Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan (Penguin Classics) (20 page)

Randal jumped downstairs to the great hall, where his mother sat. Simon Grieve was telling her all about it.

‘Sae we drave oor ain kye hame, my lady,’ he said, ‘and aiblins some orra anes that was na oor ain. For-bye we raikit a’ the plenishing oot o’ the ha’ o’ Hardriding, and a bonny burden o’ tapestries, and plaids, and gear we hae, to show for our ride.’
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Then he called to some of his men, who came into the hall, and cast down great piles of all sorts of spoil and booty, silver plate, and silken hangings, and a heap of rugs, and carpets, and plaids, such as Randal had never seen before, for the English were much richer than the Scots.

Randal threw himself on the pile of rugs and began to roll on it.

‘Oh, mother,’ he cried suddenly, jumping up and looking with wide-open eyes, ‘there’s something living in the heap! Perhaps it’s a doggie, or a rabbit, or a kitten.’

Then Randal tugged at the cloths, and then they all heard a little shrill cry.

‘Why, it’s a bairn!’ said Lady Ker, who had sat very grave all the time, pleased to have done the English some harm; for they had killed her husband, and were all her deadly foes. ‘It’s a bairn!’ she cried, and pulled out of the great heap of cloaks and rugs a little beautiful child, in its white nightdress, with its yellow curls all tangled over its blue eyes.

Then Lady Ker and the old nurse could not make too much of the pretty English child that had come here in such a wonderful way.

How did it get mixed up with all the spoil? And how had it been carried so far on horseback without being hurt? Nobody ever knew. It came as if the fairies had sent it. English it was, but the best Scot could not hate such a pretty child. Old Nancy Dryden ran up to the old nursery with it, and laid it in a great wooden tub full of hot water, and was giving it warm milk to drink, and dandling it, almost before the men knew what had happened.

‘Yon bairn will be a bonny mate for you, Maister Randal,’ said old Simon Grieve. ‘Deed, I dinna think her kin will come
speering
after her at Fairnilee. The red cock’s crawing ower Hardriding Ha’ this day, and when the womenfolk come back frae the wood, they’ll hae other things to do forbye looking for bairns.’

When Simon Grieve said that the red cock was crowing over his enemies’ home, he meant that he had set it on fire after the people who lived in it had run away.

Lady Ker grew pale when she heard what he said. She hated the English, to be sure, but she was a woman with a kind heart. She thought of the dreadful danger that the little English girl had escaped, and she went upstairs and helped the nurse to make the child happy.

The little girl soon made everyone at Fairnilee happy. She was far too young to remember her own home, and presently she was crawling up and down the long hall and making friends with Randal. They found out that her name was Jane Musgrave, though she could hardly say Musgrave; and they called her Jean, with their Scots tongues, or ‘Jean o’ the Kye’, because she came when the cows were driven home again.

Soon the old nurse came to like her near as well as Randal, ‘her ain bairn’ (her own child), as she called him. In the summer days, Jean, as she grew older, would follow Randal about like a little doggie. They went fishing together, and Randal would pull the trout out of Caddon Burn, or the Burn of Peel; and Jeanie would be very proud of him, and very much alarmed at the big, wide jaws of the yellow trout. And Randal would plait helmets with green rushes for her and him, and make spears of bulrushes, and play at tilts and tournaments. There was peace in the country; or if there was war, it did not come near the quiet valley of the Tweed and the hills that lie around Fairnilee. In summer they were always on the hills and by the burnsides.

You cannot think, if you have not tried, what pleasant company a burn is. It comes out of the deep, black wells in the moss, far away on the tops of the hills, where the sheep feed, and the fox peers from his hole, and the ravens build in the crags. The burn flows down from the lonely places, cutting a way between steep, green banks, tumbling in white waterfalls over rocks, and lying in black, deep pools below the waterfalls. At every turn it does something new and plays a fresh game with its brown waters. The white pebbles in the water look like gold: often Randal would pick one out and think he had found a gold-mine, till he got it into the sunshine, and then it was only a white stone, what he called a ‘chucky-stane’; but he kept hoping for better luck next time. In the height of summer, when the streams were very low, he and the shepherd’s boys would build dams of stones
and turf across a narrow part of the burn, while Jean sat and watched them on a little round knoll. Then, when plenty of water had collected in the pool, they would break the dam and let it all run downhill in a little flood; they called it a ‘hurly gush’. And in winter they would slide on the black, smooth ice of the boat-pool, beneath the branches of the alders.

Or they would go out with Yarrow, the shepherd’s dog, and follow the track of wild creatures in the snow. The rabbit makes marks like this ∵, and the hare makes marks like this
; but the fox’s track is just as if you had pushed a piece of wood through the snow – a number of cuts in the surface, going straight along. When it was very cold, the grouse and blackcocks would come into the trees near the house, and Randal and Jean would put out porridge for them to eat. And the great white swans floated in from the frozen lochs on the hills, and gathered around open reaches and streams of the Tweed. It was pleasant to be a boy then in the North. And at Hallowe’en they would duck for apples in tubs of water, and burn nuts in the fire, and look for the shadow of the lady Randal was to marry, in the mirror; but he only saw Jean looking over his shoulder.

The days were very short in winter, so far north, and they would soon be driven into the house. Then they sat by the nursery fire; and those were almost the pleasantest hours, for the old nurse would tell them old Scots stories of elves and fairies, and sing them old songs. Jean would crawl close to Randal and hold his hand, for fear the Red Etin, or some other awful
bogle
, should get her; and in the dancing shadows of the firelight she would think she saw
Whuppity Stoorie
, the wicked old witch with the spinning-wheel; but it was really nothing but the shadow of the wheel that the old nurse drove with her foot –
birr, birr
– and that whirred and rattled as she span and told her tale. For people span their cloth at home then, instead of buying it from shops; and the old nurse was a great woman for spinning.

