Theirs Was The Kingdom (45 page)

They moved on to Holyrood Palace, then up to the Castle, then down again into Princes Street and the Georgian squares behind it. They visited museums, art galleries, the site of the gallows where Burke the body-snatcher was hanged (he and Hare were the only Edinburgh worthies of whom Jake had heard tell), and on to Greyfriars, Surgeon’s Hall, and other places of antiquity. But perhaps the edifice that most impressed Jake was the Scott Memorial, with its three score statues of celebrated figures in Scottish history, for he had always thought of authors as long-haired starvelings who lived in garrets and it came as a shock to him that so much money and effort had been expended on a monument to a man who wrote stories.

He said, wonderingly, “Gawd luv us, Mr. Fraser, they muster thought a rare lot o’ that chap!”

And Fraser replied, “They think a rare lot of any man who pulls himself up by his bootstraps, Higson.”

They set out, in bleak winter weather, on a sweep of the territory that took them the length and breadth of the Lothians and down into the Border counties, where they paid homage to Scott, Burns, and a man called Carlyle, another of whom Jake had never heard but whose fame, he was amazed to learn, rested on a book about the French Revolution.

Little by little, as they drove about the towns, villages, and mist-shrouded moors of the beat, meeting prominent customers and dining in homely inns, a feeling grew in Jake Higson that he was an exile and outcast, separated from these people not so much by race and language (he could understand less than half the conversation between Fraser and his customers) but by a kind of mental inferiority.

Full awareness of this was not as definite as all that, or not at first, but it was there from the first day and steadily enlarged itself as he listened to Fraser’s stories of Wallace, Bruce, the Covenanters, the Porteous riots, the ’forty-five, and all manner of legends that had been retold by that indefatigable chap Scott, to whose memory they had raised that expensive-looking memorial. But it was not merely his own ignorance that teased him. It had to do, in a way he was at a loss to define, with the ability of the ordinary men and women up here to absorb book-learning, an accomplishment that Jake had always regarded as one reserved for the rich and high-born. Yet Burns, they told him in Ayrshire, had been the son of a ploughman, and Carlyle, they told him in Dumfries, the son of a mason, and in these humble cottages and granite cities they were both measured with the London great, like the Duke of Wellington and that chap who built St. Paul’s. The only yardstick Jake could use as a comparison was Dick Whittington who, like everyone else, had been obliged to trudge Londonwards before making his mark. Here in Scotland, however, one found a Whittington in every hamlet, and as many as three in some villages, as was the case at a little place called Denholm, on the road from Jedburgh to Hawick. It was here, of all places, that Jake’s feelings about the Scots suddenly crystallised, so that Denholm became for him the crossroads that gave his life a shape and purpose that it had not had up to that time.

2

He was settling in by then, and had driven in his smart waggonette, drawn by two high-stepping bays, to call on a new customer in the Kelso area. Because the spring morning was sharp and clear, and the road ran beside the pretty river Teviot, he was at peace with himself, and conscious of slowly coming to terms with the countryside and its people. He stopped off at Denholm for a bite to eat, and crossed the village green to read the inscription on an obelisk set there, finding it was erected to the memory of one John Leyden, born in a cottage that still stood on the north side of the village.

Leyden, it seemed, who had died at the age of thirty-six, had been a very famous scholar indeed, having educated himself to a point where he could confound the learned on every conceivable subject. He had even managed to pass examinations in medicine in six months in order to equip himself for a post in India, where he went on to become a brilliant orientalist.

It seemed to Jake, spelling out the inscription, that Leyden somehow epitomised the Scots. A man who could do what Leyden did in a mere thirty-six years might have gone on to rival King Solomon, of whom Jake had heard during enforced sessions in Mr. Keate’s vanboys’ Sunday School. A furious, impotent envy stirred in him as he stood pondering John Leyden’s astonishing career in the warm April sunshine.

What little remained of his urchin pride, imported from London, ebbed away, leaving him naked and pitiful, so that his extreme dissatisfaction with himself rose to his lips in a kind of involuntary protest and he growled aloud, “It ain’t
right
! It ain’t
fair
! Gawd knows, I tried me best…” But then he stopped, flushing, for he saw that he was not alone, and that a young woman was standing close by and a very fetching young woman she was, with soft brown eyes, dark, looped-back hair, and the pink and white complexion all the girls up here seemed to have in contrast to the pallor of the London girls.

