“He’s from ayant the Tweed.”
The maid laughed, and Susan was hurt. She suspected that they were talking about her but could not decipher what they were saying. Since they had left London, Dean had not once spoken to her in such a friendly and kind manner as that with which he was now addressing this common barmaid. She felt she deserved better treatment from him than the maid received. It was not that she considered herself better than the maid. Regardless of class distinctions, she was soon to be Dean’s wife.
“’Tis nought but a Sassenach in perlins,” the maid said. Susan did not like the way the maid was looking at her.
“Stop your clishmaclaver and bring us some victuals, hinny.”
“Aye, sir. Belyve.”
Dean spoke quietly when the maid had left. “If you are afraid to speak, Miss Kirke, dinna fash.”
“Speak in English, John.”
“I have informed the maid that you are English. You may speak freely as you would normally do.”
She took a sip of ale to keep from crying.
“You do seem disheartened this evening. Does the Scottish countryside not agree with you?”
“It is very gloomy weather.”
“Then your mood will change with the weather, I expect.”
Susan was confused by her feelings of jealousy. She had deceived herself into believing that she felt only disappointment that he no longer loved her. This over-familiar fraternity with the serving wench and the way they laughed about her as if she were not there should only have confirmed her suspicions that his love for her was dead.
Unexpectedly, instead of indifference to his behaviour, she felt a wrenching pain. Her throat constricted as she fought back tears.
The barmaid arrived with plates of food that she placed in front of them, obviating the need for further dialogue. The foreign food on her plate filled Susan with disgust. It did not improve her appetite to watch Dean attacking his food with relish, taking large quaffs of ale to swallow it.
Finally, with his mouth full, he asked, “What is wrong? You are not enjoying your tatties and neeps?”
She made a face. “Is that what they are?”
“Aye. Good hearty Scottish fare to defend the constitution against the Scottish climate.”
She had always loved his Scottish accent but now it seemed to have broadened. Only the night before she had felt warmed by his accent but now his rolling burr annoyed her. She pushed her plate away.
He stopped chewing, took a swig of ale to swallow what was left of the food in his mouth, and said, “You hae spoiled my appetite with your bad humour.”
“Good,” she said. “Good, because you have likely spoiled my whole life.” She stood up as if to leave.
He looked as though she had stabbed him with a knife. “What are you saying? How ungrateful can ye be?” She started to leave. “Sit down, sir. I have a mite more to say to you, but I dinna want to shout so that everyone can hear.”
She was fighting back tears and wanted desperately to get out of the tavern before starting to cry. He had reminded her that she was a boy, and boys did not cry, especially not in public. “I cannot stay,” she said. “If you want to continue this discussion you must follow me to our room.”
“You go ahead if you maun,” he replied. “I shall be up later. I want to have another pint of this good Scottish ale that I have been too long deprived of.”
Susan looked at him in utter shock. She knew that he had more to say to her. She had heard the bitter anger in his voice. Yet he chose to stay here and drink! The only man she would ever love had chosen drink over her! She left him to his pint and walked up to their apartment. She did not need a candle; it was June and getting closer to the longest day of the year, which, in this northern latitude, was longer than any she had ever known. A gloomy kind of daylight it was, with the rain falling outside. It was cold and she decided to get under the covers with all her clothes on.
She lay in bed and listened to the rain falling outside the window. He was not coming. He was going to have another pint of Scottish ale, and another conversation with a certain Scottish barmaid as well, no doubt. And where would that lead? Even in her anger she had trouble imagining him being a scoundrel, but she knew what a man might be capable of once his better judgment had been clouded with too much drink. Susan herself was feeling the effects of the single pint she had imbibed. She pictured him kissing the lovely barmaid and lifting her skirt to place his hand on her thigh. Then she imagined the barmaid laughing and encouraging him. Finally, her unexpressed anger turned to tears and spilled out of her. She lay there, sobbing, for the longest time, until fatigue finally overcame her, and she slept.
