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

by Gordon Jarvie

  ‘And what are you going to wish?’

  ‘I’m going to wish to meet the Fairy Queen! Just think how beautiful she must be, dressed all in green, with gold bells on her bridle, and riding a white horse shod with gold! I think I see her galloping through the woods and out across the hill, over the heather.’

  ‘But you will go away with her, and never see me any more,’ said Jean.

  ‘No, I won’t; or if I do, I’ll come back, with such a horse, and a sword with a gold handle. I’m going to the Wishing Well. Come on!’

  Jean did not like to say ‘No’, so off they went.

  Randal and Jean started without taking anything with them to eat. They were afraid to go back to the house for food. Randal said they would be sure to find something somewhere. The Wishing Well was on the top of a hill between Yarrow and Tweed. So they took off their shoes, and waded the Tweed at the shallowest part, and then they walked up the green grassy bank on the other side, until they came to the Burn of Peel. Here they passed the old square tower of Peel, and the shepherd dogs came out and barked at them. Randal threw a stone at them, and they ran away with their tails between their legs.

  ‘Don’t you think we had better go into Peel, and get some bannocks to eat on the way, Randal?’ said Jean.

  But Randal said he was not hungry; and, besides, the people at Peel would tell the Fairnilee people where they had gone.

  ‘We’ll wish for things to eat when we get to the Wishing Well,’ said Randal. ‘All sorts of good things – cold venison pasty, and everything you like.’

  So they began climbing the hill, and they followed the Peel Burn. It ran in and out, winding this way and that, and when they did get to the top of the hill, Jean was very tired and very hungry. And she was very disappointed. For she expected to see some wonderful new country at her feet, and there was only a low strip of sunburnt grass and heather, and then another hill-top! So Jean sat down, and the hot sun blazed on her, and the flies buzzed about her and tormented her.

  ‘Come on, Jean,’ said Randal; ‘it must be over the next hill!’

  So poor Jean got up and followed him, but he walked far too fast for her. When she reached the crest of the next hill, she found a great cairn, or pile of grey stones; and beneath her lay, far, far below, a deep valley covered with woods, and a stream running through it that she had never seen before.

  That stream was the Yarrow.

  Randal was nowhere in sight, and she did not know where to look for the Wishing Well. If she had walked straight forward through the trees she would have come to it; but she was so tired, and so hungry, and so hot, that she sat down at the foot of the cairn and cried as if her heart would break.

  Then she fell asleep.

  When Jean woke, it was as dark as it ever is on a midsummer night in Scotland.

  It was a soft, cloudy night; not a clear night with a silver sky.

  Jeanie heard a loud roaring close to her, and the red light of a great fire was in her sleepy eyes.

  In the firelight she saw strange black beasts, with horns, plunging and leaping and bellowing, and dark figures rushing about the flames. It was the beasts that made the roaring. They were bounding about close to the fire, and sometimes in it, and were all mixed in the smoke.

  Jeanie was dreadfully frightened, too frightened to scream.

  Presently she heard the voices of men shouting on the hill below her. The shouts and the barking of dogs came nearer and nearer.

  Then a dog ran up to her, and licked her face, and jumped about her.

  It was her own sheep-dog, Yarrow.

  He ran back to the men who were following him, and came again with one of them.

  It was old Simon Grieve, very tired, and so much out of breath that he could scarcely speak.

  Jean was very glad to see him, and not frightened any longer.

  ‘Oh, Jeanie, my doo,’ said Simon, ‘where hae ye been? A muckle gliff ye hae gien us, and a weary spiel up the weary braes.’

  Jean told him all about it: how she had come with Randal to see the Wishing Well, and how she had lost him, and fallen asleep.

  ‘And sic a nicht for you bairns to wander on the hill,’ said Simon. ‘It’s the nicht o’ St John, when the guid folk hae power. And there’s a’ the lads burning the Bel fires, and driving the nowt through them: nae less will serve them. Sic a nicht!’

  This was the cause of the fire Jean saw, and of the noise of the cattle. On Midsummer Night the country people used to light these fires, and drive the cattle through them. It was an old, old custom come down from heathen times.

