knee who had fought in the Risings of 1715 and 1745 and been raised by Rob Roy, who himself had been born in the house here in the mid years of the last century, the old house, that was, that had stood on the same ground. There were carvings around the walls with the initials of those long-departed MacGregors, and Jane recited their stories to Susan as they walked.
‘You are an Englishwoman, are you not?’ Susan asked shyly. ‘How come you to find yourself so at home here?’
‘It took some time,’ Jane said, ‘and I was lonely for a time, especially when my first son was born, and I seemed always tied to the house. But my husband is a kind man, and the place is beautiful, and it is my birthright, for I am a MacGregor too, for all I grew up far from here. The story of our people is not a happy one, as perhaps you know. We fell foul of powerful men and it was a great task to rebuild our fortunes even to the degree we have achieved today.’
There was no more talk of MacGregors then, as Jane turned instead to the management of a marriage, calmly and matter-of-factly outlining for Susan the ways in which she and her husband managed things between them when it came to the marriage bed. She tied a white ribbon on the doorhandle when he was welcome to spend the night in her chamber, she said, and a red ribbon when he was absolutely prohibited. She explained the best times each month for a woman to get with child, and how Susan might recognise these and plan her nights. ‘The sooner you succeed, the sooner you may be left in peace,’ she said. ‘For a while.’
As this counsel proceeded, Susan felt her ears and cheeks grow redder and redder and suddenly she blurted out the whole sorry business, how she and Robert were not really married at all, only by some irregular means Robert insisted was real but Susan had no proper witnesses, no banns, no paper to prove it had ever happened.
Jane looked grave.
‘Let’s into the house,’ she said. ‘I have sherry wine. I think we need it, before we talk any more of this.’
Susan cried a little with relief then, and Jane bustled around fetching wine and biscuits and insisted she ate and drank and calmed herself before they spoke further. Then she sat with Susan and stared into her own glass.
‘I cannot think he means to cast you aside,’ she said. ‘He brought you here, after all, did he not, into our home? He introduced you as his wife and I cannot think he would have done so unless he truly believed it. But you are young, my dear, and he is . . . how shall l say it? He is not an easy man, I think. Rather too critical. Do you recall that tale he told us at dinner, of his falling out with the surgeon Charles Bell when he was a young man at Waterloo? It did not strike me as wise for a man who was at the start of his career to cross swords with any superior, let alone a man of Bell’s power.’
‘I am a little afraid of him,’ Susan admitted. ‘I never know what he is thinking. He seems determined to be kind, but he dismisses all my concerns as though they were nothing.’
‘I think a child is what you need,’ said Jane. ‘All men desire children, do they not? Surely he will regularise the marriage when there is a child? But perhaps I am thinking too gloomily. He is going to take you home, is he not? He can hardly take you home, introduce you as his wife, and then cast you aside! It would be a scandal, and I think he cares for his standing in the city. He seems to wish to be the greatest anatomist of all.’
‘He already thinks he is,’ Susan said. ‘He resents the fact that others don’t always agree.’
The last two days at Glengyle were easier for Susan, now her secret was known, and she saw Jane watching Robert when he was with her, enquiring about his plans for his anatomy school and his life in Edinburgh. Robert said his main ambition was to persuade the College of Surgeons to establish a museum of anatomy in the city, and he believed he had good reason to think he would succeed.
Jane looked at Susan then, and Susan could see what she was thinking – Robert cared for his reputation, he had no interest in a scandal.
When they left Glengyle, Jane made Susan promise to write. ‘I travel little,’ she said, ‘but one day, perhaps, I might visit Edinburgh, if Himself keeps well enough.’
Robert seemed well pleased with the cure he had effected, and the Laird’s payment, which Susan guessed would go some way to covering the expenses of their trip. They spent a last week at Brig o’Turk, easier with one another, and then it was time to pack their trunks again for the journey home. Robert said they would go first to his cottage north of the city at Trinity, Susan would like it there.
‘I would prefer to go to Newington Place,’ she said. ‘I’m tired of travelling, I would wish to be settled as soon as I can be.’
But Robert was insistent, saying he was jealous of her company still, wanted her to himself a few days longer. He spoke then at length of the cottage, which he called Lillypot, how he wished for them to spend most of their time there.
Susan laughed at that and said how could it be, did Robert not need to be in the city to keep his practice growing?
‘It’s a short enough ride in a carriage,’ said Robert, ‘but a world apart, a green and pleasant place free from the foul humours of the city. When the children come they will be safer there, I don’t intend to father a string of corpses, as so many others seem content to do.’ Then he shook his head, as if to dispel the ghost of his words, and smiled at her. ‘It’s not as though you have any fondness for Mary or Jessie, now, is it?’ he said. ‘I know you dislike them and I can’t say I blame you. They did enjoy playing fine ladies when they had you to wait upon them. I should think you’ll be glad to be free of them and mistress of your own house. I can’t say I have much liking for their society myself; I shall enjoy being at Lillypot instead.’
