Chapter III: The Death Feud

Then pale, pale grew her tearfu' cheek,
"Let ane o' my sons three
Alane guide this emprise, your eild
May ill sic travel dree!
O where were I, were my dear lord,
And a' my sons to bleed;
Better to brook the wrong, than sae
To wreck the high misdeed."
_Hardyknute._

Several days passed; and though the ship had certainly come from France, and lay near the Beacon Rock, with all her sails furled, there came no tidings of the widow's son. Horsemen rode east, and horsemen rode west; the burly Roger of Westmains wore himself almost to a shadow, and every steed in the stables was completely knocked up; but no trace of Florence Fawside had been discovered, from the time he left the barge of M. de Villegaignon, at the old wooden pier of Leith. And now, with the reader's permission, we will go back a little in our story.

The Fawsides of that ilk were neither powerful nor wealthy, and their purses bore no proportion to their pride or their pedigree; but they were landed barons of good repute, who took (or gave, which matters not) their name from their own property, bringing thence in time of war or tumult forty armed men to the king's host. Faithful and true in times of treason and invasion, this fine old race had never failed the Scottish crown; but a deadly, bitter, and inextinguishable feud, one of those hereditary and transmitted hatreds peculiar to some Scottish families, existed between them and the Hamiltons of Preston, whose lofty baronial tower stands about three miles distant from Fawside Hill.

William of Fawside served under David I., in his war against Stephen of England, and saved his life at the Battle of Northallerton. For this service he received, that night, a charter written on the head of a kettle-drum, the only piece of parchment which the Chancellor, Bishop Engelram, had at hand, and it is remarkable for a laconic simplicity peculiar alike to the age and country:--

"_David Dei Gratiæ Rex Scottorum_, to all his people greeting. Know ye that I have granted unto William, son of Adam, son of John of Fawside, the right of pasturage on Gladsmuir, in perpetual gift, until the Day of Doom."

Now, in future years, long after the saintly David and the mailed knight who fought by his stirrup at Northallerton had been gathered to their fathers, there sprang up the Hamiltons, whose tower of Preston was adjacent to this muir or waste land; and the charter of the Fawsides was deemed sufficiently vague to make them claim the right of having the pasturage in common. Scotsmen required little excuse for unsheathing the sword in those sturdy old times; and hence, about this miserable tract of ground, which was covered with broom, whin, heather, and huge black boulder-stones, the rival barons quarrelled and fought from generation to generation, carrying their cause of feud even to the foot of the throne. More than once, in the time of James IV., Fawside and Preston, with their armed followers, had fought a desperate combat at the Market-cross of Edinburgh, and been forcibly expelled by the citizens, led by their provost, Sir Richard Lawson, of Boghall and Highrigs, who perished at Flodden. Again and again, they had been forfeited by the Parliament, outlawed by the King, and excommunicated by the Abbot of Holyrood; but each maintained himself in his strong old tower, and seemed never a whit the worse.

When the Court of Session was established by James V., their dispute "anent meithes and marches" was brought forward, and their case was the first on the roll; but during its discussion (which sorely puzzled lawyers who were unable to sign their names) they so beset the lords with fire and sword on the highway and in their own residences, each threatening to cut off all who were friendly to the other, that the plea was indignantly thrust aside, and they were left to settle it by the old Scottish arbiter of justice, the broadsword.

They were the terror of East Lothian; they fought whenever they met, and each houghed, killed, or captured the sheep and cattle of the other, whenever they were found straying upon the disputed territory.

About twenty years before the period of our story, Sir John Fawside and Claude Hamilton of Preston (both of whom had fought valiantly at Flodden, and rendered each other good service in that disastrous field), accompanied by several gentlemen, their friends, at the particular request of the good King James V.--the King of the Commons and Father of the Poor, as he loved to style himself,--met on Gladsmuir, with the solemn intention of peacefully adjusting the long-vexed question of their boundaries, and setting march-stones upon the common. They were attended by certain learned notaries, who had been duly examined and certified by the bishop of their diocese, "as being men of faith, gude fame, science, and law;" but the tedium and technicalities of these legal pundits proved too dreary for such "stoute and prettie men," as an old diarist terms our two feudatories; and, in short, Sir John and Hamilton soon came to high words. In the dispute, Roger of Westmains closed up beside his leader, and on drawing his sword, received a stroke from the truncheon of an adversary. Roger ran him through the body, and on the instant all came to blows in wild _melée_. Every sword was out of its scabbard, every hand uplifted, and every tongue shouting taunts and the adverse cries of--

"A Hamilton! a Hamilton!"

