The Great Unknown Read online

  THE GREAT UNKNOWN

  PEG KINGMAN

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Afterword

  THE GREAT UNKNOWN

  Prologue

  STEVENSON PAUSED for a moment to catch his breath and ease his pounding heart, for these immense iron hoisting tongs were unwieldy, and very heavy. He was working by moonlight beside a gryke—a chasm in the limestone—at the north end of a little offshore island: Coquet Isle. The light dimmed suddenly, briefly, as clouds blew across the moon’s face; then brightened again. The nearest man-made lights were at the southern tip of Coquet Isle, atop the lighthouse; and the next-nearest lights after that were in the town three-quarters of a mile to the west: Amble, on the Northumberland shore. As he desired above all to avoid the notice of the townspeople, he worked by moonlight.

  He was sweat-drenched, despite the hard wind that came scouring across five hundred miles of North Sea. Why must everything worth doing be so exceedingly difficult and slow? He had hauled these hoisting tongs, hinged like colossal scissors, all the way from Paris; likewise, his winch, chains, cables, blocks, tackles. He had hauled even this mast and beam from France, lashed to the deck of a lugger out of Rouen. He had brought all these not because they couldn’t be had here, along this English coast—for they could; but they couldn’t be had here secretly, privately, and without attracting notice.

  Having chosen a convenient stone ledge well down inside the gryke, so that nothing should be silhouetted against the sky, he resumed his task. The setting-up of a crane was so familiar to him that he could do it alone, in silence, at night.

  1

  THE NEW WET NURSE’S uncovered breast was mottled blue and red under taut translucent skin; the nipple was small, neat, and pink. It was a satisfactory breast; a serviceable nipple. Seated on a low chair under the library window, this young mother endured the scrutiny of three women and a man, the doctor. Of the two babies, one slept, sated; but the other was furiously hungry.

  “Uncover both, if you please, Mrs MacAdam,” said the doctor loudly to the wet nurse; loudly enough to be heard above the angry baby boy squalling in the arms of Hopey, the nursery maid. Constantia MacAdam opened her bodice to uncover both breasts. Dr Moir had already conducted his examination; already reported to Mrs Chambers that there were no symptoms of syphilis or consumption; no sign in this young mother or her surviving baby of any dependence upon laudanum; no medical reason why Mrs MacAdam should not be able to nurse Mrs Chambers’s baby as well as her own. She claimed to have had plenty of milk for two, during the five weeks that both her twins had lived. He had watched her feed her surviving baby girl—now asleep in the arms of their friend Mrs MacDonald. It was evidently thriving, and the same age as Mrs Chambers’s hungry baby boy. The misfortune of the twin’s death several days ago was due not to any communicable disease, nor to maternal malfeasance; but only to the Divine Will, inscrutable and mysterious (in the form, Dr Moir guessed privately, of a congenital kidney disorder).

  Though Hopey rocked and joggled and crooned to Mrs Chambers’s hungry baby, he would not be quiet. At a nod from the doctor, she transferred him, crimson-faced and raging, to Mrs MacAdam’s arms.

  Mrs MacAdam handled this precious infant well: hands slow, quiet, firm. Clean, too. She took him into the crook of her right arm; fitted him across her body, his belly to her own. With her left hand she lifted her right breast to his mouth. For a moment he quieted, and eagerly nuzzled, grazing the nipple with his lips—but then craned away. His face crumpled. As he opened his mouth, drawing breath to squawk, Mrs MacAdam deftly filled his open mouth with her nipple, pressing against his toothless gums. His eyes flew open, and for a moment he seemed about to close and suck—but then he twisted away once more, arching backward in her arms; furiously rejecting this unfamiliar nipple, this wrong-smelling breast. In his rage, he pulled one arm free of his wrappings to thrash the air.

  Mrs MacAdam set thumb and forefinger on either side of her nipple and pressed; her milk came, greyish and watery. She caught a droplet on her smallest fingertip and dabbled it onto his lips. Then again. His lips parted; his tiny tongue curled. Once more she offered milk on her fingertip, and this time he sucked it. Swiftly she put him to the nipple once more. He closed upon it; drew upon it; sucked. They all could hear him.