  Now the other men from Fairnilee had gathered around Jean. Lady Ker had sent them out to look for Randal and her on the hills. They had heard from the good wife at Peel that the children had gone up the burn, and Yarrow had tracked them until Jean was found.

  gliff, fright. spiel, shout. nowt, cattle.

  CHAPTER VII

  Where is Randal?

  Jean was found, but where was Randal? She told the men who had come out to look for her, that Randal had gone on to look for the Wishing Well. So they rolled her up in a big shepherd’s plaid, and two of them carried Jean home in the plaid, while all the rest, with lighted torches in their hands, went to look for Randal through the wood.

  Jean was so tired that she fell asleep again in her plaid before they reached Fairnilee. She was wakened by the men shouting as they drew near the house, to show that they were coming home. Lady Ker was waiting at the gate, and the old nurse ran down the grassy path to meet them.

  ‘Where’s my bairn?’ she cried as soon as she was within call.

  The men said, ‘Here’s Mistress Jean, and Randal will be here soon; they have gone to look for him.’

  ‘Where are they looking?’ cried nurse.

  ‘Just about the Wishing Well.’

  The nurse gave a scream, and hobbled back to Lady Ker.

  ‘Ma bairn’s tint!’ she cried. ‘Ma bairn’s tint! They’ll find him never. The good folk have stolen him away from that weary Wishing Well!’

  ‘Hush, nurse,’ said Lady Ker, ‘do not frighten Jean.’

  She spoke to the men, who had no doubt that Randal would soon be found and brought home.

  So Jean was put to bed, where she forgot all her troubles; and Lady Ker waited, waited, all night, until the grey light began to come in, about two in the morning.

  Lady Ker kept very still and quiet, telling her beads, and praying. But the old nurse would never be still, but was always wandering out, down to the river’s edge, listening for the shouts of the shepherds coming home. Then she would come back again, and moan and wring her hands, crying for her ‘bairn’.

  About six o’clock, when it was broad daylight and all the birds were singing, the men returned from the hill.

  But Randal did not come with them.

  Then the old nurse set up a great cry, as the country people do over the bed of someone who has just died.

  Lady Ker sent her away, and called Simon Grieve to her own room.

  ‘You have not found the boy yet?’ she said, very stately and pale. ‘He must have wandered over into Yarrow; perhaps he has gone as far as Newark, and passed the night at the castle, or with the shepherd at Foulshiels.’

  ‘No, my Lady,’ said Simon Grieve, ‘some o’ the men went over to Newark, and some to Foulshiels, and other some down to Sir John Murray’s at Philiphaugh; but there’s never a word o’ Randal in a’ the countryside.’

  ‘Did you find no trace of him?’ said Lady Ker, sitting down suddenly in the great armchair.

  ‘We went first through the wood, my Lady, by the path to the Wishing Well. And he had been there, for the whip he carried in his hand was lying on the grass. And we found this.’

  He put his hand in his pouch, and brought out a little silver crucifix, that Randal used always to wear around his neck on a chain.

  ‘This was lying on the grass beside the Wishing Well, my Lady –’

  Then he stopped, for Lady Ker had swoon
ed away. She was worn out with watching and with anxiety about Randal.

  Simon went and called the maids, and they brought water and wine, and soon Lady Ker came back to herself, with the little silver crucifix in her hand.

  The old nurse was crying, and making a great noise.

  ‘The good folk have taken ma bairn,’ she said, ‘this nicht o’ a’ the nichts in the year, when the fairy folk – preserve us frae them! – have power. But they could nae take the blessed rood o’ grace; it was beyond their strength. If gypsies, or robber folk frae the Debatable Land, had carried away the bairn, they would hae taken him, cross and a’. But the guid folk have gotten him, and Randal Ker will never, never mair come hame to bonny Fairnilee.’

  What the old nurse said was what everybody thought. Even Simon Grieve shook his head, and did not like it.

  But Lady Ker did not give up hope. She sent horsemen through all the countryside: up Tweed to the Crook, and to Talla; up Yarrow, past Catslack Tower, and on to the Loch of St Mary; up Ettrick to Thirlestane and Buccleuch, and over to Gala, and to Branxholme in Teviotdale; and even to Hermitage Castle, far away by Liddel water.

