But anyhow that life – that delicate new life I was fleshing out for myself as a newly-wed – came crashing to a halt one afternoon. Spencer had been down at the Mussel Inn again. I was paying Ma and Da a visit when a man came running up to our cottage, saying a press gang had burst into the inn and dragged three men away, and one of them was Patrick Spencer.

A press gang. Navy men.

Spencer was gone. Vanished. Taken off to sea.

Chapter Eight

Musselburgh
January 1724

The thing about the sea is that oftentimes there is no body to bury when it claims a soul. A drowned sailor will sink to the bottom of the great abyss. St Michael’s Kirk has seen many a coffinless funeral. But at least there is a finality in death. When the press gang took Spencer, I did not know whether I would ever see him again. Da said the news was that he and two merchant sailors had been taken by members of the Royal Navy Impress Service, who had burst into the downstairs ale room and told everyone to stay in their chairs and not dare to make a run for the door. When they had made their way to Spencer, he had tried to bribe them to leave him be, but these brutes had refused the bribe and warned him that the punishment for not going with them was hanging. They had rowed him off to Leith Port, where the Navy ship was docked. Not even allowed to say goodbye.

The week that followed was terrible. Hours ached on and on, and night rolled into day and into night again, none of it with news. At first I sat in our lodgings and waited for Spencer to walk through the door. I say ‘sat’, but I slumped on the good chair and lolled on the bed in great despair. I had never felt as bleak. I couldn’t eat or sleep, and I finished the rum and would sit in the small hours of the night imagining him rolling at the bottom of the ocean or whipped by a merciless captain or, worse, whoring in a far-off port. It was the worst of the winter. I imagined ice storms and frozen lands. Ma, Da and Joan came and went with pots of soup and tried to keep my spirits up with tales of pressed men who’d returned.

Da was rattled to the core by it all.

‘He’ll be back in a few months,’ he would say, over and over again, for he hardly knew what else to say. ‘He’ll find a way. He’s a bit of a chancer, Spencer, and that’s what’ll work for him.’