Several hours later, Dean opened the door without attempting to be quiet, walked clumsily across the floor, and sat down hard upon the bed. Susan started awake. Even through sleep-filled eyes, she could see that he had been drinking: his eyes were bleary and shot with red.
“You have wakened me, sir,” she scolded him.
“Dinna fash.” His speech was slurred and somewhat maudlin.
“I do fash!” she said. “You have been drinking, sir.”
“Drunkenness is not one of my faults, Susan.”
The fact that he was speaking to her in such a familiar fashion gave her no pleasure under the circumstances. “I would not have thought so, but I do not believe that I know you well enough to say.”
“Do ye nae love me anymore, Susy?”
His face was close to hers now, and she could smell the drink on him. She was afraid that he was going to kiss her and, as much as she would have welcomed it the previous night, she did not desire him in his present condition. “Sir!” she exclaimed crossly. “Have some dignity. You cannot leave the barmaid’s bed and come directly to mine.”
He jumped back as if she had struck him and almost tipped over. When he had regained his balance, he replied, “How can you accuse me of lichensus…” After several attempts, his tongue proved incapable of pronouncing the word and he restated his thought, “of being a rogue. I would never share any other bed but yours.”
“Again, I would not have thought it possible before, but this has been a night of surprises for me.”
“You dinna wish to marry me now,” he wailed.
“No, sir, I do not. Not in your present state.”
“Do you think you can just go back to your mommy and daddy? Will they take you back, do you suppose?”
She wondered if he was insulting her by suggesting as he had the previous night that she was a strumpet, but he seemed to be asking the question, not of her, but of the wall opposite.
He continued to address the wall. “I dinna ken these English. The claims of social class seem to outweigh those of religion with them.” Then he looked at her. “But you are too good for me, Susan. That much is clear. How can you descend from a ‘Kirke’ to a ‘Dean’? It is a long way down.”
“Are you mocking me, sir?”
He choked and started sobbing. “I am so sorry, Susan,” he sputtered between his tears.
“It is all right,” she said. At least he was a maudlin drunk and not an angry one as her father had been. “Why do you not lie down and go to sleep? We can discuss it further in the morning.”
“Aye,” he said. “’Tis a good idea.”
Then he fell into the bed without removing any of his clothes and was almost immediately asleep and snoring beside her. Susan dozed fitfully the rest of the night.
Chapter 21
Susan was awake, risen and dressed long before Dean the next morning. She sat for a while in the chair beside the bed and gazed upon him. His long, dark lashes fell on his white cheeks and his curls lay upon the pillow. He snorted loudly every so often, tossing and turning restlessly. She felt some tenderness for him, but it was mixed with so many other emotions now that she could barely express them. He was a complicated man. She wondered how he would react when he woke up. She suspected that he would be full of remorse. Should she forgive him if he was, o
r would it be better to let him stew in his own water for a while? She thought perhaps the latter would be better. He had hurt her, and she needed to make him pay. Remorse in a husband could be a good thing.
Dean gave a loud snort and woke himself. He started and sat up. “Wha…?” he shouted. He saw her staring at him as if he were naked and covered himself with the bed clothes, even though he was fully clad. “Och,” he moaned, squinting and clutching his head. “Excuse me. I am not feeling well.” He walked quickly into the dressing room and vomited into the wash basin.
“Are you ill, sir?”
He continued retching into the basin for a few moments. “You ken that I am,” he said, as he wiped his face on a towel. “My apologies for last night,” he said. He picked up the jug and tipped the water over his head, spilling much of it on the floor as he did so.
“Look what you are doing, Dean.”
“Well, ‘tis not your responsibility to clean it up, so dinna fash yourself.”
She said nothing.
“Let us proceed to Edinburgh, Master Gardiner.”
“Shall we not have breakfast first?”
“Do you think you can abide our good Scottish parritch?”