  They rode far and rode fast, and at every cottage and every tower they asked, ‘Has anyone seen a boy in green?’ But nobody had seen Randal through all the countryside. Only a shepherd lad, on Foulshiels Hill, had heard bells ringing in the night, and a sound of laughter go past him, like a breeze of wind over the heather.

  Days went by, and all the country was out to look for Randal. Down in Yetholm they sought him, among the gypsies; and across the Eden in merry Carlisle; and through the Land Debatable, where the robber Armstrongs and Grahames lived; and far down Tweed, past Melrose, and up Jed water, far into the Cheviot Hills.

  But there never came any word of Randal. He had vanished as if the earth had opened and swallowed him. Father Francis came from Melrose Abbey, and prayed with Lady Ker, and gave her all the comfort he could. He shook his head when he heard of the Wishing Well, but he said that no spirit of earth or air could have power for ever over a Christian soul. But, even when he spoke, he remembered that, once in seven years, the fairy folk have to pay a dreadful tax, one of themselves, to the King of a terrible country of Darkness; and what if they had stolen Randal, to pay the tax with him!

  This was what troubled good Father Francis, though, like a wise man, he said nothing about it, and even put the thought away out of his own mind.

  But you may be sure that the old nurse had thought of this tax on the fairies too, and that she did not hold her peace about it, but spoke to everyone that would listen to her, and would have spoken to the mistress if she had been allowed. But when she tried to begin, Lady Ker told her that she had put her own trust in Heaven, and in the saints. And she gave the nurse such a look when she said that, ‘if ever Jean hears of this, I will send you away from Fairnilee, out of the country,’ that the old woman was afraid, and was quiet.

  As for poor Jean, she was perhaps the most unhappy of them all. She thought to herself, if she had refused to go with Randal to the Wishing Well, and had run in and told Lady Ker, then Randal would never have gone to find the Wishing Well.

  And she put herself in great danger, as she fancied, to find him. She wandered alone on the hills, seeking all the places that were believed to be haunted by fairies. At every Fairy Knowe, as the country people called the little round green knolls in the midst of the heather, Jean would stoop her ear to the ground, trying to hear the voices of the fairies within. For it was believed that you might hear the sound of their speech, and the trampling of their horses, and the shouts of the fairy children. But no sound came, except the song of the burn flowing by, and the hum of gnats in the air, and the gock, gock, the cry of the grouse, when you frighten them in the heather.

  Then Jeanie would try another way of meeting the fairies, and finding Randal. She would walk nine times around a Fairy Knowe, beginning from the left side, because then it was fancied that the hillside would open, like a door, and show a path into Fairyland. But the hillside never opened, and she never saw a single fairy; not even old Whuppity Stoorie sitting with her spinning-wheel in a green glen, spinning grass into gold, and singing her fairy song:

  ‘I once was young and fair,

  My eyes were bright and blue,

  As if the sun shone through,

  And golden was my hair.

  Down to my feet it rolled

  Ruddy and ripe like corn,

  Upon an autumn morn,

  In heavy waves of gold.

  Now am I grey and old,

  And so I sit and spin,

  With trembling hand and thin,

  This metal bright and cold.

  I would give all the gain,

  These heaps of wealth untold

  Of hard and glittering gold,

  Could I be young again!’

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Ill Years

  So autumn came, and all the hillsides were golden with the heather; and the red coral berries of the rowan trees hung from the boughs, and were wet with the spray of the waterfalls in the burns. And days grew shorter, and winter came with snow, but Randal never came back to Fairnilee. Season after season passed, and year after year. Lady Ker’s hair grew white like snow, and her face thin and pale – for she fasted often, as was the rule of her Church; all this was before the Reformation. And she slept little, praying half the night for Randal’s sake. And she went on pilgrimages to many shrines of the saints: to St Boswells and St Rules, hard by the great Cathedral of St Andrews on the sea. Nay, she went across the Border as far as the Abbey of St Albans, and even to St Thomas’s shrine of Canterbury, taking Jean with her. Many a weary mile they rode over hill and dale, and many an adventure they had, and ran many dangers from robbers, and soldiers disbanded from the wars.

