The Ninth Child

by Sally Magnusson

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

A spell-binding novel combining Scottish folklore with hidden history, by the Sunday Times best-selling author Sally Magnusson.

Loch Katrine waterworks, 1856. A Highland wilderness fast becoming an industrial wasteland. No place for a lady.

Isabel Aird is aghast when her husband is appointed doctor to an extraordinary waterworks being built miles from the city. But Isabel, denied the motherhood role that is expected of her by a succession of miscarriages, finds unexpected consolations in a place where she can feel the presence of her unborn children and begin to work out what her life in Victorian society is for.

The hills echo with the gunpowder blasts of hundreds of navvies tunnelling day and night to bring clean water to diseased Glasgow 30 miles away —digging so deep that there are those who worry they are disturbing the land of faery itself. Here, just inside the Highland line, the membrane between the modern world and the ancient unseen places is very thin.

With new life quickening within her again, Isabel can only wait. But a darker presence has also emerged from the gunpowder smoke. And he is waiting, too.

Inspired by the mysterious death of the 17th-century minister Robert Kirke and set in a pivotal era two centuries later when engineering innovation flourished but women did not, The Ninth Child blends folklore with historical realism in a spell-binding narrative.

Publisher: John Murray Press

Print pages: 336

Sample

Reverend Robert Kirke was an Episcopalian minister whose tolerant views and scholarly achievements have been eclipsed by the legend that curled itself around him after his death. The book written just before he died and published posthumously, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, takes the supernatural beliefs of the Celts unusually seriously for a churchman – so seriously, in fact, that it was put about that while out walking near his manse on Doon Hill in Aberfoyle on the evening of his sudden death in May 1692, Kirke was snatched away to faery himself as a punishment for meddling. It is rather poignant that this humane, thoughtful, curious man, whose inscription of ‘Love and Life’ can be seen on the bell that hangs to this day inside Balquhidder church, should be remembered only as the central figure in a fairytale.

Of course, mea culpa, I have now added to the burden of legend on Robert Kirke by inventing another. My guilt will be considerably assuaged if everyone who reads this immediately rushes off to find out more about a fascinating man. (And I might as well admit here and now that he had a second wife, Margaret, the first cousin of his Isabel, for whom the constraints of plot left no room.)

As far as the legend is concerned, I’ve taken quite a few liberties with the one reported and popularised by Sir Walter Scott and would urge anyone interested in the authorised version to read his full account in Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which is readily available online. My own interest was in using fairytale to explore the notion of psychological duality, a familiar trope in Scottish literature, not least in the fiction of Scott’s contemporary, James Hogg.

Anyone who ventures up Aberfoyle’s Doon Hill today will discover a great pine at the top hung with ribbons and messages from those who continue to take the news of Kirke’s captivity to heart. In the ancient churchyard nearby his prominent gravestone is also much visited. On it, along with a pastor’s crook and a Scots thistle, has been carved the unmistakeable outline of a dagger. This stone is assumed to have been laid over the grave some time after his death and to refer, startlingly for a Christian memorial, to Kirke’s alleged entanglement with the iron-phobic fairies in the fashion recounted by Scott.

Centuries of fun with the so-called ‘Fairy Minister’ have eclipsed the beliefs and scholarship of the real Robert Kirke. (His name is found with and without a final ‘e’ in the sources, but Walter Scott and the Balquhidder bell opted for the former.) In the novel I’ve tried to reflect these with reasonable accuracy. In her excellent introduction to the 2007 New York Review of Books edition of The Secret Commonwealth, Marina Warner argues that Kirke’s ministry, his learning and his temperament took him in a different direction from his seventeenth-century contemporaries ‘towards a benign and tolerant delight in the breadth of human understanding, imaginings, and possibility’. Kirke’s notebooks, which can be viewed in the National Library of Scotland, also attest to what Warner calls the ‘spirit of active wonder’ that connects Kirke to us today.

Edinburgh-born William John Macquorn Rankine, a genial polymath of eye-wateringly wide interests, is another figure whose achievements are largely forgotten. Rankine was a scientist, both theoretical and applied, a pioneer of thermodynamics, a mathematician, engineer, musician, composer of light verse, captain of the volunteer riflemen who formed Queen Victoria’s guard of honour at Loch Katrine, academic teacher and much else. He was known for his enthusiasm, courtesy, warmth, lack of vanity and generosity in helping friends with their own writing while monstrously busy with his own. I am wholly responsible for the sentiments ascribed to him here, but hope to have caught something of his engaging personality. The selected stanzas from ‘A Mathematician in Love’ are taken from a volume of his Songs and Fables, published posthumously in 1874 and accessible online.