"Fawside--'Forth and fear nocht!'"

The notaries tucked up the skirts of their long black gowns, and fled, while the clash of swords continued on the grassy common, where many a horse and man went down; but the Hamiltons proved the most powerful, being assisted by the vassals of their kinsman, the Earl of Yarrow. Fawside was slain, and all his followers were routed, and pursued by the exulting victors up the grassy brae to the gates of the tower, on the iron bars of which the Hamiltons struck with their sword-blades, in token of triumph and contempt.

When the brave Sir John fell, his neighbours were uncharitable enough to regret that he had not (before his departure) given Preston a mortal wound; as all deemed it a pity that two such fiery and restless spirits should be separated for a time, even by the barriers of the other world. Denuded of his knightly belt and sword, Sir John's body was found among the green whins upon the moor, and was buried in the church of Tranent, where a tablet in the north wall _still_ bears his arms, surmounted by a helmet, and inscribed simply,--

"John Fawside of that Ilk."

Three bullets fired from calivers were found in his body. His widow had these carefully extracted, with the intention of returning them to Claude Hamilton with terrible interest; and thrice she dipped the dead man's dagger in the blood that oozed from his wounds, with the hope that, in a future time, her oldest boy might cleanse the blade in the blood of the slayer.

Dame Alison was a fierce and stern woman, "animated by such terrible passions as the heroines of the middle ages alone possessed." The partner and partaker of all her husband's ideas, his rights and wrongs--real or imaginary,--she now became inspired by one prevailing thought, and one only--_revenge_;--and so absorbed was she by this devouring passion, that nothing in this world seemed to possess the least interest or value, unless it might feed this demon, or further the terrible object she had in view. Secluded in her gloomy tower, with her two sons, William and Florence at her knee, she told them a thousand times the dark, bloody story of the old hereditary feud and hate--of their father's fall, and how, when tall men and strong soldiers, they must avenge it, by slaying him who proved his destroyer in time of truce and tryst--slaying him as they would a wolf in his den, or a serpent in his lair. And as she poured these wild incentives to future bloodshed into their boyish ears, she would point to where the tower of Preston reared its tall grim outline between them and the sea, and say such things as such a mother, living in that wild age and warlike land, alone could say, till the little impulsive hearts of the boys panted like her own, in anticipation of the hour that would lay Hamilton at their feet, and avenge that day's slaughter on Gladsmuir and Fawside brae.

She gave each one of the bullets found in her husband's corpse; the third she reserved and wore at her neck, with the intention that if her sons' hands failed her when they grew to manhood, she had still one left for vengeance in her own.

She would have appealed to the king; but the house of Hamilton was then in the zenith of its power, and complaints against one of a sept so numerous could find no echo at Falkland or at Holyrood; and so the years passed on.

Because Sir John had died unconfessed, and had been suspected of Lollardy, the Vicar of Tranent had at first refused him Church rites. For this affront, the stern dame denied him the corse-presents exacted then by the priests, and until the Reformation, in 1559--to wit, the best cow of the deceased; the _umest-claith_, or uppermost covering on the bed whereon he lay, together with the silver commonly called _Kirk-richts_; and farther, she threatened to send Westmains with a troop of horse, to burn both kirk and vicarage about the ears of his reverence.

Yearly, on the anniversary of her husband's fall, she went, with hair dishevelled, feet bare, and a taper in her hand, to hear mass said for his soul, in the church of Tranent; and after the service, with an irreverence which even the old vicar failed to restrain, she invoked the curses of Heaven on the Hamiltons of Preston. Her sons heard these things; they sank deep into their little hearts, and absorbed all their thoughts.

Often when she prayed at her husband's tomb (it had now become her altar) she imagined that strange sounds came from it; that she heard him chiding her delay in avenging him in this world and joining him in the next; and these morbid fancies fostered yet more her spirit of revenge.

By her injunctions, the gudeman of Westmains left nothing undone to render the boys hardy, stout, and athletic, and expert in the use of weapons of every kind; thus, ere William, the eldest, who possessed great comeliness of face and beauty of person, had reached his twelfth year, he was master of the sword and dagger, the bow and arquebuse; and he could toss a pike, pitch a bar, or handle a quarterstaff with the best man in the barony. His brother Florence had gone to France, as page in the suite of Anne de la Tour de Vendome (the widowed duchess of the regent, John of Albany), who had promised Lady Alison he would return the most accomplished cavalier in Scotland; and, as related, he had now been seven years absent.

