HELEN’S BAD EAR SOMETIMES PAINED HER, and so she thought little of it when she woke on the first day of August to a mess on the bedclothes where she had lain her head. She tilted it experimentally a time or two, but the pain wasn’t very bad and there was no discharge, so she washed and dressed and loaded the shoes William had repaired for sale into her hawking basket. William said there was no need, they had no need of money right now and she should rest, but Helen couldn’t see the sense in letting his work go to waste. Cold and wet as the last fortnight had been, harvest time was near, and thousands of city folk would be tramping out to the Borders and Falkirk and Berwickshire to work at the reaping and the stooking. They would be wanting shoes, at last a fair day had come, and Helen could clear out William’s stock and make a pretty penny for her troubles.
In the Grassmarket she found a spot between a coffee seller and an oyster stall and she began to call out to passing women – she always preferred to talk to the women. She had some early success, selling a pair of stout shoes to an old wife for her grandson and a pair of slippers to a lass she thought most likely a hoor. Good luck to her, Helen thought, though she felt her usual shudder of fear that someday she might have to take up such a trade. She put the thought firmly from her mind; William would keep her, so long as he was living, surely he would, they had come through so much already and it hadn’t broken them.
Trade was quiet after that for an hour or so, folk rushing here and there on business with no time to stop and crack. Then a woman a bit younger than Helen stopped to look. She had a babe strapped to herself in a shawl, tied so it looked out at the world, and Helen chucked its cheek and laughed to see it smile. The woman admired a fine pair of black boots, trying them on her feet and strutting up and down fair trickit with herself. Helen named the price, and the woman turned out her pocket and made to count her money, but it was clear from the slump of her shoulders that she knew she hadn’t enough. Indeed she was short some shillings.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ Helen said, surprising herself, ‘I’m feeling a cold and shivery way and I could use a hot cup of coffee and an oatcake. If I give you the boots for what you have, and you keep back enough to bring us both coffee and food to share from that stall over there, then I’ll be well pleased with the bargain.’
The woman didn’t need to be offered twice. She handed over her money to Helen, less a few coins, and scurried off in her new boots to haggle with the coffee seller.
When she returned, they sat themselves in the lee of the old wellhead at the foot of the West Bow and the woman – her name was Jenny – fed the babe and drank her coffee while Helen ate her oatcake, and then Helen dandled the babe while its mother ate her share. Jenny kept stealing a look at her boots every now and then and Helen was gladder than ever that she’d more or less given them away. As William said, they had no pressing need of coin, and this woman’s pleasure was payment enough.
The wellhead wasn’t used any more, and so they sat undisturbed a good while talking of this and that until Jenny said she must be on her way, the babe was sleeping and she should use the time to get on with her own work. Helen bid her farewell and sat a while longer by herself, missing the warm weight of the babe in her arms. She felt less chilled now, but muzzy-headed and weary. When she stood she found her bones were aching, and she set off slowly for home.
As she passed the ruckle of stones that were all that remained of the Flodden Wall, a woman in the red cloak of a peddler came the other way, from the direction of the King’s Stables. She had a fine basket of pretties, lace and buttons and a clutch of carved wooden dollies. Helen stopped her and asked the price of the one poppet she had that was dressed.
‘That one’s no for sale,’ the peddler wife said. ‘It’s just to show how you can dress them, see? You can have one of the others and make it look every bit as fine for your wee lass at home. Get her to help you, it’s a fine way to learn.’
Helen looked at the dressed doll again. She had dark painted hair, a yellow hair comb, and a pretty, sulky face.
‘I do so much plain work, my eyes are too tired for fine,’ she said. ‘And my wee lasses are no longer with me. Please can I have your dressed doll? I can pay you enough to make it worth your while to make another.’
The peddler woman sighed. ‘I lost four bairns myself,’ she said, and she named a price. Helen didn’t bother to haggle, just handed over the money and tucked the doll in her basket. She bid the peddler wife farewell and climbed up the rise of the West Port to Tanner’s Close, dodging as best she could the pigs that seemed ever more numerous in the streets and closes. By the time she had closed the door of their room behind her and set down her basket, she was chilled again, and sweating. She took off her cloak and bonnet, kicked off her shoes, and climbed into bed fully clothed. She hugged the little doll to her and drifted off into an uneasy sleep.
The next time she woke, it was night and William was there, sitting on the bed, asking what was the matter. His voice sounded strange, like she was hearing him from under water. Helen tried to speak, but her tongue seemed stuck to the roof of her mouth. William’s hand felt for her forehead then, and he jerked it back.
