The Tweedie Passion

by Helen Susan Swift

  However other things had also changed in my enforced absence, as I discovered the morning after my return. I lay in my own bed, staring at the groined ceiling, thinking how glad I was to be back home and wondering about Hugh when Mother walked in.

  Expecting her to start shouting that I should be up and about and working, I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed.

  'Don't get up,' Mother held up her hand to stop me. She sat on the bed at my side. 'Now that you've decided to come back,' Mother spoke as if I had chosen to be abducted and carried away by half the outlaws of the Borders, 'your Father will want to talk to you.'

  I nodded. 'I have already told him what happened.' Or some of it, anyway. I missed out some minor details, such as what Hugh and I had got up to, and the fact that he had been a Veitch.

  'So I believe,' Mother said. 'It is what you have not said that I find most interesting. We will discuss that later.' She looked deep into my eyes. 'You have much to tell me, I believe.'

  I said nothing to that.

  'If I were you,' Mother said. 'I would get up and dressed soon. And get a decent breakfast. You will need all the strength today.'

  I shoved back the tangled mess of my hair and scratched my head. Honestly, if men saw us first thing in the morning they would not be attracted at all. Mind you, Hugh had first seen in in a dungeon, filthy and… I concentrated on what Mother had said. 'Why?' I asked. I had rather hoped that I could recover after all my recent excitements.

  'You'll see.' Mother patted my thigh. 'It's up to your father to explain, not me.' She lowered her voice. 'All I will say is: don't think too hardly of him, Jeannie. Talk to me later, when you know.'

  'When I know what?' I scratched my head again, furiously, and again pushed back my shocking hair. I hated all this secrecy. Why could people not be straightforward and open? 'Why should I think hardly of Father?'

  Mother patted my thigh again. 'We are having a visitor in the forenoon,' she said. 'Some things will be explained then.' She looked at me, sighed, and shook her head. 'I will send up a maid with a basin of water to help wash your hair, Jeannie. I can see you brought half of Liddesdale back with you. If I did not know better I would say that you had been rolling around on the ground.'

  You will have to do better than that, Mother, I thought. 'It would feel cleaner after a wash.'

  'And wear something at last half-decent,' Mother said, 'don't go around near naked.' She stood up, shaking her head. 'It's no wonder most of the men in the Borders want to bed you.'

  I was better than half-decent when I sat at the ingle-neuk in the great hall. I had taken pains with both my clothes and my appearance, which drew some ribald comments from the boys of the valley when they began to filter in. The maid had done herself proud in washing my hair with water in which birch-bark had been soaked so it both shone and had a sweet aroma. That caused Robert to give a loud laugh.

  'Is that the latest fashion in Liddesdale?'

  I did not fully appreciate the joke and told him so with hot words and narrowed eyes that did their work well.

  'It was meant to be funny,' Robert said.

  About to say that it would have been funnier if he had come to rescue me, I bit back the words. I had no desire to humiliate him further. Indeed, I knew he was going to save me at some time in the future so I had to be gentle with him. I swallowed my anger.

  'Do you know what this is all about?' I asked.

  'Not yet,' Robert said, smiling past me to Crooked Sim of the Mains.

  'Does anybody know?' I looked around the hall as more men entered. All the leading men of the valley seemed to be there, from our tenants at Lethanhead away up in the hills to the riverside men of Lethanfoot who owed their allegiance to Ferguson of Whitecleuch.

  'What?' Robert glanced at me. 'Oh, no I don't think so, Jeannie. Not until your father tells us.'

  'It's good to be back.' I reached out for him.

  When Robert continued to ignore me and talk to Crooked Sim, I nudged him in the ribs. 'I said it's good to be back!' I nodded to my hand. Honestly, that man was hard work. 'You may take my hand if you wish.'

  'Go on Rab, take her hand when you're told,' Crooked Sim jeered. 'Jeannie got herself all dressed up for you! She even washed the lice from her hair.'

  I tapped my hand on the table we sat around. 'Robert?'

  He laughed and looked away. 'Not in front of my friends, Jeannie,' he said so softly that only I could hear him.

  I withdrew my hand and stood up. 'I will leave you with your friends,' I said.

  There was a better view from the top table and anyway, it was where I belonged. I should never have joined the Whitecleuch boys, despite Robert being there. I sat at the top table with a vacant seat on either side, fuming as more men crammed into the hall and my Robert sat in the midst of his cronies, cracking poor jokes and boasting to each other of their prowess.

  Only after the last of my father's chief tenants found a space did Father himself arrived, with Mother at his side. Father entered with a flourish and with his sword at his side, which was unusual inside the tower.

  As the men either stood in respect or hammered hard hands on the table in spontaneous applause, Father and Mother stepped to the head table, with Willie Telfer standing by the closed door. I moved aside as they took their places.

  'Enough!' Father roared and the row gradually subsided. 'You will be wondering why I have gathered you all together today.' That was a statement rather than a question. 'Well if you sit still and listen you will learn.'

  There was a general laugh at that, with a few ribald comments from the more crude of the men. Why do some men think it amusing to be rude about everything?

  'For as long as we all can remember,' Father said, 'we have been at feud with the Veitches.'

  The men growled at that, waving their fists in the air to prove their martial valour and dislike of the old enemy. I sat silent, thinking of Hugh as I watched Robert and his group of friends outshout all the others; young callants eager to be heard. For one bitter moment I wondered how they would fare against Wild Will and his band of veteran outlaws, shook the thought away as disloyal and listened to Father.

  'We have bickered for decades. They have raided us and we have raided them; we have reived a few cattle and they have reived a few cattle; we have burned a couple of their cottages and they have burned a couple of our cottages. There have been some killings.'

