Page 7

Chapter Seven

Fisherrow December 1723

‘ T hose gems are too big to be real. They must be paste,’ declared Joan, after eyeing the ring like a hawk, her face green with envy. ‘The whores that hang around the Mussel Inn wear big sparkly glass gems like that. Spencer has probably bought it off one of the whores, and no doubt fugged her too.’

Da clipped her for that, quick as a flash, and I was glad. She sat at the table with a red cheek, tears spilling from her eyes, her jaw set in a firm line.

But it was me that Da was really furious with. I was not daft enough to tell them about our London plans, for they would have asked too many questions about Spencer’s trade and I was sworn to secrecy. But I told them we were to be married.

‘And I shall be Spencer’s wife, not a fishwife,’ I said nervously. ‘For he wants me to keep house for him.’

‘Patrick Spencer is a blaggard and this is just a dalliance,’ Da replied. ‘I’ve a mind to clip you too. You come from a long line of fisher folk and you are to marry a local boy, not shame us by marrying some Englishman who will drag you away from your calling and forbid you from doing the work you were raised to do.’

Fishing was not my calling, but I said nothing.

‘And as for you, Joan Dickson, if I hear you use words like whore and fugged again, I shall whip your arse good and proper.’

I gathered myself, feeling brave, now that I had a ring on my finger.

‘If you hit me, I shall tell Spencer,’ I warned my da. I said nothing in Joan’s defence and she glowered.

‘Are you with child?’ Da asked. ‘I take it the two of you have been at the capers? Is that what all this is about?’

I reddened and shook my head, mortified at the way the conversation had turned.

‘He’s a sort,’ continued Da. ‘No one knows who Spencer is. The tea men don’t trust him. He seems to have appeared one day with mystery packages and all sorts of claims about making a fortune.’

‘I know everything I need to know,’ I replied. And who were the tea men to say who should be trusted and who should not be trusted?

‘We should calm down and have a pot of tea,’ said Ma, standing up. She knew how I felt. She knew this was my chance. She knew how to handle Da. ‘And I take it Spencer is planning on sticking around for a while this time?’ she asked gently.

He was planning on sticking around for a while. He was not going to attempt to travel again until after the worst of the winter weather was over. That meant there was time for a wedding and to find us somewhere to live.

Spencer organized the lodgings. It didn’t take him long to find somewhere decent in Musselburgh town itself. It was a house with two rooms. More spacious than my own home. Not grand, as such, but a step up in the world. The fact of the matter was that Spencer had the cash to afford it. He moved in straight away, desperate to be out of the Mussel Inn. I took Ma and Joan to visit my soon-to-be home. Da refused to come.

‘Well, this will suit you nicely,’ said Ma as we stood in the parlour, taking in the smooth stone walls and the scrubbed floors laid with new woollen rugs. It was unlived-in and cold, but was nice and clean, and I had already decided where I would one day put jars of daffodils, and where a gleaming looking glass ought to hang.

‘This is not the best end of town,’ sneered Joan with an exaggerated shiver. ‘It feels damp this close to the river. I’d have thought Spencer would fancy himself further away, where the mill owners live.’

‘It does not feel damp,’ I snapped. ‘’Tis the fact no one has lived here a while and it is frosty outside. Once we’ve had the fire on and bought some tapestry wall-hangings and thick blankets, it will be cosy as anything.’

‘You pair would bicker about anything,’ sighed Ma. ‘I am glad I won’t have to put up with it for much longer. You have outgrown the nest, Maggie, with your talk of tapestry wall-hangings, though I dare say Spencer would know how to get one.’

But mibbie we might not have time for such things because, as Spencer had said, we would soon be off to London. ‘This place will do us for a year or so, just enough time so that I can establish myself and you can keep house and whatnot – look after the stash and look after me,’ he had winked as he’d shown me around. ‘You don’t mind moving off Fisherrow and into the town, do you?’

He knew the answer to that.

We were married in St Michael’s Kirk on Boxing Day. Imagine it: wed barely more than three months after our first meeting, and a chap from the Middle of England too. Fisherrow buzzed with the gossip. It gave everyone something to talk about as the winter waves chopped at the harbour, stopping the boats from going out.

