The incessant racket for building works makes it difficult to concentrate.
Through the open window, Tam can see a forest of masts and spars in the East Harbour. The many sails are furled and tangles of rigging & lines fill the spaces like cob-webs. Dockworkers bustle on the quay, unloading tea and sugar, cotton and tobacco.
Closer to his tenement, gangs of Irish navies continue to excavate the new East India Harbour, sinking wooden piles and setting massive blocks where McMillan’s Shipyard stood. Another boatyard succumbed to the appetite for shipping.
On East Stewart Street itself, Tam’s own crew is plastering the interior walls of his new tenement, situated in the gap between his boatyard and his home. Seamen loiter in the still vacant lots on the far side of the street. Saws bite wood in the yard on the corner. Carters pass below the window, feeding the frenzy of building with wood and stone.
Tam closes the window and the glass provides some respite from the noise. He can hear the clock tick where it stands on the mahogany side-board. The kitchen door is open and Sìne is singing in gaelic, forgetting Tam is home.
‘S na horo hi hoireannan
Horo chall eile
‘S na horo hi hoireannan
Helen is out at the school. She is quite the young lady now, learning her graces. She reads and writes, speaks foreign languages, dances, sings. Her mother would be proud of her.
Tam leaves his desk and moves quietly across the room, edging towards the lassie’s song.
‘S na horo hi hoireannan
Horo chall eile
‘S na horo hi hoireannan
The flavours roast meat from last night’s dinner still hang in the air in the lobby. Tam pauses to listen. The lassie is only a few years older than Helen. Tam took her on six months ago, after the previous lassie disappeared – took off one Sunday afternoon without a reference. He needs another woman in the house to see to them. So that Helen is free to attend her lessons.
When her mother was alive, they employed a maid though Helen herself was in the house. He could afford it, she said, and it was appropriate. Women have always outnumbered him. Well….almost.
The latest broadsheets say that the Russian Tzar has fallen out with Bony so Russia and Britain can be friends again. Though who decides that is a question. The mad king in his powdered wig or the vicious prince with his papish mistresses.
‘S na horo hi hoireannan
Horo chall eile
‘S na horo hi hoireannan
Sine sends back remittances to her family in Ardtornich. Bonny lassie. Pinched at the waist. Broad hips. He can hear the rhythmic pulse of kneading: fold and press and fold and press.
The fever that took Helen and wee Katie came off of a Russian ship. The ship had been seized on the Clyde when the Russian’s last changed side. First they were allies and then they were enemies and now they are allies again. And wee Katie was among the hundreds of casualties of that vacillation[i]. Since then, the price of ship-building has risen to £29 a ton.[ii] A skilled man is asking for £1 per week!
Siting the new boatyard on the corner of Sprinkell Street had been a mistake. The idea of fueing a plot of land near to his old yard seemed wise at the time but, as the new harbour gouges out new frontage and the surrounding streets become lined with tenements, there is less and less space to manoeuvre a hull to a slipway once it is off the cradle. For now, there is space enough to negotiate the turn with the lot opposite the yard vacant: but how long will that last?
‘S na horo hi hoireannan
Horo chall eile
‘S na horo hi hoireannan
The kitchen door is ajar. Sìne has her sleeves rolled up and her bodice loosened. A curl of dark hair escapes her linen cap. She is pale and rosy cheeked, dark haired: not blonde like Helen. Helen’s maid abandoned them when Helen and Katie went down with the Russian fever, leaving Tam to tend the both of them through their terrible agues and sweats. Then there was only him. Wee Helen was banished from her mother and sister’s sickroom.
Tam was just getting into his stride with the boats and the buildings when they died. Helen was finally content, furnished this place in the latest style. It is her furniture that haunts him as though she lurks in the mirrors, keeps watch from the armchair in the parlour.
‘S na horo hi hoireannan
Horo…
“Mr Niccol. Tha mi duilich. I didn’t hear you.”
“You were singing.”
“Tha. Yes. Excuse me.”
Her bare forearms stretch straight in front of her, her fingers, dusted with flour, press on the pliant dough on the marble slab. Her back is arched.
“Carry on,” he says.
“What can I do for you, sir?”
“Carry on.”
“Do you want tea? I thought you’d be at the boatyard.”
“The men are coping fine. I came back. Carry on.”
“Miss Niccol is at the school still. I’m not used to this making bread. It’s mostly bannocks back home. If we’re lucky.”
“Jean. Carry on.”
With a shrug, the girl returns to her task. She does not sing. Tam can hear the breath sift between her pretty lips. A trickle of sweat. A blush spreads to her cheeks.
Despite selling the land, money was tight when Helen died. Her spending and his investment in feues depleted his reserves and the new boatyard stood idle because of the fever[iii].
Then, the King banned the trade in slaves from Africa[iv] and Tam thought the whole Atlantic trade would stall and his ambitions with it.
But the sugar and cotton keeps coming, just like the Irish.
Then boats using paddles and a new horizontal steam engine began to haul barges along the new canal that links the Clyde to the Forth: ships indifferent to the wind and tide. The coming of steam power and the end of slaving – not slavery – and peasants like Sìne, thrown off good land – cheap labour getting cheaper.
Risk or opportunity?
She is barefoot and without stockings. She has long toes and the muscles in her feet flex as she folds the dough. Helen’s best pearlware scolds him from the dresser but still the urge is there and Tam steps into it.
Notes
[i] Contagious fever contracted from a Russian prize vessel brought to Greenock in 1806 killed hundreds.
[ii] In 1810 the contract price to build a vessel was £29 per ton. A Greenock shipyard worker at the end of the Napoleonic Wars ( 1810-14) could earn 20/- to 27/- per week.
[iii] When Helen Niccol died Thomas ‘had no money or Estate to divide after satisfying the lawful demands of my Creditors’.