“Do you think that you can?” she responded.
***
All the way to Edinburgh, Susan considered what John Dean had said to her while inebriated. In vino veritas, she thought. He had said she was too good for him. Was he being ironic or had he lost his belief in the fundamental equality of mankind? Was he perhaps correct? Was she too good for him, and not just because of her station in life? She had always believed that he was her moral superior, but now she was not so sure. She was profoundly disappointed in his behaviour of the preceding night. One could not choose one’s parents, it was true, and now it seemed equally true that one did not really choose one’s mate, either. It was a pig in a poke, and not much better than that.
And what about the question he had addressed to the wall? Would her parents take her back again and forgive her for her elopement with the gardener? If they would, then perhaps there was some way out of this nightmare she had found herself in. Perhaps she could send a message to her parents from Edinburgh. She would try to forestall the marriage until her father came to rescue her. She would not say anything to Dean, lest her father did not feel her worth rescuing. If she had to, she would stand at the altar and refuse to marry him. Then she would have to wait alone and friendless in Dundee until a rescuer came from England. The contemplation did not bring her any warmth against the Scottish mist.
***
By the time of their arrival in Edinburgh, Susan was sunk into a funk even gloomier than the Scottish weather. She descended from the coach, used now to debarking without the offered hand of a gentleman. She walked past Dean into the tavern of the Cowgate without a word of greeting.
“Master Gardiner,” he called after her. “Have you forgotten your manners?”
Susan turned around. “Sorry, sir,” she said as she waited for him to walk beside her. She had not meant to be petulant. She had only been intent on arriving ahead of him in order to enquire about the post to London privately. She did not know when there might be another opportunity to do so.
Inside the inn, Susan was astonished when Dean requested two apartments for three nights.
“Why are we staying for three nights?” she asked him.
“Tomorrow is the Sabbath and there will be no journeying then.”
She had lost track of the days. “That I understand, but why another day after that? Are you not anxious to arrive in Dundee where your family awaits you?”
“That I am, sir, but my parents will be disappointed if I arrive with a lad. They will be expecting me to marry a lassie, I fancy.” He smiled. “On Monday, we shall visit the shops of Edinburgh. I am sure that you will not find apparel as handsome as Fitzwilliam’s gown at the masquerade, but perhaps it will be pleasing for you to wear women’s clothes again.”
“Yes, indeed,” she said, but her mind was moving swiftly now. They would be here two full days, and in separate apartments! She would have the opportunity to write to her father and perhaps, if he came immediately, he would arrive in time to rescue her before the wedding took place. She could not determine how many days it would take for the letter to reach him and then for his coach to arrive, but with this respite in their travels, she felt some reassurance. The day of reckoning was at least postponed.
At the door of her apartment to which he had led her, she asked, “I am curious as to why we are to have separate apartments after so many days of sharing.”
“Well, Gardiner.” Dean walked close beside her and whispered. “Once you are transformed into a woman, it will not be appropriate to share a room.”
“And how is this transformation to occur without arousing suspicion?”
“On Sunday you will go to bed a man and awake a woman. I hope with all the traffic in this busy inn that it will not be remarked upon. If it is, we shall hope that it is greeted with silent astonishment only.”
“If it is remarked upon, we can say that I am going to attend a masquerade.”
“I would rather not make such an admission in Scotland.” Dean laughed. “Here is your apartment, sir. Mine is just a little farther down the hall, I believe. And so we shall meet in half an hour to sup together. Is that agreeable to you?”
“It is, sir.”
Susan went inside, happy that she had all this time to herself to compose a letter to her father, but it taxed all of her skills to draw upon the emotion of humility, which she was not used to.
“Sir:” she wrote and then scratched it out as too formal. “Dear Father”. That was better, she thought. “I humbly apologize”. Would “abjectly” be better or would that be too strong a word? She let it lie. “I humbly apologize for my disrespectful behavior.” A few other adjectives came to mind: flagrant, disobedient, willful, dishonourable. She swallowed hear and dipped the quill in ink again.