  But at last they had to come back to Fairnilee; and a sad place it was, and silent without the sound of Randal’s voice in the hall, and the noise of his hunting-horn in the woods. None of the people wore mourning for him, though they mourned in their hearts. For to put on black would look as if they had given up all hope. Perhaps most of them thought they would never see him again, but Jeanie was not one who despaired.

  The years that had turned Lady Ker’s hair white, had made Jean a tall, slim lass – ‘very bonny’, everyone said; and the country people called her the Flower of Tweed. The Yarrow folk had their Flower of Yarrow, and why not the folk of Tweedside? It was now six years since Randal had been lost, and Jeanie was grown a young woman, about seventeen years old. She had always kept a hope that if Randal was with the Fairy Queen he would return perhaps in the seventh year. People said in the countryside that many a man and woman had escaped out of Fairyland after seven years’ imprisonment there.

  Now the sixth year since Randal’s disappearance began very badly, and got worse as it went on. Just when spring should have been beginning, in the end of February, there came the most dreadful snowstorm. It blew and snowed, and blew again, and the snow was as fine as the dust on a road in summer. The strongest shepherds could not hold their own against the tempest, and were ‘smoored’ in the waste. The flocks moved down from the hillsides, down and down, until all the sheep on a farm would be gathered together in a crowd, under the shelter of a wood in some deep dip of the hills. The storm seemed as if it would never cease; for thirteen days the snow drifted and the wind blew. There was nothing for the sheep to eat, and if there had been hay enough, it would have been impossible to carry it to them. The poor beasts bit at the wool on each other’s backs, and so many of them died that the shepherds built walls with the dead bodies to keep the wind and snow away from those that were left alive.

  There could be little work done on the farm that spring; and summer came in so cold and wet that the corn could not ripen, but was levelled to the ground. Then autumn was rainy, and the green sheaves lay out in the fields, and sprouted and rotted; so that little corn was reaped, and little flour could be made that year. Then in winter, and as spri
ng came on, the people began to starve. They had no grain, and there were no potatoes in those days, and no rice; nor could corn be brought in from foreign countries. So men and women and children might be seen in the fields, with white pinched faces, gathering nettles to make soup, and digging for roots that were often little better than poison. They ground the bark of the fir trees, and mixed it with the little flour they could get; and they ate such beasts as never are eaten except in time of famine.

  It is said that one very poor woman and her daughter always looked healthy and plump in these dreadful times, until people began to suspect them of being witches. And they were taken, and charged before the Sheriff with living by witchcraft, and very likely they would have been burned. So they confessed that they had fed ever since the famine began – on snails! But there were not snails enough for all the countryside; even if people had cared to eat them. So many men and women died, and more were very weak and ill.

  Lady Ker spent all her money in buying food for her people. Jean and she lived on as little as they could, and were as careful as they could be. They sold all the beautiful silver plate, except the cup that Randal’s father used to drink out of long ago. But almost everything else was sold to buy corn.

  So the weary year went on, and Midsummer Night came round – the seventh since the night when Randal was lost.

  Then Jean did what she had always meant to do. In the afternoon she slipped out of the house of Fairnilee, taking a little bread in a basket, and saying that she would go to see the farmer’s wife at Peel, which was on the other side of Tweed. But her mind was to go to the Wishing Well. There she would wish for Randal back again, to help his mother in the evil times. And if she, too, passed away as he had passed out of sight and hearing, then at least she might meet him in that land where he had been carried. How strange it seemed to Jean to be doing everything over again that she had done seven years before! Then she had been a little girl, and it had been hard work for her to climb up the side of the Peel Burn. Now she walked lightly and quickly, for she was tall and well grown. Soon she reached the crest of the first hill, and remembered how she had sat down there and cried, when she was a child, and how the flies had tormented her. They were buzzing and teasing still; for good times or bad make no difference to them, as long as the sun shines. Then she reached the cairn at the top of the next hill, and far below her lay the forest, and deep within it ran the Yarrow, glittering like silver.