Ma baked a plum cake and we gave everyone a piece in the kirk hall afterwards, with plenty of tea. Spencer did not ask his folks to come, but said we would go and visit them once we had settled down a bit. He said they might not like him marrying out of farming.

I could understand that – of course I could.

Da said that was off, and how did we believe anything Spencer told us if we didn’t meet his folks? But as we were not about to travel to England to meet them, and the Spencers had no notion of what was happening in Musselburgh, that was the end of it.

I wore a new dress that Spencer had a seamstress make for me, and it was a glorious navy and grey striped silk. It was the same dress they hanged me in. Lost now, of course, for as I learned when they cut me down and put me in my burial shroud under the scaffold, there was all manner of a kerfuffle, and my body near snatched altogether. The anatomists were scurrying around me like rats.

But let’s away from the gallows for now, though my hanging haunts me day and night, and back to the lodgings on Musselburgh High Street.

We had a large parlour with an adjoining kitchen at the front and one large bedroom at the back, although I must admit, grudgingly, that Joan was correct and there were mornings when I woke up thinking that room was a bit damp. The privy was in the back close, and there was a water well not too far from the gate. Spencer kept his stash of perfume parcels and money in a secure cabinet in the bedroom. Unsurprisingly, he was obsessed with the safekeeping of his stash and had a smith come and fit new locks to the doors and windows. He had the place like a little vault. I don’t suppose I really knew, at first, how much he had stashed away, but we never went without meat, and Spencer never went without rum.

The cottage was of solid-feeling stone that was grey and cold in the morning and would warm up gently to become golden in the afternoons and, as I was soon to learn, that was just like Spencer himself.

First, those golden afternoons. Oh, he was never more glorious than when he sat in the parlour, nestling a cup in the palm of his hand, swirling his rum as tales flitted from his lips. He talked little of his early life, steering his stories away from his own childhood, but his thoughts meandered off to the foreign ports that he visited and to London Town, where we were eventually headed.

Gothenburg was the place he sailed to, a port in the Swedish empire. I knew it from the tea men. Sweden had been at war for years, but there was hope it would become a new centre of global trade. Merchants were trying to set up deals there, to import spices and silk and furniture from the East.

‘One day Gothenburg will be magnificent. But now it’s no place for a lady,’ he declared. ‘Destroyed by sieges and pirates and rogues. You’ve got to have your wits about you over there.’

‘Are you not frightened to return?’ I whispered with a shudder.

‘I know who to bribe,’ he said. ‘For where there’s war there’s impoverishment, and where there’s impoverishment there’s desperation . Gents with nothing left to their name but their connections. Refugees. These are the kinds of gents who will do anything when they hear there’s money to be made from London merchants.’

Ma, Da and Joan were only down the road and around the corner, yet they lived in another world from my new one. I had thought that Joan and I would never be close again, but instead she thawed. She started to pay me visits, to get away from Ma and Da. She came over sometimes when Spencer was out. He liked to visit the Mussel Inn and go for long walks when there was a break in the weather, and I supposed he was restless to get on with his trading. I let him go out without nagging him about where he was going or what he’d been up to, for I had seen what happened when Ma did that to Da, and it never ended well.

Joan and I became more sisterly, now that we were not living in stifling proximity. She needed out of the cottage and to talk freely without Ma listening. She confessed as much one evening a few weeks into my marriage. Spencer was down at the Mussel Inn, where he had started to get in with Da’s crowd, and Joan had brought her knitting over so that we could do our chores and gab. She’d brought a bit of seed-cake on one of Ma’s second-best plates and I had poured us a small cup of coffee each.

‘Ma was all for coming along with me tonight, but I said you wouldn’t like it,’ Joan told me, her knitting flopped on her lap, barely a stitch done.

‘Why would you say a thing like that?’ I asked. Honestly, Joan was a wench sometimes.

‘Well, you wouldn’t like it.’ Joan shrugged. ‘She would only harrumph at Spencer not being here and say that he leaves you on your own too much.’

‘But Da is the same, is he not? Going away all the time. Or is that different because he’s in the fishing trade?’

Joan shrugged again.

‘Ma is getting used to it,’ I said. ‘Me marrying out.’