  In less than a minute, her milk let down. He coughed once, as the milk came too fast to swallow, then greedily resumed; and three fine sprays of milk arched from her other nipple, the one he was not suckling; soaked her linen.

  “Plenty of milk for two,” Dr Moir was saying. Mrs Chambers was smiling. Hopey was smiling. Mrs MacDonald was smiling.

  But Constantia MacAdam did not smile. She was transfixed by the sight of the baby’s tiny splayed hand, clamped now like a small rosy starfish against her breast: a thumb and five perfect fingers. Not four; five.

  The commodious old house was called Spring Gardens. It lay in spacious private grounds outside Edinburgh between Newhailes and Musselburgh, just above the harbour and the cottages of Fisherrow, to the west of the River Esk. Here, the Robert Chambers family had spent the summer of 1845 as tenants, while their house in Doune Terrace in Edinburgh was undergoing repairs. Now, in September, though summer was past, the Doune Terrace repairs were not yet complete—and here at Spring Gardens, therefore, the family still remained.

  Besides the two infants—Charles Edward Chambers and Livia MacAdam—eight other children were living in the house. The eldest, at fifteen, was Nina. Next was Mary; then Annie, named for her mother; and the twins Jenny and Lizzy, both nine and very pretty, but vacuous. Grave little Tuckie was seven; then came the two little boys, both still in frocks: James, called Jemmie, aged four; and two-year-old William, called Willie—much distressed at his recent ouster, upon the birth of Charlie, from the privileged position of Baby. There seemed to be others, too, somewhere—for where were the Janet, Eliza, and Amelia sometimes mentioned? It was some days before Constantia MacAdam understood that these were only the formal names of Jenny, Lizzy, and Tuckie. Polly, it emerged, was a recently-outgrown nickname of Mary’s, sometimes still used by mistake, or to annoy. There seemed to be a Rob or Robbie, too, heard of but never seen; he, however, turned out to be a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, his father’s namesake, who had already returned to his school for the Michaelmas term.

  For the girls, the summer had been a long holiday from lessons. Their adored governess, Mam’selle, had gone to France to visit her ailing mother and was not expected to return before October. Until then, Hopey, the nursery maid, presided alone over most of the rooms on the top floor of the house: day nursery, night nursery, big girls’ rooms, and little girls’ room. Hopey had been with the Chambers family ever since coming as wet nurse to Lizzy and Jenny, nine years before. If she wished, she might have had another nursery maid under her for the summer, to help look after all these children: to bathe them, dress and undress them; induce them to eat their meals and get into and out of their beds at the proper times; take them out to run across the sands and play at the shore; teach them to say “if you please, ma’am” and “thank you, sir,” and the game of checkers; and to adjudicate their near-constant quarrels, grudges, squabbles, contests, disputes, jealousies, and bickerings. But serene Hopey preferred to manage by herself, until Mam’selle should return. An u
ntrained homesick young nursery maid, said Hopey, would be muckle bother and small use; and hadn’t the house lasses enough in it already?

  It was Hopey who had surprised the first wet nurse in the very act of administering Godfrey’s Cordial to the five-week-old baby Charlie. Instantly that wet nurse had been sacked—but how, then, was the baby to be fed? Both cow’s milk and mare’s milk were tried; both sickened him. Mrs Chambers had sent express to every domestic agency in or near Edinburgh, to no avail. Were there no young mothers with milk to spare in all the Lothians? Well, of course there were; but if said young mother must also be of decent character and good repute; and unhabituated to gin or laudanum; and in robust health without venereal or consumptive taint; and willing to come upon the instant to live in the Chambers household; and not already engaged to suckle some other woman’s baby? Mrs Chambers’s unreasonable stipulations narrowed the field to . . . none. It so happened that not even one such young matron could be found just then, at the critical moment of need.

  Mrs Chambers attempted, belatedly, to establish her own milk, but at five weeks after her confinement, it was far too late for that. All her friends told her it would be so.