Susan said nothing, thinking this fancy would pass once Robert returned to his work in earnest. The cottage did indeed turn out to be a pleasant place, not really a cottage at all but a squat stone-built house of a middling size, lime-washed and solid, set back from the road in a small grove of trees. It was a few miles east of Leith, out along a rough road in the lands of Trinity where the Masters and Mariners of Trinity House raised monies for the assistance of destitute sailors and their families through the operation of a farm and the occasional sale of a plot of land to the wealthy for the building of a summerhouse. Robert said it was private enough to leave a house locked up for months together.
Inside, Lillypot was simply but tastefully furnished, the rooms painted in pale colours of distemper like sugared almonds, with furniture of light wood and pale upholstery to match. Susan was surprised to find the place had a staff of its own, a housekeeper, a cook, a gardener, and a maid of all work. The housekeeper was a Mrs Scott, a plump, comfortable-looking woman, and she welcomed Susan most cordially, showing her to an elegant room she said was Susan’s own, and bringing water to wash off the dust of the road. When Susan was washed and changed, she ventured out to find Robert, but Mrs Scott told her he was gone.
‘Gone?’ Susan said, stupid with shock. ‘Gone where?’
‘Back to Newington Place, I suppose,’ said Mrs Scott. ‘I’m sure much business has piled up during his absence.’
‘I want to go too,’ said Susan. ‘Bring me my cloak and my shoes.’
‘Now?’ said Mrs Scott. ‘Och, that won’t be possible, Ma’am. We’re very quiet here, there’s no transport except our own, and Doctor Knox has taken our carriage. But you must be tired, Ma’am, why don’t I serve the dinner now, and then you can take your rest?’
Susan fought a rising panic in her throat. ‘Did he say when he’d be back?’ she asked. ‘Doctor Knox?’
‘I’m sure it’s no my place to ask,’ said Mrs Scott. ‘But are you quite well, Ma’am? You look that pale. Shall I fetch you a draught?’
‘No,’ said Susan. ‘I’ll . . . I’ll just go to my room.’
‘I’ll bring up a tray with your dinner then,’ said Mrs Scott. ‘We cannae have you wasting away.’
Susan had no appetite, but she didn’t wish to offend Mrs Scott, and so she ate what she could manage and then put the rest outside the door. She heard Mrs Scott take it away, and then the familiar noises of any house in the evening, the sounds of clearing in the kitchen, fires being set for the following day. Last of all, she heard Mrs Scott lock the door and climb the stairs to her own room at the end of the hall.
In the morning, Susan found Mrs Scott in the kitchen supervising the cook, whom Mrs Scott introduced as Mrs Foster. ‘Mrs Foster doesn’t live in,’ she says. ‘She comes over from a farm a mile or so hence.’
‘Perhaps Mrs Foster can see me to Leith when she is done,’ said Susan, smiling at the cook. ‘I can find a carriage there, I think, to take me into town.’
‘Och, Leith is miles from here, Ma’am,’ said Mrs Scott. ‘And Mrs Foster lives quite the other way. But if you have any letters, Mrs Foster will pass them to her brother who will take them with him when he next goes to town.’
Susan wrote to Jane and passed the letter to Mrs Scott with coins to pay for the postage. Mrs Scott handed the coins back, she said Doctor Knox paid for all the household expenses here. Susan considered writing to Robert, to ask him to come, but shame would not let her.
Days passed, and then a week, and then a month, and Robert did not come.
Susan now understood this was a prison of sorts, her marriage a sentence that had begun in that inn at Leith and would last until she died. It was all genteelly done, of course, nothing so coarse as locks or keys, threats of ill treatment or even outright refusal to let her leave. Mrs Scott was all smiles, and John the gardener and Elsie the housemaid were kind, but they were Susan’s jailers nevertheless. If Susan said she would go for a walk, Mrs Scott would find a reason she was needed in the house. Elsie took her cloak for mending, and it never returned. John took her stout boots outside for cleaning, and Mrs Scott replaced them with pale satin slippers with kid leather soles, quite unsuited to the ground outside. Letters went out in Mrs Foster’s pocket, but none ever returned.
Mrs Scott had sight of all her bodily functions, which Susan knew she reported to Robert, for when at last he came, he knew her courses had stopped and she was with child. He professed himself delighted, ignoring all Susan’s weeping and protestations. He went to fetch Mrs Scott, who said Doctor Knox thought Susan had become overwrought; would she not take a seat while Mrs Scott fetched her something restorative? Mrs Scott was a great believer in restorative draughts in small glasses. Susan sometimes lost whole days to these sticky measures, waking the next morning with a pounding heart and a dry mouth, and no memory she could muster of going to bed.
Susan sat in the chair waiting for her draught, wondering whether she might have married a butcher, or a candlemaker, or a baker after all. She might have served in the shop then, gossiped with neighbours, ventured out into the streets with her basket to choose fish for the dinner. On Sundays she could stroll to the kirk with her husband, arm-in-arm.
In the morning, Robert was gone.