‘Well, she needs to get used to it. For I shan’t marry a fisherman, either,’ said Joan. ‘Not now you’ve shown it can be done so easily and you can end up living as cosily as this.’ She looked around at the pristine fireplace, shirts pegged neatly in front of it. The vase of dried lavender on the windowsill. My map of Great Britain now unfolded and pinned to the wall. The room had the scent of clean washing.

‘Oh, Joan,’ I sighed, ‘Ma likely has her hopes resting on you to carry on the Dickson line of proud fishing folk.’

‘Then she’ll be sorely disappointed,’ Joan retorted.

‘But you’re her favourite, you’ve always been her favourite and that means you must do the right thing by her,’ I warned.

Joan took a deep breath. ‘You are right,’ she said. ‘I knew Ma preferred me – Da too. And I was never nice to you. In fact I took full advantage and I was a right bitch about it sometimes, wasn’t I?’

‘You were a spoiled cow,’ I told her.

‘But I was feared, Maggie,’ she said, whispering as though they might hear. ‘I was feared they would start liking you more, and I would be the one getting into trouble. No chance of that now, not now you’ve married out.’

That took a lot from Joan, for she’s proud and not given to self-criticism. I respected her for that and we sat together a while longer, knitting needles clicking gently, saying little, but content in each other’s company.

Spencer came home not long after that and kissed me on the lips right in front of poor Joan and she looked away, embarrassed.

‘I shall be on my way then,’ she said, standing up and putting her needles in her creel.

‘Don’t suck the fun out of our evening, Joan,’ said Spencer, ‘it’s not bedtime yet. Stay and have a nightcap with us.’

She hesitated, but only for a moment, and Spencer dispensed rum into three clean cups.

‘Joan here is saying she will marry out of the fishing trade, just like I did,’ I told him. Joan went red, but Spencer looked unruffled.

‘No shame in that,’ he said. ‘Plenty of other things to do in life, and plenty of other ways to make a living. Besides, you’ll have your choice of young men, Joan.’ There was an awkward pause then and I thought Spencer ought not to say things like that. ‘But you will have to be a sight less lazy and a bit more ladylike, Joan Dickson. You come on a bit strong, if you want my opinion,’ he added.

‘You rude bugger,’ she shrieked.

‘But it’s true,’ he said. ‘When it comes to marrying, a fellow wants a wife who will look after him, like Maggie here. She looks after me good and proper. A fellow doesn’t want to be worrying about his wife’s moods or getting nagged, or having to cook his own bacon in the mornings, and I reckon you’d be a lazybones of a wife and ask too many questions as well.’

‘Spencer, I shall slap you if you don’t shut up,’ Joan squawked, looking mortified.

He laughed and said he was only teasing, and I said that was plenty from both of them. I’d had enough of her company by then. I yawned, saying it was time for bed and we were keeping Joan up too late. I told Spencer to walk her round the corner and make sure she got home safe, and not to fall out with her on the way.

I washed, then waited for him to come to bed, and I was happy to wait too, for he had introduced me to the marriage act in a way Ma would no doubt say was wanton. Our nights ran into the soft hours. I know not how long we lay together; all I remember is the grey, gritty feeling of not getting enough sleep because of all the things we were doing. Feeling quite thrilled about it all. Spencer seemed to know his way around my body in a way I had not even known myself. I was sure he must have lain with a dozen women before me, to know such things. Before my marriage, a bed was a place for sleeping and snoring and the poking of ribs. Where unwashed bodies sweated, and blankets stank. Now my bed was a place of pleasure and clean, fresh sheets that I had washed and perfumed with the packets that Spencer gave me. It was a place of nakedness and lust.

‘Did you learn your ways in a whorehouse in Gothenburg?’ I asked him one night, half joking, but half serious because I was jealous of all the other women who might’ve been before me.

‘Of course not. I am just finding out as I go, same as you,’ he said. ‘But there’s no shame in the pleasure, is there?’

But we both knew he was sparing me the details. I tried to put the thought of these other women out of my mind, but it unsettled me to know that there were girls in London or Sweden with feathers in their hats and white silk gloves, whom he had admired and bedded. I did not like that feeling at all.