  But one of these friends—Mrs MacDonald—had another friend staying with her just then, in Edinburgh: a young married woman called Mrs MacAdam. She was a family connection of some years’ standing, whose husband was necessarily at some distance just at present; and, for obscure reasons (obscure to Mrs Chambers, at least), this young wife had deemed it best to come to the MacDonalds in Edinburgh for her first lying-in. It was just as well that she had, for there she had been brought to bed of twins, a boy and a girl. Though Mrs MacAdam’s infant girl thrived, her boy languished; and at thirty-four days of age (on the same day, as it happened, that Mrs Chambers was obliged to sack that first wicked wet nurse) he died, having never pissed in all his brief life.

  “Charlie is our darling, our darling, our darling! Charlie is our darling, our young Chevalier!” Lizzy and Jenny would sing several times each day as they romped along the upstairs corridor, to honour their newest baby brother. Indeed, all the children sang old Jacobite songs: “Will ye No Come Back Again,” or “Johnny Cope,” or “Awa’ Whigs Awa’,” at the top of their lungs. They were a musical family, and they were practicing for a gala occasion: a party to be given by their mother a few weeks hence.

  The general feeling among all these children was amicable enough, but with plenty of the warmth of friction; that warmth amounting, from time to time, to actual heatedness; followed by a natural cooling. Their alliances constantly shifted and then reformed, like the polities of Europe—except for the twins, who were always to be found ranged upon the same side, in any contest or debate.

  In this houseful of merry children, Constantia MacAdam had to herself a small room with a bed, a carpet, a chair, a writing table, and a window. It was separated from the day nursery only by a thin wall of boards, so that at any time she might hear voices through the partition. What a talkative, playful, mirthful clan they were! They reminded Constantia of nothing so much as a litter of tumbling puppies, one scarcely distinguishable from the next—except for Nina, eldest; Tuckie, gravest; the twins, twins; and the little boys, unmistakably boyish, despite their frocks.

  Constantia’s room smelled of milk, both sweet and curdled; and sleep, and babies. Day and night, at intervals of an hour, or two—rarely as long as three hours—Hopey would bring her an infant to be suckled, either Livia or Charlie. The babies were brought in raging with hunger; but when they were taken away again, twenty minutes later, they were soft and sweet with milk.

  Constantia felt the family enfold her, not as servant, but as cherished friend and guest. Whether en famille or in company, Mrs Chambers always welcomed her in drawing room or dining room; but so irregular were the babies’ appetites, and so profoundly fatigued was Constantia that Mrs Chambers urged her to order her meals brought up to her room whenever she liked. The food was good, plain, abundant and nourishing: mutton or beef, squab or chicken, mussel stew or fish, porridge, eggs, custards, bread and butter. There was generally ale or stout too, for the sake of her milk. She had plenty of everything, except sleep.

  Constantia could not stray far from her room and the hungry babies, but each morning and again each afternoon she would take a turn in the garden below the house, whether it rained or shone. This being Scotland, and September, it often rained. She would walk down to the dovecote—the “doocot,” the Scots called it—at the bottom of the garden, where the pigeons, looked after by the gardener, strutted and cooed, and bred as they pleased, and enjoyed the freedom of the sky. Her own pigeon was housed here, too, in a small pen to itself; the sole pigeon which still remained to her of the four she had brought with her from the place where she had been before. It could not be allowed to fly free, lest it fly away home immediately.

  Just beyond the garden wall to northward she could smell the whitecapped Firth of Forth, and sometimes hear the waves. From the attic windows, the beautiful busy water could be seen, between trees. And on clear days, the far shore: Fife.

  It was an existence as placid, as dull, as a cow’s. Her suffering was muffled here, too, as though swaddled in layers of flannel. How curious.

  But her room was just above Mr and Mrs Chambers’s rooms, it seemed. It was not a well-built house, and sometimes she could not help but hear them, in what should have been their private moments. That was deeply disturbing; it raised the nap of her suffering again.