She was a great woman for stories, too, and believed in fairies, and ‘bogles’, as she called them. Had not her own cousin, Andrew

Tamson, passed the Cauldshiels Loch one New Year morning? And had he not heard a dreadful roaring, as if all the cattle on Faldonside Hill were routing at once? And then did he not see a great black beast roll down the hillside, like a black ball, and run into the loch, which grew white with foam, and the waves leaped up the banks like a tide rising? What could that be except the kelpie that lives in Cauldshiels Loch, and is just a muckle big water bull? ‘And what for should there no be water kye, if there’s land kye?’

Randal and Jean thought it was very likely there were ‘kye’, or cattle, in the water. And some Highland people think so still, and believe they have seen the great kelpie come roaring out of the lake; or Shellycoat, whose skin is all crusted like a rock with shells, sitting beside the sea.

The old nurse had other tales, that nobody believes any longer, about Brownies. A Brownie was a very useful creature to have in a house. He was a kind of fairy-man, and he came out in the dark, when everybody had gone to bed, just as mice pop out at night. He never did anyone any harm, but he sat and warmed himself at the kitchen fire. If any work was unfinished he did it, and made everything tidy that was left out of order. It is a pity there are no such bogles now! If anybody offered the Brownie any payment, even if it was only a silver penny or a new coat, he would take offence and go away.

Other stories the old nurse had, about hidden treasures and buried gold. If you believed her, there was hardly an old stone on the hillside that didn’t have gold under it. The very sheep that fed upon the Eildon Hills, which Randal knew well, had yellow teeth because there was so much gold under the grass. Randal had taken two scones, or rolls, in his pocket for dinner, and ridden over to the Eildon Hills. He had seen a rainbow touch one of them, and there he hoped he would find the treasure that always lies at the tail of the rainbow. But he got very soon tired of digging for it with his little dirk, or dagger. It blunted the dagger, and he found nothing. Perhaps he had not marked quite the right place, he thought. But he looked at the teeth of the sheep, and they were yellow; so he had no doubt that there was a gold-mine under the grass, if he could find it.

The old nurse knew that it was very difficult to dig up fairy gold. Generally something happened just when people heard their pickaxes clink on the iron pot that held the treasure. A dreadful storm of thunder and lightning would break out; or the burn would be flooded, and rush down all red and roaring, sweeping away the tools and drowning the digger; or a strange man, that nobody had ever seen before, would come up, waving his arms, and crying out that the Castle was on fire. Then the people would hurry up to the Castle, and find that it was not on fire at all. When they returned, all the earth would be just as it was before they began, and they would give up in despair. Nobody could ever see the man again that gave the alarm.

‘Who could he be, nurse?’ Randal asked.

‘Just one of the good folk, I’m thinking; but it’s no weel to be speaking o’
them
.’

Randal knew that the ‘good folk’ meant the fairies. The old nurse called them the good folk for fear of offending them. She would not speak much about them, except now and then, when the servants had been making merry.

‘And is there any treasure hidden near Fairnilee, nursie?’ asked little Jean.

‘Treasure, my bonny doo! Mair than a’ the men about the toon could carry away frae morning till nicht. Do ye no ken the auld rhyme?

‘And there’s the other auld rhyme:

Randal and Jean were very glad to hear so much gold was near them as would pay nine kings’ ransoms. They took their small spades and dug little holes in the Camp of Rink, which is a great
old circle of stonework, surrounded by a deep ditch, on the top of a hill above the house. But Jean was not a very good digger, and even Randal grew tired. They thought they would wait till they grew bigger, and
then
find the gold.

‘Everybody knows there’s fairies,’ said the old nurse one night when she was bolder than usual. What she said we will put in English, not Scots as she spoke it. ‘But they do not like to be called fairies. So the old rhyme runs:

‘So you must always call them “good neighbours” or “good folk”, when you speak of them.’

‘Did
you
ever see a fairy, nurse?’ asked Randal.

‘Not myself, but my mother knew a woman – they called her Tibby Dickson, and her husband was a shepherd, and she had a bairn, as bonny a bairn as ever you saw. And one day she went to the well to draw water, and as she was coming back she heard a loud scream in her house. Then her heart leaped, and fast she ran and flew to the cradle; and there she saw an awful sight – not her own bairn, but a withered imp, with hands like a mole’s, and a face like a frog’s, and a mouth from ear to ear, and two great staring eyes.’

‘What was it?’ asked Jeanie, in a trembling voice.

‘A fairy’s bairn that had not thriven,’ said nurse; ‘and when their bairns do not thrive, they just steal honest folk’s children and carry them away to their own country.’

‘And where’s that?’ asked Randal.

‘It’s under the ground,’ said nurse, ‘and there they have gold and silver and diamonds; and there’s the Queen of them all, that’s as beautiful as the day. She has yellow hair down to her feet, and she has blue eyes, like the sky on a fine day, and her voice like all the
mavises
singing in the spring. And she is aye dressed in green, and all her court in green; and she rides a white horse with golden bells on the bridle.’

‘I would like to go there and see her,’ said Randal.

‘Oh, never say that, my bairn; you never know who may hear you! And if you go there, how will you come back again? And what will your mother do, and Jean here, and me that’s carried you many a time in weary arms when you were a babe?’