Another thing Spencer had no shame about was the physic preparations that he gave me to take, now I was a married woman. They came in packets and were a concoction of powders, which he assured me was perfectly safe, but would stop us from becoming a ma and da ourselves just yet. On this we were in agreement. I was as averse to becoming a mother as I was to becoming a fishwife. I had never forgotten the blood on the bed when Ma had her miscarriage, or the look in her eye when she talked of her lost babes, or the worn-out state of her as Joan and I bickered.

Motherhood. I never said as much to anyone, but the word left me cold. I did not want to end up with a babe hanging from me. In fishing folk, the women are not long in their confinement. A week or two perhaps, or longer if they are older and have other bairns to deal with. Then it’s back to work, but with double the toil. Feeding and changing and fussing. Nights of no sleep and days of colicky cries. Or worrying over a sick babe and, worse, mourning ones who did not survive. I wanted none of it. Some would call me selfish for that. Unwomanly. Perhaps I was.

So it came as a huge relief when Spencer brought me a physic preparation on the morning after our wedding night. I’d never seen anything like it. Not in all the tinctures Ma and Da had taken over the years for headaches and knee aches and poxes. The packet was in the shape of a neat square and there was writing on the front, two words that I could not decipher, even though I had some limited knowledge of written words; and a sketch of a fine lady with a secretive-looking smile on her face.

‘The writing says Women’s Tonic ,’ Spencer explained. ‘Except it’s written in Swedish. It’s the most popular one in Gothenburg. All the courtesans use it, so I have heard. Take one dose every morning stirred into fresh water. Just like this.’ He emptied the packet into a cup of water and stirred it with a spoon, then offered it to me. It fizzed for a moment or two and, when it had settled, he beckoned me to drink it. I sipped it gingerly. I didn’t like the salty taste. I didn’t like his easy use of the word courtesan .

‘Every morning? How will I ever get used to that?’

‘Drink up,’ he said. ‘You’ll get used to it soon enough. It’s the only way to stop a baby, for if we carry on like we did last night, a baby will come soon enough.’

That was enough to frighten me. I swallowed the drink. I did not ask Spencer how he knew so much about the habits of the courtesans.

Grey mornings, though. That was the other side of living with Spencer. You wouldn’t wake him before ten of the clock. I learned that in the first week. He was not rough like Da, nothing like that, with fists flying, but he had a flash of temper to him that made me go quiet. It was on the fourth day of our marriage I found that out. I had been tidying up the bedroom and he had been lying in bed like a stone. I had never seen anyone take a lie-in before, unless they were sick. I went to wake him up, gently touching his shoulder, but he rolled over to face me and out came a hand from the blanket and he jabbed his finger to my face. I flinched.

‘Never wake me up when I’m sleeping,’ he said.

‘I was only going to offer you a bit of bacon,’ I replied.

‘Well, don’t,’ he retorted. ‘I’ll come and get my bacon when I’m ready.’

And so that was me told.

Regardless of things like that, for I had had far worse, I did think myself absolutely in love with Spencer. I was in awe of him. I was certainly in love with his plans to make a pile of money in Musselburgh first, then get to London quick as we could. He said we’d need to save and that living up here was a sight cheaper than living down there, but once we had enough money saved, we would take a coach down south and secure some smart lodgings. He would still have to do his business, of course, obtaining his products. But we would set ourselves up on a splendid row of lavish shops, with cabinets filled with dark bottles: Patrick Spencer’s Perfume Emporium .

Until then, we passed the worst of the winter in our snug home.

I would cook and clean. He would praise my stews and soups and cleanliness. Sometimes Joan would come and they would bicker a bit, and I would send her home when it all got too much. Twice a week, when Joan was at choir practice and Da was out drinking, I would go and see Ma and we would sit and blether, but not about anything important. Ma and I found it easier to talk about trivial things, like how to spice a plum cake, than the big things, like why I had married out and what would become of Joan, and if there would even be any more generations of fishing Dicksons.

But anyhow that life – that delicate new life I was fleshing out for myself as a newly-wed – came crashing to a halt one afternoon. Spencer had been down at the Mussel Inn again. I was paying Ma and Da a visit when a man came running up to our cottage, saying a press gang had burst into the inn and dragged three men away, and one of them was Patrick Spencer.

A press gang. Navy men.

Spencer was gone. Vanished. Taken off to sea.