‘Christ, woman,’ he said, ‘you’ve the heat of the Devil in you! What ails you, Nelly?’
‘My ear,’ Nelly managed, thickly, and he turned her head and grimaced at the sight of the mess that had returned, crusted on her neck and the pillow.
‘I’ll fetch an apothecary,’ he said, and hied him out of the room.
Helen drifted back into an uneasy sleep, haunted by memories of fists and blows and fire. She thought she heard a woman scream, and she started awake, her heart pounding, to see William and another man she didn’t know standing over her. This was the apothecary, it seemed. He was a small man, dark-haired, and his touch was gentle as he turned Helen’s head this way and that.
The man said the ear had gone bad right enough, and he prescribed a tea of bark powder to bring down the fever, laudanum for sleep, and a poultice of turkey rhubarb to draw out the infection. William said he would write it down, and even in her fevered state Helen saw the surprise with which the man heard that; he must have thought William unlettered like so many of the Irish. He looked at him appraisingly and asked, ‘Have you the money for a nurse? It would be best, if so, to have a woman in.’
William said they did, and the two men left Helen and sat at the table so the apothecary could write his instructions and measure out his potions from the case he carried. Then the man dosed Helen with foul-tasting stuff and strapped her ear up with a hot rag of some sort against it – the bandage round her throat holding it in place made her feel sick at first. Then William settled the bill and the man told him where he could find a good nurse, a clean, efficient woman, and then he took his leave.
The hot compress was comforting and the draught seemed to do its work so Helen slept without dreams, or if she had them she couldn’t remember after. When she woke in the middle of the morning, the nurse was there, a strong-looking creature with wiry grey hair and a wrinkled brow. Helen had a fiery pain in her ear, and was hotter than ever, and the woman set to right away and made her draught with hot water and honey, it didn’t taste so bad when it was hot and sweetened. Then she cleaned the mess and dressed the ear again, and after that she made Helen drink a glass of ale. Helen tried to say she didn’t want it but the woman insisted and in the end Helen got most of it down. The woman took up some needlework she had with her and made herself comfortable by the fire, and Helen drifted back into sleep.
Her dreams were filled with horrors, the walls of the room closing in and in about her until they enclosed her completely. When she tried to sit up, she found she couldn’t, her arms were held tightly on each side and her legs pressed tightly together. She tried to raise her hands but there was no space above her either – her hands hit wood, she was in a coffin, buried alive. She began to hit it with her head, her knees, scratch it with her nails, anything to get free. At last it seemed the wood had cracked, but then earth began to pour in, and worms and all the crawling creatures of the ground, filling Helen’s mouth and her eyes. When she thought at last she must choke, a hand reached down from somewhere above and grabbed at her, pulling her up and into the light.
‘Don’t let them!’ she screamed, starting up into the arms of Margaret Hare. ‘Don’t let them cut me up!’
‘Good Heavens, Nelly,’ Margaret said, easing her back down. ‘What are you saying?’ She shot a look at the nurse, who was busying herself at the table.
The nurse laughed. ‘We all rave, in fever,’ she said. ‘Pay her no heed.’
‘Shall I dose her?’ Margaret asked. ‘Let you get out for a bite to eat?’
The nightmare still clung to Helen. ‘Don’t leave me with her,’ she said to the nurse. ‘They cut up Joseph. And the other man. Cut them up with their wee knives.’
Margaret looked furious but the nurse just kept on mixing her poultice.
‘Did they now?’ she said, unpeturbed. ‘Well I never.’ To Margaret she said, ‘I thank you, but I’ll stay here till the fever is broken. Her man said he’ll bring me a bite at midday.’
Margaret looked put out and Helen turned her face to the wall, closing her eyes on more phantoms, birds this time, flying into the room and scratching at her face and arms, hurting her. Somewhere in the horror of it, she heard voices and a great bird rose up above her, but then it flapped its wings and it was gone. A warm pressure came at her ear, easing the worst of the pain of the birds’ scratches, and Helen slept.
Afterwards, the nurse told Helen that she really had been in danger, those first days. She had known an ear infection go into the brain, she said, and there was no surviving that. But thanks to careful nursing – she took pains to emphasise that part – Helen’s ear had drained, and she had fought off the infection. The apothecary’s medicines had been good, the draught stopping Helen’s body destroying itself while the poultice did its work.