  The baby Charlie had not only an extra finger on each hand, but also an extra toe on each foot. All these supernumerary digits were well-formed and, unless one counted, this unusual abundance, this superfluity, this redundancy, this exuberance of digits might go unnoticed.

  Constantia thought she could discern a puckered reddened place on the plump outside edge of four-year old Jemmie’s right hand, just where an extra finger might have been removed by a surgeon. But there was no such mark on his left hand, nor on Willie’s hands, nor on the hands of any of the girls.

  “I told her this morning that you were expected, and she promised to come down, if she can. And if she cannot—why, we will go up to her instead,” said Mrs Chambers to her friend Mary MacDonald, as they passed from the gusty garden into the bright still orangerie which opened off the drawing room. “Ah! Here is our tea laid ready for us. Is there a more agreeable sight, on a blustery afternoon? I feared that my bonnet had been turned quite inside-out,” she added, untying it and laying it aside undamaged. “Poor Mrs MacAdam! Hopey does what she can to spare her, but I know she gets scant sleep. My young Chevalier does very well with her, and has already gained back the flesh he had lost, and more—though he remains somewhat fractious still. It is the lingering effect of the laudanum he had from that wicked nurse, Dr Moir says; but that, he assures me, should go off quite soon.”

  “You will forgive my saying, once more,” called a woman’s voice promptly, from the adjoining drawing room, “that entirely too much fuss has been made about laudanum.”

  To her friend Mrs MacDonald, Mrs Chambers raised one eyebrow very decidedly—while she called out, “Oh, Lady Janet! Are you there? I did not know. Will you come and drink a cup of tea with Mrs MacDonald and me?”

  Lady Janet, a guest who had been staying with the Chambers family for quite long enough, now appeared in the doorway. “You know that I speak plainly, Mrs Chambers,” said she, an elderly woman whose cap was of a pattern which had not been seen for ten years. The cairngorm brooch which fastened her pelerine was, though large, of regrettable shape and colour. “I have used Godfrey’s Cordial myself, from time to time,” she said, “and it has never done me anything but good. Anyone of good character—of a strongly-formed and well-regulated character—may take it without danger. I must say again, Mrs Chambers—it is no pleasure to me to say it, but it is my duty—that you ought not to have sacked that first nurse. You were wrong to act in such haste. I make it a principle, you know, to speak plainly: your family was certainly b
etter off with that modest and sensible nurse in the house than this mysterious hussy, with her French clothes, and the face and figure of—of an actress! A French actress! Or worse!”

  Said Mrs Chambers, “Your ladyship knows more than I of physiognomy, it would seem; for I had supposed that a person’s distinguishing qualities are evidenced by her conduct—not by her face, figure, or dress. I am quite prepared to admit that I have been wrong. No one could pretend that Mrs MacAdam is not exceedingly lovely: the soft speaking eyes! the golden hair! the sweet dimple to her chin! But if these are the infallible signs of base propensities, I can only plead that I have never heard it before.”

  “Oh, but to go by a false name!” said Lady Janet. “If it is by conduct that we are to judge—why, there, surely, is indefensible conduct. To style herself ‘Mrs MacAdam’! Has she never yet told you her husband’s true name?”

  “No, my lady; and I shan’t press her,” said Mrs Chambers, serenely, as she poured out the tea. “This, it seems, must be one of those matters on which we think differently, you and I. You remember my friend Mrs MacDonald?—by whose kind agency Mrs MacAdam came to us, in our time of need.”

  “I trust I see you well, Mrs MacDonald,” said Lady Janet, “and I hope that you do not suffer as I do from these September gales. I do not suppose that you have knowingly brought any wicked person to lodge in our midst; but can you feel quite certain that this ‘Mrs MacAdam’ is in truth an honest married woman?”

  “She is as honest a married woman as I am,” declared Mrs MacDonald stoutly.

  “You will have seen that she wears a ring,” said Mrs Chambers, with a glance at her own wedding ring. Her fingers were ink-smudged, for she had spent the morning as usual at her writing table in the library.

  “Anyone may be clever enough to provide herself with a ring,” said Lady Janet. “But to go by a false name!”