She was smiling, he noticed, but in the friendliest possible way, as she said, obviously with the intention of helping him out, “Oh, don’t mind, I’m always talking to myself. Why not? It’s the only way to learn anything about yourself.” His heart warmed towards her as he grinned, sheepishly, saying, “Down home it’s reckoned a sure sign o’ goin’ barmy, miss. It’s just that… well… this bloke Leyden… it set me thinking and it come out, before I could stop it!”

She said, drawing her fine dark brows together, “
What
came out?” and he noticed then that she had little trace of the brogue but spoke like a person difficult to place. Not “ladylike” exactly, but easily and naturally, with effortless enunciation.

“I suppose I was thinkin’ o’ brains,” he said, slowly. “Brains, like this chap had an’ muster bin born with. I mean, some are and some ain’t, and if you ain’t you c’n on’y get so far and then, bang goes the door, smack in yer faice, if you see wot I mean.”

“Oh, I see what you mean,” she replied gaily, “but it isn’t in the least true. Leyden started from nothing, right here in this village, and so did John Scott, the famous botanist, and Sir James Murray, the man who made the dictionary. It’s no more than a matter of making up your mind to do whatever you want to do.”

“
Three
of ’em! From a place this size?”

She smiled. She had, he decided, a bewitching smile. “Up here it’s the only way to a better life and it’s always been so. Education gives a man something to set his sights on, for money is hard to come by this far north. Is that your waggonette over there?” and when he nodded, “Then you don’t have to worry, do you? To run a team like that, and wear broadcloth of the kind you’re wearing, you must be comfortable to say the least.”

The statement amazed him. He had never once thought of himself as being “comfortable” as she put it, although Swann paid his provincial managers very well and he had been putting money aside for some time now.

He said, carefully, “Well, the waggonette an’ cattle ain’t mine, exactly. I’m Scottish manager fer Swann-on-Wheels, the carriers. At least, I will be, soon as Mr. Fraser packs in. Mr. Swann—our Gaffer that is—he likes us to drive a good rig. Says it’s good fer business.”

“And so it is,” she said, but then, to his amazement, “Why don’t you step across to the Manse and take a dish of tea with myself and my father? We don’t get much company and someone from London is a rarity about here. It’s well enough for father. He has his work to occupy him, but I’m on holiday and I miss Edinburgh, I must confess.”

“You live in Edinburgh, Miss…?”

“McKenzie. Mary McKenzie. I’m a teacher there in a school near the Infirmary. I know your yard. It’s the one in the Grassmarket, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said, eagerly, “and I’d like very much to take tea with your father, Miss McKenzie. I’d… I’d like it fine!” and with that, a gamin’s trick to identify with the locality by using a local idiom, she laughed, showing two enormous dimples and he thought that never, in the whole of his life, had he seen a prettier or more engaging face.

He walked beside her across the green to the Manse and was introduced to a gnomish little minister, who gave him the welcome he was learning to expect up here. They all drank tea together and exchanged mild courtesies, Miss McKenzie telling him she lodged with an aunt in George Square, and he telling her and her father the nature of his work as Swann’s manager in Edinburgh.

It was past three o’clock before Mary McKenzie walked him to the inn where his team had been fed and watered, and as they shook hands he said, falteringly, “Everyone I met up ’ere ’as bin… well… so friendly like. But it’s all give an’ no take. Mr. Fraser says no one expects tit-fer-tat, like they do dahn south, but seein’ you work right alongside our headquarters coulden I, coulden we…” And he stopped, for somehow, although well accustomed to making assignments with young women, ordinary techniques failed him in the presence of the daughter of a minister, clearly a respectable girl, of the kind he rarely met outside business hours.

