“You haven’t been taking care of her all that time, surely?”
“Oh, no! Mr. Campbell had a woman as cared for her where they lived, in Burntisland, but the woman was none so young, and didna wish to leave her home. So when the Reverend made up his mind to take up the Missionary Society’s offer, and to take his sister wi’ him to the West Indies—why, he advertised for a strong woman o’ good character who wouldna mind travel to be an abigail for her…and here I am.” Miss Cowden gave me a gap-toothed smile in testimony to her own virtues.
“The West Indies? He’s planning to take Miss Campbell on a ship to the West Indies?” I was staggered; I knew just enough of sailing conditions to think that any such trip would be a major ordeal to a woman in good health. This woman—but then I reconsidered. All things concerned, Margaret Campbell might endure such a trip better than a normal woman—at least if she remained in her trance.
“He thought as the change of climate might be good for her,” Miss Cowden was explaining. “Get her away from Scotland, and all the dreadful memories. Ought to ha’ done it long since, is what I say.”
“What sort of dreadful memories?” I asked. I could see by the gleam in Miss Cowden’s eye that she was only too ready to tell me. I had finished the examination by this time, and concluded that there was little physically wrong with Miss Campbell save inactivity and poor diet, but there was the chance that something in her history might suggest some treatment.
“Weel,” she began, sidling toward the table, where a decanter and several glasses stood on a tray, “it’s only what Tilly Lawson told me, her as looked after Miss Campbell for sae long, but she did swear it was the truth, and her a godly woman. If ye’d care to take a drop of cordial, mum, for the sake o’ the Reverend’s hospitality?”
The chair Miss Campbell sat on was the only one in the room, so Miss Cowden and I perched inelegantly on the bed, side by side, and watched the silent figure before us, as we sipped our blackberry cordial, and she told me Margaret Campbell’s story.
Margaret Campbell had been born in Burntisland, no more than five miles from Edinburgh, across the Firth of Forth. At the time of the ’45, when Charles Stuart had marched into Edinburgh to reclaim his father’s throne, she had been seventeen.
“Her father was a Royalist, o’ course, and her brother in a government regiment, marching north to put down the wicked rebels,” said Miss Cowden, taking a tiny sip of the cordial to make it last. “But not Miss Margaret. Nay, she was for the Bonnie Prince, and the Hielan’ men that followed him.”
One, in particular, though Miss Cowden did not know his name. But a fine man he must have been, for Miss Margaret stole away from her home to meet him, and told him all the bits of information that she gleaned from listening to her father and his friends, and from her brother’s letters home.
But then had come Falkirk; a victory, but a costly one, followed by retreat. Rumor had attended the flight of the Prince’s army to the north, and not a soul doubted but that their flight led to destruction. Miss Margaret, desperate at the rumors, left her home at dead of night in the cold March spring, and went to find the man she loved.
Now here the account had been uncertain—whether it was that she had found the man and he had spurned her, or that she had not found him in time, and been forced to turn back from Culloden Moor—but in any case, turn back she did, and the day after the battle, she had fallen into the hands of a band of English soldiers.
“Dreadful, what they did to her,” Miss Cowden said, lowering her voice as though the figure in the chair could hear. “Dreadful!” The English soldiers, blind with the lust of the hunt and the kill, pursuing the fugitives of Culloden, had not stopped to ask her name or the sympathies of her family. They had known by her speech that she was a Scot, and that knowledge had been enough.
They had left her for dead in a ditch half full of freezing water, and only the fortuitous presence of a family of tinkers, hiding in the nearby brambles for fear of the soldiers, had saved her.
“I canna help but think it a pity they did save her, un-Christian thing it is to say,” Miss Cowden whispered. “If not, the puir lamb might ha’ slippit her earthly bonds and gone happy to God. But as it is—” She gestured clumsily at the silent figure, and drank down the last drops of her cordial.
Margaret had lived, but did not speak. Somewhat recovered, but silent, she traveled with the tinkers, moving south with them to avoid the pillaging of the Highlands that took place in the wake of Culloden. And then one day, sitting in the yard of a pothouse, holding the tin to collect coppers as the tinkers busked and sang, she had been found by her brother, who had stopped with his Campbell regiment to refresh themselves on the way back to their quarters at Edinburgh.
“She kent him, and him her, and the shock o’ their meeting gave her back her voice, but not her mind, puir thing. He took her home, o’ course, but she was always as though she was in the past—sometime before she met the Hielan’ man. Her father was dead then, from the influenza, and Tilly Lawson said as the shock o’ seeing her like that kilt her mother, but could be as that were the influenza, too, for there was a great deal of it about that year.”
The whole affair had left Archibald Campbell deeply embittered against both Highland Scots and the English army, and he had resigned his commission. With his parents dead, he found himself middling well-to-do, but the sole support of his damaged sister.
“He couldna marry,” Miss Cowden explained, “for what woman would have him, and she”—with a nod toward the fire—“was thrown into the bargain?”
In his difficulties, he had turned to God, and become a minister. Unable to leave his sister, or to bear the confinement of the family house at Burntisland with her, he had purchased a coach, hired a woman to look after Margaret, and begun to make brief journeys into the surrounding countryside to preach, often taking her with him.
In his preaching he had found success, and this year had been asked by the Society of Presbyterian Missionaries if he would undertake his longest journey yet, to the West Indies, there to organize churches and appoint elders on the colonies of Barbados and Jamaica. Prayer had given him his answer, and he had sold the family property in Burntisland and moved his sister to Edinburgh while he made preparations for the journey.
I glanced once more at the figure by the fire. The heated air from the hearth stirred the skirts about her feet, but beyond that small movement, she might have been a statue.
“Well,” I said with a sigh, “there’s not a great deal I can do for her, I’m afraid. But I’ll give you some prescriptions—receipts, I mean—to have made up at the apothecary’s before you go.”
If they didn’t help, they couldn’t hurt, I reflected, as I copied down the short lists of ingredients. Chamomile, hops, rue, tansy, and verbena, with a strong pinch of peppermint, for a soothing tonic. Tea of rose hips, to help correct the slight nutritional deficiency I had noted—spongy, bleeding gums, and a pale, bloated look about the face.
“Once you reach the Indies,” I said, handing Miss Cowden the paper, “you must see that she eats a great deal of fruit—oranges, grapefruit, and lemons, particularly. You should do the same,” I added, causing a look of profound suspicion to flit across the maid’s wide face. I doubted she ate any vegetable matter beyond the occasional onion or potato, save her daily parritch.