Helen didn’t feel very sure her body hadn’t destroyed itself, in all honesty; she was as weak as a baby, almost unable to raise her head from the pillow. The nurse no longer stayed overnight but she came a time or two each day and fed Helen broths and jellies and eggy things to build up her strength, and checked the ear was no longer weeping. She turned out to be a right gossip, telling Helen she had heard raised voices two nights in a row in the kitchen, when Helen was at her illest, thon Margaret was a harpy and no mistake, but Helen’s man had stood his ground right brawly.
Helen tried to ask William what the argy bargy had been about, but he didn’t hear her, or at least he let on he didn’t hear her. He said a strange thing though, one morning, that he would prefer Helen lock the door when he or the nurse weren’t with her. Helen agreed, although it took almost all her strength to reach the door and her heart was pounding by the time she got herself back to bed. She didn’t mind, though, with the door locked she knew there was no chance of waking up to discover Margaret sitting over her. The woman still gave her a curious feeling in her stomach. Indeed, a time or two she thought she heard Margaret try the door, and, finding it locked, go away.
Helen’s strength built slowly, and by the middle of the month William asked if she might be well enough to go with him to Redding. She might finish her convalescing in her father’s house, he said, and he could go to harvest. If she would mind the bairns, Peter might harvest too and William’s money would all be his as well, to pay for the wee lassies’ keep. Helen cried at the thought, she had missed the procession the village had to mark Robert Bruce’s victory against the English, when she had often gone home to play her own part, and she had expected to pass the whole summer in Edinburgh. The nurse was done with her, by then, and had gone on her way content with her fee, and so it fell to William to make arrangements, packing their bundles and moving their other goods into the stables so the room could be let in their absence.
On the allotted day, two men came up the close with a sedan chair to convey Helen to the Falkirk coach. It was an odd feeling, swaying as the men hoisted her out across the setts and the muck in the cool dawn light, the soaring tenements seeming to sway overhead. They had a hard job, for the first part, to avoid the pigs who were rooting around for their breakfast, and once or twice it seemed almost that they would topple her. In the end, though, they cleared the West Port and made their way through the bustle of the Grassmarket – the place never slept – to the Cowgate. William walked alongside, lugging their bundles.
To travel by coach had never been within Helen’s means before, and under normal circumstances might have been a wonder, but as it was it was something of a trial, and by the time they reached Polmont that afternoon, she could barely rouse herself to climb down. But somehow William had got word to Peter Gaff that they were coming, and he was waiting for them with a neighbour’s cart and horse. He and William lifted Helen up into the cart for the short journey home, and at the other end they lifted her down and carried her into the house, laying her down on a pallet by the fire.
Helen slept away that entire first evening and night at home and only woke in the morning when the bairns gathered for their breakfast, but it was the good, healing sleep of exhaustion and not the uneasy rest of the fever. Before much more than a week had passed, she was on her feet, baking oatcakes and making porridge, and then mending clothes and setting the place to rights. Peter had acquired a cow, a nice beastie with a wee calf, and Maisie taught Helen to milk it, although she was handless at first compared to her daughter. Maisie was now a tall, confident stripling, and at first Helen was shy of her, feeling her a stranger, but Maisie attached herself to her from the first, calling her ‘Mother’ and talking quite easily with her as if they’d last seen each other the week before, not years ago.
Peter and William were off at the harvest, returning stiff and tired in the darkness. Some nights, William camped out in the fields, earning a night’s shelter in a hut or tent with his piggy of whisky and a few songs. He met up with a cousin of Helen’s – well, of James MacDougal’s, really – a woman named Ann MacDougal, and he spent a night or two in the bow tent she shared with a gang of young folk. At first Helen felt a sting of jealousy, thinking of the strumpet Mary in Constantine’s house and wondering if William had taken a fancy to Ann MacDougal. But she said nothing, and was mollified by the attention he paid to Maisie and wee Annie. Both lassies had become great favourites of his, and in his rest time he carved them a bonnie wooden doll, like Helen’s, with proper pegged joints so the arms and legs could move. Peter mixed them up some kind of black paint with varnish and shoe-black and they painted a face and hair for her with a feather quill, and then they made her a frock from rags. Then Maisie led wee Annie in the making of a tiny bed of sticks tied together with strips of leather, and chairs made with the quills of feathers, pinned with nails purloined from Peter Gaff’s cobbler’s kit, and the two of them spent hours together imagining the goings-on of the dolls. When William slept in the fields, they crawled into bed with Helen, and she revelled in the unaccustomed closeness of her bairns, for all they wriggled and kicked and bruised her.
