In this excerpt from Should Auld Acquaintance, the wife of poet Robert Burns, Jean Armour, comes to life and asserts her place as more than a footnote in poetic history. Melanie Murray’s biographical Should Auld Acquaintance reveals the historical tale of the talented farmer, a forbidden affair, and the tumultuous life of an 18th-century Scottish woman, who was more than just the wife of the infamous poet and mother of nine of his children.
I kneel on the wet grass beside the moss-encrusted stone that reads The Armour Burial Ground, recalling my first visit to this grave two years ago. Immersed in my sister’s maternal grief, I was doing research for a book about her son’s life and death—a book to help her survive, so tenuous was her hold on life. Reading the inscription on this marker, I couldn’t comprehend how a mother could endure the loss of four children. Jean Armour was just a name then, a shadowy figure subsumed under the identity of her famous husband. Now, out of the obscurity of the past, a complex woman is emerging. And I understand how these deaths would have shaped Jean’s life.
Our losses transform and define us. When I was seventeen, my father’s death shook the entire foundation of my world and propelled me into a premature marriage with an older man. My sister, six years after her son’s death, still has one foot in another realm as she continues to search for her lost boy. The myth of Demeter and Persephone encapsulates the devastation of losing a child. When Hades abducts the daughter of the earth-mother goddess and carries Persephone down to his underworld kingdom, Demeter wanders the world searching for her daughter. She abandons all her divine duties. The rain stops, rivers dry up, crops die. The earth becomes a barren wasteland.
Jean lost everything—her children, her home, her family. Surviving physically and monetarily was as much at stake for her as mustering the will to carry on. So the crucial decision she has to make at this juncture in her life, I realize, was wrought by the tiny bones buried beneath this cracked slab of stone.
* * *
The day after her recovery, Jean wobbles to the window and turns the crank to let in the breeze wafting fragrant with spring. Larks chirrup and flit about with strings of grass draggling from their beaks. In the kirkyard, the ash is unfolding its first leaves. Red and yellow primroses speckle the grass. Two mounds of freshly dug earth bulge on either side of Jeanie’s grave. White coffins for cradles. The endless loop of questions replays over and over in her mind. Why? Was it all the fear and worry she’d fed them for nine months? Was it Rab pushing inside her? Those iron tongs gripping that soft head? Maybe malicious fairies or the evil eye. She’d placed the Bible and an open pair of scissors under her pillow. But Dr. Mackenzie didn’t heed the same after-birth customs as the midwives, claiming they were fey nonsense, old wives’ tales.
Her chest aches as if a weight is pressing on it. She gasps for air and collapses onto the floor. All that’s transpired in the last year and a half seems too much to carry: birthing four babies and burying three in the past five months. Her son, her only living child, a stranger to her. Bobbie’s face shines before her like a beacon across a dark sea. It pulls her up from her knees as she pledges, I will find a way.
That afternoon Nelly arrives with a basket of fresh linens. She washes her sister’s stringy hair and rinses it in water infused with hawthorn buds. Changing into a clean shift, Jean notices the pearly scars of stretch marks streaking her shrunken belly and sagging breasts. Her illness melted the pounds from her; a gaunt, sallow face looks back at her from the glass.
“The roses will soon be back in your cheeks,” Nelly says, brushing Jean’s long black hair. “You’ll be bonnie as ever.” She sets a pot of hotchpotch to heat on the gridiron. “Eat hearty and sleep well,” she says, pecking Jean’s cheek. “Until tomorrow then.”
Jean drops into the chair and stares out the window at the pink and mauve streaks left by the setting sun. What now? she wonders. Her rent is paid until the end of the month. Returning to James Armour’s house is out of the question. Two weeks to find work, or a husband. Marriage is the only way to get her son back. Would Robin still be waiting?
A soft knock on the door. Jean knows the voice that calls her name, but does not reply. The door edges open. “Please, can I come in?”
She sits silent, eyes unmoving, as if turned to stone.
Rab kneels by her chair and tilts her head up to look at him. “When I learned about our babies… and you… almost… The load of care has been too heavy for my shoulders. I realize how I’ve wronged you. That I do love you. Forgive me, Jean.”
“Bastard,” she yells, pounding her fists against his back. “Is this what it takes?”
He grabs her hands and pleads, “I can make it up to you. If you’ll let me.”
“Can you raise the dead?”
“Nae. But I can provide for the living. Make a home for you and Bobbie.”
“And where would that be?”
“There’s a farm in Ellisland, near Dumfries. A hundred and seventy acres on the River Nith.” His eyes glow as he describes it. “As sweet a poetic ground as I’ve ever seen.”
“But is it good farming ground?”
He nods. “An old farmer-friend of my father’s, John Tennant, surveyed it with me. I’ve spoken with the landlord about taking out a lease. The old house is falling into ruins. But he’d put up the money to build a new one.”
“You want to be a farmer?”
“Tis the only way I know to support a family. I was bred to the plough, yoked to it at nine years old. I’ve learned a lot from working the land at Mossgiel.”
“And your grass widow in Edinburgh?” she says, meeting his eyes. “Is it all over with her?”
“Ay. Mrs. McLehose will never seek a divorce. Religion has her in its shackles. As good as a chastity belt.”
“Her maid-servant satisfied your other needs?”
He puts his hand to his forehead and slowly draws his fingers down over his face. “My wild days would be over if you marry me, Jean. I promise.”
She studies his eyes, unblinking. She wants to believe him. She wants to trust him. They would have a fresh start, away from the scrutinizing stare of the village and the kirk, far away from her father. And Bobbie—she’d have her son.
“Could you be a farmer’s wife, Jean?”
She shakes her head.
“That won’t do.”
Rab raises his thick eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“Surely, Poet Burns, you can come up with a more romantic proposal than that.”
Grinning, he looks up into the air and closes his eyes. A minute later he tells her that the words are from an old song, one he’s been revising for Johnson’s book. He gets down on one knee and takes her hand. His voice is rather harsh and off-key, as usual, but he sings the lines with so much feeling:
As fair art thou my bonie lass,
So deep in love am I,
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun!
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.
Jean cups his face in her hands. The grooves in his wide forehead are too deeply etched for his twenty-nine years. She strokes his bristly sideburns. “If you write verses like that, but let me sing them,” she says, touching his lips with her fingertips, “then a farmer’s wife I’ll be.”
Should Auld Acquaintance: Discovering the Woman Behind Robert Burns by Melanie Murray is published by Nightwood Editions (January 2017).
Melanie Murray is a professor of literature, composition and creative writing at Okanagan College in Kelowna, BC. She holds a BA, BEd and MA in English, and a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing. Her previous book, For Your Tomorrow: The Way of an Unlikely Soldier, was published by Random House in 2011.