In October 1859 a great deal of newsprint was devoted to the opening of the Corporation of Glasgow Water Works by Victoria and Albert. I am sorry to have found no evidence of a story doing the rounds today (and faithfully imparted to tourists) that a particularly exuberant twenty-one-gun salute shattered the windows of Royal Cottage during the ceremony, thus preventing the royal couple from staying the night as planned. Despite the rain and the ample provision of bedrooms, however, the royal party was always due to return to Edinburgh that afternoon: the timetable had been agreed weeks earlier. If anyone has evidence to the contrary, do let me know.

Victoria’s diaries, available online at queenvictoriasjournals.org, provide an abundant and delightfully readable insight into their marriage and the restorative effect of their Balmoral home, where they welcomed Florence Nightingale warmly in September 1856. Intriguingly Prince Albert, whose stomach was increasingly bothering him in the last years of his life, did once bury a seltzer bottle at Balmoral with a message inside. He died in December 1861 at the age of just forty-two, to be mourned by Victoria for the rest of her long life.

By the second half of the 1850s Florence Nightingale was already well on her way to being sanctified as a ministering angel, the devoted ‘Lady with the Lamp’. Her efforts in the Crimea were followed by Notes on Nursing, an unprecedented compendium of practical advice which challenged the ignorance and prejudice of contemporary attitudes. Less well known are her denunciations of the arid, idle lives that upper- and middle-class women of the time were expected to live. In her angry essay ‘Cassandra’, penned in 1852 although not published until years later, Nightingale inveighs against the amount of time that ladies were expected to devote to keeping a pretty house, ordering the dinner, sending pheasants and apples to poor relations and driving out in the carriage – time that could be poured into work if only it were allowed. She describes sitting among a company of ladies and listening to them reading aloud as ‘like lying on one’s back with one’s hands tied, having liquid poured down one’s throat’.

Agnes Lister, wife of the famous pioneer of antiseptic surgery, was one woman who did secure herself a role, if largely out of sight, beyond the domestic. She deserves more notice for the work she undertook at the side of Joseph Lister (no great supporter of the advancement of women in general) as amanuensis and laboratory partner.

The Loch Katrine waterworks was one of the most ambitious civil engineering schemes in Europe since antiquity, employing the most advanced surveying and construction techniques of the age. To keep up with the consumption of Glasgow’s expanding population and industries, a second tunnel and aqueduct system was begun in 1885 at the side of the first, which was completed in 1896. Both still serve the city of Glasgow and its surroundings with Loch Katrine water, which rushes into twin tunnels through adjacent sluices at Royal Cottage. These are now – like many of the novel’s locations – at the heart of the gorgeous Loch Lomond and the Trossachs national park, in which many works of Victorian engineering can still be admired. The fairy place names still give the whole area a marked sense of the clash (or synthesis perhaps) of modern progress and ancient traditions.

The idea for the novel’s denouement came from an intriguing sentence in the Glasgow Herald of 15 October 1859, reporting on the inauguration ceremony the previous day: ‘No sooner had [Queen Victoria] left than two navvies, dressed as if in the holiday garb of a London waterman, embarked in a shallow flat-bottomed boat, and accompanied by a young gentleman whose name we have not heard, set out on a voyage of discovery down the tunnel. Where they emerged and what they saw, we have not yet learned.’

Nor have I, but I hope they came to no harm.

Alexander should have warned her. Explosions, Issy, he might have said. Puddles, he could have mentioned. Grass of a less manicured variety than the Botanic Gardens, pronounced absence of paths wider than your dress – a hint would have been helpful.

Had he warned her? This morning’s compliment on the strawberry bonnet had been, on reflection, a shade less than sincere, but no, nothing had been said. She would have paid attention to that much.

Isabel sank majestically on to a hummock of grass, which is the only way a descent from the upright can be accomplished in a crinoline, and looked around. There were men everywhere: navvies distinguishable by their gay neckerchiefs and hobnail boots sauntering about with armfuls of ironmongery or leading the most enormous horses along the shore; gentlemen guests whooping themselves hoarse around a vast Corporation of Glasgow banner, each boom accompanied by a frenzied waving of hats. By now Alexander would probably be hollering right along with them.