Fired by the story which his mother never ceased repeating and enforcing, by touching references to the empty chair which stood unused by the hall fire, to the unused plate that was placed daily on the hall table, to keep alive the memory of the slain man whose rusty arms and mouldering garments were hung in conspicuous places, and to all of which Dame Alison hourly drew the attention of her boys,--fired by the reiteration of all this, one evening, in the autumn of 1541, when Hamilton of Preston had just returned from the battle of Haldenrig, where the army of Henry VIII. had been defeated with considerable slaughter, William Fawside, then in his fourteenth year, without consulting his mother, Father John of Tranent, or his warlike preceptor, old Roger of the Westmains, presented himself at the iron gate of Preston tower, and, while his swelling heart beat high and his smooth cheek flushed crimson with the consciousness of his own audacity, he demanded of the surly and bearded warder admittance to the laird. The servants of the latter narrowly and insolently scrutinized the boy, who bore the arms of his house, _gules_, a fess between three besants, worked in crimson and gold on the breast of his velvet doublet.

"See that he has nae weapon--nae sting aboot him, the young wasp!" said Symon Brodie, the butler, whose name and convivial habits have come down to us in a famous old drinking song.

"They are kittle cattle, the Fawsides," whispered Mungo Tennant, the warder, as they ushered the boy into the high-arched hall, where the grim old laird was reclining asleep in a huge black leather chair, covered by a wolf's-skin, and seated near a fire that blazed on the tiled hearth.

"Bairn!" he exclaimed, with more astonishment than anger, on being wakened, "what want ye of me?"

"My father's sword!" replied young William boldly.

"Your father!--And who was he, my callant?"

"Sir John of Fawside and that ilk----"

"Aha!"

"He whom ye foully slew under tryst, as all in the Lothians know."

The high, stern brow of old Preston grew black as night. He grasped the carved arms of his high-backed chair, and for a moment surveyed the boy with a terrible frown; then, perceiving that he neither quailed nor shrank under this glance, but stoutly paid it back, though his little heart trembled at his temerity, Preston relaxed his ferocity a little, and grimly replied, under his shaggy moustache,

"Ye lie, ye d--d little limmer!--and they who told ye so, foully lie! I slew him, true; but it was in fair fight, and at open feud, as God and all braid Scotland be my judge!"

"Be that as you will, I want his sword; and, betide me weal, betide me woe, I shall have it!"

"His sword?"

"Yes!"

"For what purpose?"

"That ye shall ken anon," replied the boy with flashing eyes and clenched hands.

"Ye have the dour devilish look o' that termagant Kennedy, your mother, in ye, lad. You are the widow's son Willie, I suppose?"

"I am. Your insolent grooms here ken me weel; and better shall they ken me ere this death feud be stanched! But the sword, Claude Hamilton of Preston!--I say, my father's sword!"

"But what want ye with it, loon?"

"To stab you to the heart, when the time comes," responded the fearless boy.

"By my faith! this little devil takes fire like the match of an arquebuse!" growled the tall, grim laird.

"My father's sword, foul riever!" continued Willie, stamping his foot.

Old Preston now laughed outright, for the boy's daring charmed his warlike spirit.

"Though lawful spulzie, taken in combat and under harness, receive the sword, and welcome, bairn," replied Preston, unhooking from the wall one of those long cross-guarded and taper-bladed swords used in the early part of the fifteenth century, and handing it the boy, who trembled with stern exultation as he there kissed the hilt of polished steel. "It was good King James's gift to your father on that bloody morning when first we forgot our quarrel and fought side by side, like brither Scots, on the green slope of Flodden Hill, where our best and bravest were lying on the brae-side thick as the leaves in Carberry Wood. Take the weapon, bairn. Your father was a leal and gallant man--rest him, God! for Scotland had no better,--and I, the man he hated most on earth, avow it; and ill would it become Claude Hamilton to keep the sword of such a father from such a son. Take it, bairn, and welcome; and I pray Heaven that we may meet no more!"

"False carle, we _shall_ meet, and that thou shalt see!" responded the boy, pressing the sword to his breast, while his eyes filled with tears.

Symon Brodie, the butler, here raised his huge hand to smite the boy down, but the laird interposed.

"Beware, fellow!" said he, "and let the bairn alone; yea, and let him speak, too. What have I to fear from a fushionless auld carline and twa halfling laddies?"

"I have been told that you fear not God, although you are a Hamilton; but I will teach you, carle, to fear me!"

"A brave lad!" exclaimed the old laird, with an admiration which he could not repress. "I love to see a lad stand up thus for his father's feud and his family honour. But let this matter end; in twa hunder years and mair we have surely had enough of it! Give me thy hand, Willie o' Fawside, and I will ask pardon for slaying thy father. 'Twas done in hot blood and under harness; and I will even pay unto Mass John of Tranent a hundred French crowns to say funeral services for his soul's repose."