She said, to his gratification, “Couldn’t we meet? Why, of course we could. It would be a pleasure, Mr. Higson. You shall pay a call on me at my aunt’s, and then show me your stables if you wish, for I love horses and your firm is famous, isn’t it? I remember that trademark on vans when I was a girl about here. Well, then, goodbye for now, and we’ll meet again after Easter, I hope. You can reach me at this address,” and she whipped out a pocketbook and wrote the address, her pencil flying over the paper in a way that made him as envious of her as he had been of John Leyden, for he found any kind of writing very laborious.

It was difficult to accept that a chance encounter in a remote Teviotside village could have wrought such a devastating change in his life.

She seemed, on the instant, to bring him luck, for he landed a lucrative haulage contract in Kelso that same night, and later, as the evenings began to draw out, he paid several uneventful but pleasurable social calls on Mary McKenzie and her widowed aunt, Mrs. McFie, in the latter’s home in the city. Mrs. McFie had been housekeeper here when her late husband had been a coachman to a rich old bachelor. He had left her house and furniture when he died without heirs a year or so before.

He got along very well with Aunt Flora, a bustling, cheerful woman, who seemed to think of him as someone very important in the commercial life of Edinburgh. Although his admiration for Mary McKenzie’s face, figure, and accomplishments grew and grew, so that soon he found it difficult to give his full attention to anything else, he made little progress with her save as a source of information concerning the history of a city that he was already beginning to think of as his own.

He once called for her at her school near the Infirmary, finding it daunting to watch her queening it over some three score neatly dressed children who paid her the kind of respect accorded to royalty. In a way it removed her still further, if that was possible, from the orbit of his daily life, for he now began to regard her as a female equivalent of John Leyden, who must assuredly think of him as a gauche, coarse-grained creature, forever hanging about in the background of her well-ordered life, with nothing much to say for himself unless it was about horses.

Their relationship remained on this one-sided level until one day, out of the blue as it were, she said to him, over the ruins of a supper cooked for them by Mrs. McFie, “You’re hazed about something, Jamie Higson, apart from the responsibilities you’ll be called upon to face when Mr. Fraser retires. It’s to do with that first conversation we had by John Leyden’s obelisk, isn’t it? Come now, we’re friends, aren’t we? If I can help I’d be glad to.”

Her prescience, in being able to go directly to the heart of the matter in this way, amazed him, so that he blurted out, “You’ll think me daft, no doubt, but the fact is… well… sometimes I wonder why you bother wi’ me at all. Wot I mean is, you’re a scholar. You mus’ be, to teach in school, but me—well, I’m ignoranter than any one o’ them bairns o’ yours. You’re right tho’, it does get me down in the mouth sometimes. Oh, I c’n manage the job all right, but that ain’t the point, is it? Not if a man wants to
make
something of ’imself! He’s got to have book learnin’ and ’ow does he go abaht gettin’ it at my age?”

She said, “How old would that be, lad?” He said, glumly, “I dunno, reely. About thirty, I reckon. I don’t remember no mum or dad. I was a chimney sweep as a nipper, straight aht o’ the Guardians. That’s ’ow I come be the one piece o’ luck I ever ’ad.”

“Tell me, Jamie.”

“My mate Luke choked ter death in one o’ Mrs. Swann’s flues. Twenty years ago, that was, an’ Mr. Swann bashed the livin’ daylights out o’ that gaffer of ours, took me away from ’im, and set me to work as a vanboy, then a waggoner, then head stableman, and ’ere I am. ’Ere, why am I tellin’ you all this?”

She said, gently, “It’s time you told somebody, and I really can’t see why you have to feel so humble. You’ve already come a long way by your own efforts.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, “abaht as far as I c’n ’ope to go, an’ that’s the rub when I meet people like you. Money don’t come into it. I thought money was every-think once but it ain’t. I found that out soon as I got ’ere. It’s… it’s, well,
torkin’
, knowing things, bein’ able to put ’em dahn on paper. It’s being able to
think
abaht things outside o’ work, and readin’ books, like that chap Scott wrote, besides the latest murder in the
Police Gazette
.” He stood up, driven to a point of desperation by his own sense of inadequacy. “You know something else, Miss Mary? I can’t even read the bits in the paper about pollerticks, for I don’t know ’arf the words. Now how could I begin to go abaht putting that straight?”