As the only lady for miles and certainly the only woman braving the wilds today in a hooped lilac gown and a bonnet nodding with silken fruit, Isabel had been attracting so much attention that she barely noticed the other figure staring at her from a clump of bright trees. She might not have registered him at all – black coat, something white at the neck, no hat of any kind – if she had not been so struck by the man’s eyes, which burned through the faint gunpowder haze with a peculiar energy.

‘Hungry’ is how she would describe the look afterwards.

‘Poor fellow,’ her husband would murmur. ‘We need to find him work.’ Alexander was not easily engaged with a metaphor.

The man was quickly gone, and Isabel, hot and disgruntled in her billow of skirts, had no more inkling of peril than a twinge of anxiety for her strawberries. There was certainly nothing to alert her that here on the banks of hidden Loch Chon was a beginning. Or that this sunny May morning would ever remain for her a kind of ending, too.

‘Engineers,’ Isabel had roused herself to protest as the brougham clattered them through the frosty streets of Glasgow that January of 1856. ‘Alex, they’ll all be engineers.’

She frowned through the front glass at the inoffensive back of the driver hunched over the reins for warmth; his dark coat glistened with spent snow.

At her side Alexander was sitting as stiffly in his black tails as a man will who is more comfortable in a blood-grimed apron with a knife between his teeth; a man, moreover, who is beginning to have doubts about tonight’s plan.

In truth Isabel’s reluctance to attend Professor Rankine’s supper party had little to do with their host being one of the country’s leading engineers. Nor was it solely because she had never been a natural in any drawing room, although that was part of it. ‘Oh, Isabel, will you not try harder to dazzle?’ her mother had used to plead, palpitating with anxiety that her only daughter’s too easily furrowed brow and barely disguised preference for her own company were never going to snare a husband. It was a fear that had persisted until the day that Mrs Sarah Gillies, hosting a soirée herself of the tepidly polite kind Isabel most disdained, collared from among the guests a cheerful young medical man with distressingly gingery whiskers but good income prospects. ‘Come out from behind the curtain, Isabel, and let me introduce you to the dashing Dr Aird,’ she had commanded, stretching the point: never in her life had Mrs Gillies seen so many freckles. Alexander had winkled Isabel from the window seat, made her laugh with a dry commentary on her cousin Josephine’s erratic interpretation of the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ and then engaged her attention for the rest of the evening with the latest trends in surgery. He had understood Isabel’s social reserve from the first, appreciating the unfocused intelligence underneath it, sensing both an impatience and an insecurity with the subjects a lady was expected to enjoy discussing. He had envisaged a marriage full of lively conversations about the things that mattered to him and a social life in which they would signal their private reactions across the room and chuckle all the way home.

Alexander cast his wife a sideways glance and blew out his cheeks in a surreptitious sigh. These days Isabel was too listless to want to go anywhere and getting her this far tonight had been a struggle further than he normally ventured. Nor was the subject he intended to air likely to occasion gales of merriment on the journey home.

‘You will have no need to talk to any engineers,’ he returned with a strained grin. ‘You’ll be whisked away by some matron in black to discuss preserves, while I offer my thoughts on Rankine’s mathematical analysis of the cooling of the earth and take the opportunity of correcting his latest theories on heat and steam.’

Isabel laughed. He could still disarm her. ‘Fraud! You no more understand the action of a piston than I care about the boiling point of jam.’

He smiled more easily and slipped an arm around her. ‘Our host is an excellent fellow, Issy, although his brilliance might trouble me if I thought about it too long. He’s designed harbours, waterworks, railways and heaven knows what else. I’m fairly sure he’s even got a Rankine’s Method to his name – something to do with railway curves. And he composes songs. And plays the cello.’

‘Well, that should enliven the evening at least,’ she said, reflecting that her husband had probably been fretting about this man’s accomplishments longer than he liked to admit. William Macquorn Rankine was in his thirties too.

Alexander looked vaguely out of the window. ‘Anyway, there’s something I want to ask him.’

Macquorn Rankine, all amused eyebrows and rioting curls, succeeded in frustrating the worst of Isabel’s expectations by proving to be an entertaining host. He regaled the company with his own ridiculous ditties to such repeated acclaim that Alexander had to wait until he rose from the pianoforte and made for his pipe before waylaying him with the subject on his mind. To his wife’s chagrin the subject on Alexander’s mind proved to be Glasgow’s waterworks project.

Water. Alex had inveigled her here to talk about water?

