ELIZABETH HALDANE COULD DATE the beginning of her misfortunes very precisely; she may not have known the hour, but she knew the day. All had been well until the nineteenth of August in the Year Of Our Lord 1746. Elizabeth herself was not yet born, indeed would not be born for a score more years, almost, but that was the day that Charles Edward Stuart climbed a hill at Glenfinnan, raised his standard, and claimed the throne of Britain in the name of his father James. Both sides of Elizabeth’s family had rallied to the cause.
Elizabeth’s mother was descended from minor gentry in Angus, the daughter of a younger son who had grown his scant portion many times over as a merchant bringing French wine and cambric into Scotland through Montrose. Her father’s people were Haldanes, of course, descended from a cadet branch of that clan and living quite comfortably in Perthshire as tacksmen, although some might have mocked them and called them Bonnet Lairds.
The two families’ allegiance to the Stuarts had different roots: Elizabeth’s maternal grandfather disgruntled with the union and keen to build his trading links with France; her father’s folk following blindly in the path of their Laird. In the end it made little difference, when it all ended for Prince Charles in a hail of cannonballs on Culloden Moor. Mother’s father was taken to Tilbury with other prisoners, and died there of typhus, leaving his widow almost nothing to pass to her children when she followed just months behind him. John Haldane fled to France, and the vassals who had flocked to his standard were swiftly cleared from his lands as his children sought to win back royal favour, transforming themselves into the very model of a Lowland family loyal to the crown.
Mother and Father’s marriage had been brought about through the Stuart links between the two families; if you believed Mother, it was all clandestine meetings and white roses and toasting over a finger bowl as code for the ‘King across the water’.
Mother and Father took all that they had and made their way to Edinburgh, where they hoped they could live with some dignity on very little silver. Father took work as a teacher, and Mother did fine work, she was a skilled embroideress and had learned to make needle-lace as a girl. Her collars sold by the piece, for a pittance really, when you thought about the work that went into them, but any money helped.
Two sons were born in the early years of the marriage, called James and Charles for the Old and the Young Pretender, but neither survived infancy. It seemed there would be no more but then, in Mother’s thirty-eighth year, the year James Stuart died in Rome, Elizabeth was born.
Elizabeth grew up quite unaware they lived in a sort of poverty that was painful to her parents, having known nothing else. She had no schooling; Father taught her her letters and her numbers and Mother taught her to sew. She was alone but not lonely, she had Mother and Father to herself and she wanted for nothing; Mother kept her beautifully dressed with the work of her needle, even as Mother’s own fine gowns grew faded and worn and she had to patch and darn, turn collars and cuffs and let down hems to snip a bit of fabric for a repair.
Father’s circles in Edinburgh included those still loyal to the Stuarts, even so long after the cause was lost. He frequented particular coffee houses and inns where much coded talk took place. Sometimes he took Elizabeth, and one of the men made a pet of her, an older man who had lost his fortune and his family name. He told Elizabeth she should call him ‘Uncle’, for her father was like a brother to him and he would do anything for him, anything at all.
Mother preferred to stay at home, but she too entertained ladies of a loyal persuasion, although they spent more time discussing the scandalous carryings on of Prince Charles and his mistress Clementina. She had fled his clutches and was traipsing from nunnery to nunnery in France with a child the Prince did not acknowledge as his own, leaving it to his brother to maintain them.
Charles was a bitter drunk by then, and a lout, but Father remained loyal to him until his death in the winter of the same year the Prince himself died. Elizabeth was twenty-two then, and almost as accomplished a needlewoman as Mother, but without Father’s salary it was not enough, they were forced to begin selling off the few pieces Mother had treasured as relics of her past life. Elizabeth was charged with this task, going to call on Father’s friend for help, the one she had called Uncle, for many of their valuables were of a nature that could not be sold openly, even after all this time, but were very desirable in the right circles.
Uncle was as good as the promise he had made, seeking bids for Elizabeth’s artefacts among his circle, helping make sure they realised the best price. He would take no payment for his help, saying he had loved her father too dearly to profit from his widow and daughter.
Mother’s treasure went first – a silver brooch set with garnets that formed the number ‘45’ for the year of the Rising. That, and a few collars, kept them going a good while.
Next Mother unlocked a cupboard Elizabeth had never seen open before and brought out a set of six glasses, with twisted coils of red and white in their stems and white roses carved into the goblets. Those caused a stir in the coffee houses and Mother and Elizabeth lived a long time on the proceeds. Last of Mother’s pieces was a pretty paper fan painted with a portrait of Prince Charles on one side. It could be opened quite innocently, the Prince’s face to the user’s bosom, so all an onlooker might see was the design of roses decorating the other side.
After that there was a glass Father had used that said ‘Hanover to the Devil’, and his most treasured possession, a ring that commemorated the four peers sentenced to death for their parts in the Rising, the Englishman Derwentwater, Balmerino and Kilmarnock who died so bravely, and Lord Lovat the Old Fox. He had gone laughing to his death, they said; the seating collapsed under the weight of spectators, and some of the ghouls were killed for their trouble. Uncle bought that for himself and said he would always wear it and think of Father.
Mother and Elizabeth sewed and sewed and spent as little as they could, and in this way they eked their money out a good few years more. Then they had to begin selling the furniture, and clothes, all the things that made their shabby room a home. Eventually, there was nothing left to sell.
Mother was growing frailer by then, her eyesight fading so she struggled to sew and complained of a pain in her head in the evenings when the light was low. Elizabeth said nothing to Mother, let her believe they still had a little money put by. She said she must go out one night to meet a man Uncle had found that was interested in a that glass of Father’s, the one that said ‘Hanover to the Devil’, Mother might remember it. It had been sold years before, of course, but Mother didn’t argue, perhaps she really had forgotten, or she wished to believe it was true.
