Heaven Knows Who Read Free

affable to her husband also, and on two occasions at least there are accounts of James M’Lachlan going round with his wife to Sandyford Place and having a drink with the old man—though of course in the basement, with Jess. The Fleming family were at this time on the way up socially; and it may well be that the grandfather, who had started life as a hand-loom weaver, was more easy in the company of these humble people than his son and his grandson would have been. On the other hand, he was considered a little eccentric, and one of his oddities may have lain in this disposition to be friendly with their domestic staff.
    On Friday night, July 4, 1862, Jessie had arranged to go round to Sandyford Place and see her friend. They met very frequently: they were as affectionate and easily intimate as two devoted sisters. Jess M’Pherson earned about fourteen pounds a year, but she had her keep above that, and she was always kind and generous to poor ailing and harassed Jessie. She was always giving her thingsthat ‘she would require to buy for herself straight after’; and once when a friend suggested that she should summon Jessie for money still owing for goods from her grocery shop she said ‘never to heed, for Jessie had been to great expense on account of her illness and she’d pay when she got better.’ Jess had stayed three weeks with the M’Lachlans at the time she opened her shop with no question of payment between them; and on one occasion—it would doubtless be while she was working on her own—when she couldn’t pay her baker’s bill, Jessie had pawned some clothes and her husband’s watch to help her; it can’t have been much of a watch, the whole bill was four shillings. Jess, spent much of her meagre off time at the Broomielaw, and Jessie was always in and out of the basement at Sandyford Place. She knew it well, of course; she had lived there herself for two years, and many an evening, especially when the family were away and Jess therefore not so busy, she would go round and spend an hour talking over old times, confiding her own troubles and listening to Jess’s complaints about the old gentleman.
    For the joke about Grandpa courting Jess was now growing exceedingly thin. Jess herself had never for one instant entertained the idea, the whole thing had at first amused and now disgusted her; but James Fleming was apparently quite serious, and had been for a long time, and was becoming worse than a nuisance. He half lived in the kitchen and, in her own word, ‘tormented’ her with his attentions. Only a week before she died, when she was walking in the street, a friend, a Mrs Smith, had met her and thought her looking ill and depressed. She confessed that she was both. ‘You don’t know how I’m situated; I have a miserable life of it.’ She couldn’t get rid of the old man, she said, he made excuses to come down to the basement with the newspapers or ‘to make up the sugar and tea’, and she couldn’t be bothered with him any longer; it was making her ill. It wasn’t so bad when the family was at home, but as soon as they left her alone with him it was misery. He wouldn’t let her out of his sight, no one else was allowed into the house, and sooner than let her run round and buy so much as a cabbage he’d go out and get it himself. And she burst out suddenly and violently that he was an old wretch and an old devil.… ‘Why, what has he done to you?’ asked Mrs Smith, horrified and curious. But Jess wouldn’t tell. That there was something to tell she did not conceal, but she couldn’t speak of itin front of Mrs Smith’s husband. She promised to come round the following Sunday and confide it all to her, over a cup of tea.

    Several people testified later to the same sort of thing. Though half a dozen ex-servants were found to say they had never seen any signs in the old gentleman of