The engineer responded with enthusiasm – indeed with such alarming enthusiasm that Isabel feared they were in for a night of it. He expounded at length on why Loch Katrine was a better solution to Glasgow’s water problem than any competing source, of which, as everyone knew (an expansive flourish of his pipe was kind enough to include Isabel, who nodded as if she did), there had been many. He had tramped the Trossachs area himself, taking measurements to compare Katrine with arch-rival Loch Lubnaig to the east. Both lakes would require extraordinarily difficult tunnelling – ‘Gneiss, Mrs Aird. And mica slate. Both devilish hard’ – but Katrine’s tunnel through a fairly narrow ridge and around Loch Chon would have the merit of being shorter.

‘Loch What?’ she murmured. Isabel had heard of Loch Katrine – had not every reader in the land? – but here was a new one.

Rankine obliged with a grandiloquent roll of the throat.

‘Chon, my dear lady. Chon. It’s a Gaelic word, like so many of the place names out there. You aim for Hon with the ch of “loch” and out it comes.’ He repeated the performance of a man attempting to dislodge a fishbone. ‘Dog Loch, in English.’

Isabel smiled her thanks. Why dog? she would have liked to ask. But Rankine was already back on course.

‘The purity of the water in those parts is quite unparalleled. It’s because the rock is so impenetrable, ye see, and the area so little cultivated. No moss. Traces of potash, soda, some iron. Bit of lead that caused us problems in Parliament right enough, but really you couldn’t find a better source of water.’

It was around this point that it occurred to Isabel that a woman may tire of water.

Perhaps sensing it, Rankine remembered his manners and turned to Alexander. ‘May I ask why you’re interested, Dr Aird?’

Yes, Alex. Pray explain.

Alexander looked quickly at his wife and back again. He should have thought of trying to divert her towards the doughty dowager holding forth on a nearby chaise longue on a subject that sounded as if it might be gloves. Too late. He hesitated a moment. Then, flushing red as his hair, he ploughed on.

‘Because I feel I’m wasting my skills, sir. I have a house in Bath Street – the fashionable end, as my mother-in-law would doubtless have you know – and a decent enough income from phlegm and constipation.’ Isabel registered the querulous note from a man whose exuberance in medical matters had tended to the puppyish when they first met. And what possessed him to bring her mother into this? ‘And my training allows for some dining-table surgery for those who can afford it. But this in a city that had near four thousand perish from cholera last time, and as many the time before.’

Isabel stared at her husband with mounting consternation as he warmed to his theme.

‘And you know where they died, sir? Of course you do. Not all, of course, but most of them were in the stinking wynds that us in this room do our best to keep away from. Does it not shame us that in no other civilised country in the world is so large an amount of filth and misery and disease in one spot as Glasgow?’

Was this what had been preoccupying Alexander behind his newspaper, then? Was it among these hideous places that he walked when he was on his own? Isabel was not sure she had ever been down a wynd, stinking or otherwise, although the streets in their part of town could certainly be better swept: sometimes Annie had to scrub her hem for an hour. She knew about cholera, of course. Panic erupted across the city every few years and last time, now she thought about it, Alex had been miserable at his inability to treat it. But the disease had never arrived at their own front door, and behind it she had been nursing miseries of her own.

‘It’s practically certain,’ he was saying now, ‘that contaminated water plays a part in the progress of cholera.’

Isabel tried to remember if he had mentioned such a thing before. There was a time when she would have been the first to hear it from him. There was a time when she would have paid attention. She watched as he leaned earnestly towards the professor, his eyes alight with the old eagerness.

‘You know what it’s like, Rankine. The High Street, the Gallowgate, the Saltmarket – all those thousands of folk crammed into filthy tenements – there are such horrors there as the better off among us never see.’ He shot another glance at his wife. ‘Dunghills that reach as high as some folk’s first-floor windows. Pigs wandering the vennels. Wells taking drinking water from the Clyde where it’s no better than an open sewer.’

Pigs? There were certainly no pigs in Bath Street.

Macquorn Rankine nodded so vigorously that his dark curls shook. ‘Aye, I know, I know. None better. Your husband will have told you that I teach at the university in the High Street, Mrs Aird, amid such sights and smells as would shock you. As soon as another epidemic hoves into view, the newspapers shout blue murder and the orders go out for whitewashing and scrubbing. Down go the dunghills, out with the swine. But once that epidemic is past, what happens? It’s the job of all-merciful Providence to spare everyone another visitation – not the ratepayers. That’s what those of us who wanted to bring pure water from the Highlands were up against. Quite a battle the Glasgow Corporation had of it in Parliament, not to. . .