“I hope…” A great blot of ink appeared in the “o”. She had forgotten to shake the excess from the quill. “Damn,” she said, blotting the paper. It only smeared further. She picked it up and crumpled it.
“I hope that you will find it in your heart to forgive me,” she said to herself as she arranged a clean sheet, dipped the quill, shook the excess ink from it and began to write again. She paused when the process of writing finally caught up with the thoughts in her head. What next? she thought as she read the words she had written thus far.
Somehow I must convince him I am a virgin still. “You will…” “Mr. Dean has been…” “Not so much as a kiss has been exchanged between Mr. Dean and me.” That was it. She wrote the words down. Who would believe it since they had shared a room since London? Her father might; he was gullible where she was concerned, but no one else would. So what? She was writing to her father, not to the world.
What next? She wrote down her simple heartfelt plea: “I want to come home. Please come and fetch me.” A teardrop fell and smudged the ink again. She crumpled another piece of paper and consigned it to the floor.
In half an hour, she had succeeded in filling all the paper that the inn had afforded her with scratched-out words and tear-filled blots. Fortunately, with her own apartment she would have all of Sunday to write if she so required.
***
Dean knocked at her door the next morning early. “Let us go to the kirk, Master Gardiner.”
She was ready. “Yes, sir. Shall we walk?”
“Aye. The High Street is but the next street over from the Cowgate. St. Giles is there.”
As they walked, she asked, “Why is the road called the Cowgate? I see no gate anywhere.”
“’Gate,’ in Scottish dialect, means ‘way.’”
“I had no idea that Scottish was a different language.”
“’Tis only a different dialect of English that we speak. The highlanders farther north speak another language altogether.”
They arrived at what
is called the Royal Mile, the High Street between Edinburgh Castle and the old royal palace of Holyrood; they walked the rest of the way to the church in silence. Susan observed that Edinburgh seemed as crowded and dirty as London. Even on the Sabbath day, the street was teeming with people jostling and elbowing on the narrow thoroughfare.
The building was old and dark, a converted Catholic edifice not greatly different from the churches of England, but the service was unlike anything that she had ever experienced. The only music was the chanting of a Psalm, with no accompaniment of a musical instrument.
However, the greatest difference was the sermon. Susan remarked that the preacher did not read his homily but spoke directly to the assembly. For the first hour, she was captivated by the delightfulness of his oration as she listened intently to his sermon on the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are they that mourn, blessed are the meek…” A heap of blessings were piled upon the neglected and downtrodden, it seemed. Perhaps it was a good thing, after all, that she had become one of them.
When the minister came to the next beatitude, “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled,” she lost her way, when he said: “I find in my heart a flame of desires. After the righteousness of Christ. My soul earnestly desires to be stripped naked of my righteousness, which is rags, and to be clothed with the robe of his righteousness. This wedding garment my soul affects: so shall I be found without spot when the Master of the feast comes in to see the guests. My soul is satisfied and acquiesces in justification by an imputed righteousness, though, alas! My base heart would have a home-spun garment of its own sometimes.”
Why would anyone want a home-spun garment, she wondered, when they could have a robe of righteousness? She pictured her own magnificent wedding-gown, left far behind in London, and sighed. Dean had said they would shop for a gown tomorrow. She wondered what it would be like. Home-spun, no doubt. Her feelings were decidedly mixed. It might be pleasant to wear a gown again, but she had enjoyed being without the encumbrance of stays and a pannier. Perhaps the home-spun apparel that Dean could afford to purchase here in Edinburgh would not require such severe restrictions as the fashion in London demanded. She felt a little guilty that he should incur the expense of a wedding gown when she intended to jilt him the next day. When her father arrived she would try to persuade him to repay Dean for his expenses. She laughed out loud at the ludicrous thought, and Dean gave her a reproving look.