Читать книгу The Crest of the Broken Wave - James William Barke - Страница 9

Table of Contents

But at General’s Entry, in the Potterrow of Auld Reekie, Clarinda wept herself to disturbed sleep.

In November Jenny Clow had brought forth a son to Robert Burns. Only now, even as Jean Armour conceived, did Clarinda learn the truth from her part-time maid.

Oh, the cruelty, the heart-break of it! That son of Jenny Clow should have been hers. She had denied Robert Burns what her servant had not denied him.

She thought of him in her agony of jealousy as a blackguard, a scoundrel, a heartless villain, a monstrous deceiver—as everything vile and shameless under the sun...

And yet she couldn’t. He was no deceiver. It was she who had deceived. Her deceptions with Kemp and with Ainslie did not matter: she had deceived them even as she had deceived Robert Burns. No: these deceptions were but white lies on an idle tongue compared to the depth of her deception of Robert Burns. He had been a gentleman, a knight in the purest of white armour. Kemp and Ainslie were afraid for themselves for what they didn’t do to her: Robert Burns, with ten thousand times the sexual fire and audacity of ten thousand Kemps and Ainslies, had saved her, in regard for love, from herself. She had been a ten times irretrievably-damned fool for having denied him. But this deep truth only came into Clarinda’s brain to be just as vehemently denied. What could she have done? Jenny was but a servant-lass. A servant-lass was expected to have children no man admitted to fathering. But she was no servant. She had had four children in awful but legal wedlock. She still had a husband in Jamaica. And she was still in the direst of poverty.

Had she conceived to Robert Burns, cousin William Craig would have denied her; Bob Ainslie would have denied her; William Nimmo and his sister would have denied her; Mary Peacock... But all Edinburgh, all society, all morality would have denied her...

But Robert Burns was as far above morality as Jenny Clow was beneath it.

Or was she... ?

Oh, the heart-break, the torment of it all...

No, no; he was a blackguard, an unprincipled villain, a heartless scoundrel. He had fled from her arms (after the most sacred vows, after the holiest protestations); he had fled from the carnal arms of her servant into the arms of his Jean... Oh, that she might die of the most horrible pox! But he had married his Jean and all the time he had deluded her with the most villainous letters...

Surely, surely he had not been so sexually intimate with Jenny Clow as he had been with her—even if Jenny had not denied his seed. Damn the fornicating hot-blooded little bitch! She had laid herself out for Robert—had trapped him. Had she expected marriage? But how torturing the thought that he had in any way embraced her... It must have been a hasty furtive hole-and-corner affair—the hasty contrivance of a flurried moment... Impossible to think of his lips, his hands, his words, his wine-inflaming words... Not to Jenny... Oh, the little hot-bottomed bitch! But good-looking—yes; and virginal and not fat...

She ran her fingers over the blue vein-ruptured, post-pregnancy corrugations of her flaccid abdominal wall. Four confinements in four years had played havoc with her once drum-smooth belly and firm-fresh contoured breasts...

And yet Robert had rhapsodised about the sweetness of her curves, the poetry of her plumpness... No, no, no: he hadn’t lied. The tongue might lie; but he didn’t lie with his lips, with his hands; his body hadn’t lied...

She wept. Clarinda was but a lassie. She had been harshly treated by life. The fluttering butterflies of her youthful passion had been broken on the lust-wheel of a brutal sex-maniac. And she had been abandoned to the not even genteel poverty of an inadequate allowance and the misery of two dingy rooms in General’s Entry in the Potterrow... Her furniture, her linen, her dresses were humiliatingly threadbare and inadequate. She had been reduced to accepting clothes-gifts from Miss Erskine Nimmo and Mary Peacock.

She had been worthy of a better fate. She should have been able to dress nearer the height of fashion; she should have been able to afford the theatre, the Assembly, the concerts at Saint Cecilia’s... She had a right to at least one fine room in a fine house where she could have entertained like Miss Nimmo or Miss Chalmers; she deserved good china and fine wine glasses and a good carpet on the floor...

She wept; for she was but a love-lorn affection-starved lassie at heart. As a mask, as a shield, she had cultivated poetry, elevating conversation, affected piety and what she fondly imagined to be England’s fine and refined English... And here was courage in the face of beetling adversity. She might have broken and sunk under the harshness of fortune into a sluttish indifference. And who would, or could, have blamed her if she had ceased to struggle, ceased to battle for her own self-respect and the respect of her friends? Maybe her battle was a foolish one and her study of fine poetry profitless; but at least it had saved her from despair and the corrosion of loneliness...

For Robert Burns she had risked almost everything that meant such security as she had. But the happiness had been worth more than any risk. Only now there was bitterness, loneliness, rage, despair, and endless longing...

Oh Robert, Robert: what had she done? She had sought him from the beginning; she had protested but protested too much; she had led him on ... she, a married woman who could never, while her wretched husband lived, offer him anything. Oh, God, in His understanding and almighty love forgive her, guide her and protect her. She had sinned against God and against Robert Burns; she had sinned against life and love.

But the flywheel of Clarinda’s thoughts was loaded at the point of morality; and ever the wheel came to rest against this point.