When at last the harvest was finished and their time in Redding drawing to an end, Helen noticed Peter watching the two lasses with a keen eye. On one of their last nights, it was unusually mild, and Helen and Peter and William sat outside by the door, the men smoking their pipes and all three of them enjoying a dram from William’s piggy.
Peter tapped the ash from his pipe and began to fill it again. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, peering closely at his task, ‘that the lassies are fell fond of you, Helen. And you, William. This place you have in Edinburgh, your friends’ lodging house, it sounds a grand place. Would you wish to take them back with you?’
Helen’s heart leapt, but before she could speak, William stood up, knocking over the stool he’d been sitting on. He strode off into the darkness.
Peter was silent, Helen blinking hard to keep the tears from her eyes. There was no more talk of the lassies that night.
In the morning, Peter fed the bairns and shooed them out the door before he picked up his own tools and announced he’d a saddle to mend for a friend out by.
As soon as he was gone, Helen turned to William.
‘Do you no want them?’ she asked. ‘My lasses?’
William stared at his feet.
Helen tasted blood in her mouth; in her anxiety, she had torn a strip from her lip with her teeth. ‘Is it because they’re another man’s?’ she asked.
William’s head bobbed up.
‘No,’ he said, with a frown. ‘James MacDougal doesn’t trouble me. It’s . . . Ach!’ He punched his own thigh, his face dark.
‘What is it?’ Helen cried. ‘Why can’t I have them with me? Do you not trust me, is that it? You think I’d let harm come to them, like my father once thought!’
‘No!’ William stood up and strode over to the door, clenching and unclenching his fists. He took a deep breath and dropped his shoulders.
‘I don’t . . . I don’t trust your woman,’ he said, still not meeting her eye. ‘Margaret. She doesn’t like you, Nelly. Doesn’t trust you. She thinks you’ll blab. About the lodgers who . . . died and how we had the money for them.’
‘I won’t,’ said Helen. ‘Why would I? Anyway, I don’t know anything about it. Just that there were three of them, and no one missed them, so it didn’t matter, you said.’
William turned to look at her. ‘You’re not one of us, that’s what she said. Not Irish.’ He still seemed unable to hold her gaze. ‘Ach, drink had been taken, Nelly. But it feared me a bit.’
Helen thought back to those days in their room at Tanner’s Close, when she was sick and alone and Margaret always lurking outside.
‘Is that why you had me lock the door?’ she said. ‘Did you think she would hurt me?’
‘No!’ William laughed, but it didn’t reach his eyes. ‘She joked about it, that’s all. Said we’d get ten pounds for you if you died too.’
Helen thought about Margaret sitting over her in the bed, offering to let the nurse leave. Her wiry frame, the cold look in her eyes. She felt the hairs on her arms rise.
‘How can we go back after that?’ she asked flatly. ‘We can’t.’
William shook his head, like a dog coming out of a river. ‘Och, we were all acting the maggot, Nelly, just a bit. It was the pressure of it, taking that money for the bodies. But now we’ve had some time away. When we get back, everyone’ll be the master of themselves again, you’ll see.’
‘And the lassies?’ Helen asked. Her lips were numb; she knew the answer.
‘I’m not saying never, Nelly,’ William said. ‘But let’s get ourselves settled first, before we bring them into it. No sense upsetting things with two more mouths to feed.’
With that, he stood up and stretched and looked about him for some task to do, as though all was well again and he hadn’t just suggested two minutes before that Margaret Hare might kill Helen’s children if they brought them home. Helen sat on her stool and picked up Phemie – that was the name the girls had given their dolly. For a moment she thought of throwing herself on her father’s charity, asking to stay here and keep house for him, but she knew she could not. Nothing had changed, and Peter still had need of any money they could earn him. She straightened the little doll’s clothes, tucked her into her bed and went to pack her own bundle.
The Burke and Helen who left Redding the next day were not quite the same pair who had arrived three weeks before. William seemed lighter, somehow, as though by putting his fear of Margaret into words, he had divested himself of some awful burden. Helen, on the other hand, had arrived weak of body but light of spirit, and left strong of frame but sore of heart. Not only must she continue on without her children, but her trust in William was dented yet again. He would keep Maisie and wee Annie safe, for sure, but what of his Nelly?
The little girls put brave faces on it and neither cried, but Maisie had dark rings around her eyes and red patches on pale cheeks, and wee Annie held tight to Phemie and would not speak. Helen kissed them, and then William hugged them and pressed a coin into each of their hands. Then William shook Peter’s hand, and Helen kissed him, and it was time to go and meet the coach to return to Edinburgh and Tanner’s Close.