"My hand!"

"Yes, bairn; an auld man asks it of thee."

"Never!" replied William Fawside, shrinking back. "If I gave a hand to thee, my mother would slay me like a cur; and I would well deserve the death. So fare ye well! with a thousand thanks for this fair gift, until--we meet again."

And they did meet, most fatally, five years afterwards.

William Fawside, then in his nineteenth year, was a tall and handsome cavalier, than whom there was none more gay or gallant in costume, manner, or bearing at the court of the Regent Arran, to whom he officiated as Master of the Horse. He was the most graceful dancer on Falkland Green, and there, also, the victor of the ring and butts, with spear and bow; but when he and Claude of Preston, then a man well up in years, confronted each other in the lists under the southern brow of the Castle Rock of Edinburgh, to fight a solemn duel, to which the taunts and open accusations of murder (for so the widow styled her husband's fall on Fawside Brae) had brought him, the young Sir William saw, without pity, that his grey-haired adversary was animated by a reluctance which he was at no pains to conceal, for on many a day of battle his courage had been put to the sternest proof.

Cartels of defiance had been duly exchanged; mass had been said in the chapel of Our Lady in the Portsburgh; and there, in presence of the assembled citizens of Edinburgh, whose provost, William Craik, appeared on horseback in complete armour, and before a chair, in which sat George Earl of Errol, hereditary lord high constable of Scotland, as vicar-general to the infant queen, wearing on his surcoat the three shields of his house, in a field _argent_, and within a listed space, sixty paces long and forty broad, stood the young and resolute challenger, on foot, at the eastern end, and Preston at the western, all according to the custom of judicial combats. Each was in full armour of unpolished but highly-tempered steel, with open helmets; each bore a Scottish target, a sword, and dagger.

They were sworn solemnly by the constable, "That they had not brought into the lists other armour or weapons than such as were allowed by Scottish law, or any firework engine, witch's spell or enchantment, and that they trusted alone to their own valour, as God and His holy Evangelists should help them!"

It was then proclaimed that no man should speak or utter a cry, under penalty of a fine equal in value to twenty cattle; or put forth hand or weapon, under pain of forfeiting limb and life to the queen--the poor little unconscious queen, who was then in her cradle, in time-hallowed Holyrood.

The constable rose from his seat, and waved his white truncheon thrice, exclaiming,

"Let them go! Let them go! Let them go, and do their worst!"

This was the usual formula; and then they rushed on each other.

Preston fought warily; but the fury of his adversary and the wounds he inflicted soon raised the old man's blood, and, by one tremendous stroke of his two-handed sword, he clove the widow's son--her boasted, her fair and comely Willie--through helmet and bone, to the chin, slaying him in a moment; as the quaint records of the lord high constable's court have it, "cleaving him through harnpan and harns to ye bearde with ane straik of his quhinger."

His body was sent home for burial, but denuded of his armour,--every buckle of which had been that morn adjusted by his mother's hands,--of his jewels and rings, which, according to the form of judicial combats in Scotland, became, together with the posts and rails of the lists, the fees of the constable's servants.

Lady Alison was on her knees at her husband's altar-tomb in Tranent Church, imploring God to aid and to protect her son, when old Roger of Westmains arrived, with his eyes swollen by weeping, and his heart swollen by rage and sorrow, to detail the death of her eldest boy by the same relentless sword that slew his father! The fierce, stern woman heard him to an end, and then fell prostrate on the tomb, in a paroxysm of grief, and perhaps of remorse.

If the latter found way in her breast, it did not linger long. Three days she remained in a darkened chamber, without speaking to any one; on the morning of the fourth she came out, graver, more gloomy, and, if possible, paler than before, and said briefly to Westmains--

"Write to France--to the chateau of Anne of Vendome, and desire Florence to come home without delay. I have yet the bullets that were found in the body of his father; and if the widow of John of Albany hath kept her royal word, I may yet have sure vengeance on yonder murderer and his brood!"

"The tenants have brought their herezelds," said Westmains in a low voice.

"Remit them; but say, to put their swords to the grindstone, for the day cometh when I, Alison Kennedy, shall need them all."

The bailie referred to the gift given in case of death to the heir of an over-lord, generally the best cow, yielded by those who held of the said lord an oxgang of land.

There were now TWO places vacant at the hearth, two platters unused on the table, and two scutcheons hung in the kirk of Tranent; but the mangled images of those who were gone remained enthroned more darkly than ever in the heart of the widow and mother!