Elizabeth dressed with care, in a gown of Mother’s that was so threadbare they had never sold it. It was what they called a round gown, cut in one piece, and although it was fifty years out of date, it had been fine once and Elizabeth was pretty enough to wear it. Some fancy took her when she had it on and she put a dot of black high up on her cheek, like the patches they used to wear. It felt like war paint.
At the club where she had met Uncle, Elizabeth knocked and looked the skinny lad in the eye who answered the door and said she was looking for company, for any man that wanted company and could afford it. The lad blushed bright red but then he recovered and brought her in and took her to a side room and went away again. And then a man came in – it wasn’t Uncle, she had a horror that it might be Uncle – and he did what he wanted with her and gave her six shillings.
Elizabeth left then, holding back tears, and bought a pie from a seller on the street to take home. Mother tried to make her eat some of it but she couldn’t, she was sick to her stomach. They slept in the same bed, for warmth, had done for months, and she had to turn her face to the wall, she couldn’t bear to look at Mother, having done what she had done. When she woke to ice on the window, though, and knew she had the means of buying firewood, she felt a little better.
Elizabeth visited the other places she knew, over that winter and the next spring, and her money and the lace money kept them in rent and food and firewood. She thought Mother didn’t know but of course she did; when Elizabeth found herself sick in the mornings and the bodice of Mother’s dress too tight, Mother wasn’t surprised at all. Perhaps it came from being part of a family of traitors – in the government’s lights, that was – that reticence of Mother’s to put into words the things they all knew fine well.
‘We need to leave,’ Mother said. ‘We can’t let the neighbours see how low we have fallen. We’ll go west, to Glasgow. No one knows us there and we can live more cheaply still.’
And so Jeanie was born that autumn in Glasgow, a bonnie wee scrap. Mother and Elizabeth took a room in a lodging house, shared the care of Jeanie and took in sewing, not fine work as they had once done, but mending and alterations. They bought worn-out clothing from the ragmen, too, and made smaller garments out of such fabric as they could salvage, women’s blouses and children’s smocks from men’s shirts, that sort of thing. With the sale of these, they could almost cover their rent and their food, and Elizabeth needed to go out of a night less often. She got away with it for five years and more without getting with child or a pox, but then her luck ran out and Peggy was born when Jeanie was six, and Mary Ann when she was eight.
Jeanie and Peggy were good lassies, but Mary Ann was a demon, it seemed, from the moment she could toddle. She was bonnie and blithe, but she fibbed and lied without compunction, pinching her sisters and stealing their ribbons, messing Mother’s work and pulling the tail of the cat they kept for mousing till it screeched. By the time she was twelve she had already been brought home by a policeman, having attempted to steal a pair of gloves from a stallholder at the Lammas fair.
Mother died that winter, worn out with work and worry, and Elizabeth took herself and her girls back to Edinburgh. Jeanie married a good man, the next year, a tinsmith with a shop on the High Street. Elizabeth and the other lasses lodged with them there, for a time, and it seemed Mary Ann had calmed down, but then she palled up with another girl, a weaver’s daughter called Margaret Finlayson, and soon she was up to her tricks again. They spent their days in the New Town, where basement steps and busy servants afforded them the opportunity of stepping unseen into this fine house or that and leaving with their aprons full of booty. Margaret served sixty days in the Tolbooth, for the stealing of some coats, but although it seemed Mary Ann had done the actual thieving, she escaped punishment as she had passed the loot to Margaret and absconded. She missed Margaret sorely and visited her often, but no sooner was Margaret out but they had stolen a gown, a hat and a half-pound of tea from a house in Dublin Street, and both had been arrested. They had learned a lesson of sorts, however, and had handed the loot off to someone else entirely in the hullabaloo as the servants of the house gave chase, and so they were released without charge for lack of evidence.
Both girls’ luck gave out after that, though, and they were sentenced to transportation, first Margaret for a theft in Melville Street and then Mary Ann for the same crime in Elder Street. Elizabeth wondered if Mary Ann had done it on purpose, once Margaret had had her sentence, they were that devoted to each other. Elizabeth, on the other hand, had found out her devotion to her daughter had its limits and she really didn’t mind very much being relieved of Mary Ann.
When the girls were gone, first to London and thence to Van Diemen’s Land, Elizabeth took herself away from Jeanie’s house and found herself lodgings in a place in Tanner’s Close. Jeanie gave her enough to live on – they could well afford it, her man’s shop was doing fine – and Elizabeth gave herself over to grief and drink and long days spent abed. The grief was not for Mary Ann, but for Mother and for herself, the things she had had to do and give up. She saw it all clearly now, how in her caring for Mother, and helping Mother cling to the pretence of dignity she held so dear, Elizabeth had never had a chance at a man or a home of her own, and now she was old and fat and had one tooth left in her head and no one would want her anymore. It pained her, but the drink dulled the pain along with the other senses. And that was how Elizabeth found herself here, lying in the stable of the lodging house; she had gone out for more drink, and fallen asleep somehow. The cobbler man who worked in the cellar found her there, and she began to thank him, thinking he was going to help her back to her room, but then all was confusion, his hands were over her mouth and nose and all of it running before her eyes, thoughts like stars exploding, there and gone in an instant, Father in the coffee houses, and kind old Uncle, and crystal glasses, and stitches, so many stitches, like the white tips of the waves under the ship carrying Mary Ann across the ocean with the girl she loved – of course Mary Ann loved Margaret, Elizabeth sees that now – and Mother’s hands holding baby Jeanie who had her own babes now, and Peggy—
But at that, Elizabeth’s thoughts still, the flow of blood to her brain is not enough, the bright pictures flicker and go dark.