  Father paused then to allow the men of the Lethan remember the men and women they had lost to the vicious Veitches and savour the triumph of victory as the brave Tweedies had exacted revenge by catching and killing a handful of the enemy over the decades.

  'It is time to end this once and for all,' Father declared.

  I was the only person who clapped in the ensuing hush. The feud with the Veitches had been a fact for so long that people could not think of an alternative. Now I believed that Father was proposing an end to the feud, so we could live in peace.

  Father raised his hands high. 'It is time that we finally quelled the Veitches and turned their lands into a smoking waste; put their men to the sword, burned their crops, reived their livestock and razed their towers to the ground!'

  I stopped clapping, appalled that Father intended the very opposite of what I had hoped. 'No!' I said. Now my small voice was lost in the roar of approval from the assembled might of the Lethan Valley. The Tweedies and their tenants were on their feet shouting their delight at the thought of turning a smouldering feud into a full scale war.

  'Father!' I shouted, 'you can't!' I remembered Liddesdale where men carried weapons every day, where the churches and chapels had been destroyed, where the only law was the blade and the hangman's rope. I did not wish my green Lethan Valley turned into a place like that.

  'You hear my daughter!' Father calmed his people down. 'She has immediately realised the reason we have not done this before is that we lacked the numbers.'

  'No, Father,' I protested, 'that is not what I meant.' About to exp
lain, I found Mother's hands on me as she ushered me back to my seat.

  'Hush Jeannie; this is Father's day. He has a lot to explain.' Mother's eyes were deep with warning.

  I sat down and clamped shut my mouth. I knew I spoke too much. I also knew that I did not wish to see Father, brave though he was, pitted against active, proven fighters such as Hugh Veitch. I certainly did not wish to see Robert outmatched again.

  'We have not done this before,' Father continued, 'because we have lacked the manpower. We have two hundred riders in the Lethan; the Veitches have three hundred. If we faced them in open battle they would outnumber us.'

  The assembly was silent again. They knew these facts of course, but hearing them was always sobering.

  'I was as aware of the numbers as you are,' Father spoke more quietly now, 'so I cast a wide net to look for allies and distant kinsmen.'

  That got my interest. The old Border worked on the kin system. Family was second only to business. Men and women felt strong attachment to family and blood and loyalty could be fierce, unless cattle was involved. I had thought the Tweedies were a close-knit family; I was not aware that we had kin outside the Lethan Valley.

  'Let me introduce you to one of them.' Father nodded to Willie Telfer at the door. 'Right Willie; bring him in.'

  When Willie opened the door and a man stepped in, a buzz ran around the great hall. I watched in astonishment as the Yorling, resplendent in his bright yellow jack and with his spurs rattling, stepped across the stone flags.

  I stood up, reaching for some sort of weapon, as a score of men did the same. I searched for Robert's gaze, hoping to reassure him that I believed in him despite his discomfiture at the hands of this lithe young man.

  There was a smile on the face of the Yorling as he joined us at the top table. He gave a small bow to Mother, and a deeper bow to me.

  'I am glad to see you alive and well, my Lady Jean,' he said quietly as the assembly broke into a hundred questions.

  I responded with stiff formality. 'Sir,' I said, with the briefest of curtseys.

  Father banged his fist on the table for silence, causing great dents in the pine for which Mother would undoubtedly later take him to task.

  'Most of you have heard of the Yorling,' Father had to raise his voice and repeat himself until the hubbub died down. 'Well; I have a small admission to make.'

  As the Yorling stood beside Father, I drew in my breath sharply. I had always been aware that I felt a bond to the Yorling; despite his actions I had known that I was never in any real danger from him. Now I guessed why.

  I looked toward Mother and felt her hand slide around mine. 'Mother…' I said.

  'Yes, Jeannie,' she whispered. 'I already know.'

  I squeezed my mother's hand in sympathy and support.

  'Some of you may have guessed the truth,' Father said. 'In my youth, before I met my lady wife, I was a roving blade.'

  Most of the men laughed at that, digging each other in the ribs and guffawing their masculine approval. Oh our Tweedie men loved to think of themselves as men's men, reiving and raiding for women as well as cattle, although in slightly different ways. I hoped.

  'In these old days, I roved around the Debateable Land and had a name and reputation. I wore a yellow jack most remarkably like this one and men knew me as the Yorling.'

  That name caused a hush to fall on the gathering. Everybody had heard of the Yorling as the leader of an outlaw band decades before. Now they knew that my Father, Tweedie of the Lethan, had been that man. I am sure their opinion of him multiplied. I am not sure that I shared their adulation.

  'This bold young callant took on my mantle.' Father tapped the Yorling's shoulder. 'This is George, now known as George Graham from his mother's side, or the Yorling. He is my son; born out of wedlock so not able to inherit my lands, but Tweedie by blood.'

  I had guessed that truth and now I looked on the face of the half- brother I had not known that I possessed. He looked at me along the length of the table.

  'Will you forgive me, my sister?' His smile was as wide as ever although there was genuine concern in his smokey eyes. 'You were never in danger.'

  'I always knew that,' I said truthfully, 'but why did you do it?'

  As he opened his mouth to talk, Father started again. 'Now you see why the time is right to rid us of the plague of the Veitches. George – the Yorling- will add his band of twenty riders to our strength and our combined force with sweep the Veitches from their land of Faladale!'

  The gathering were on their feet, clapping hands and stamping feet, hammering the tables with fists, tankards and the pommels of daggers as they agreed full-heartedly with Father's ideas.

  Oh, Father was clever. He had used is youthful faults as a tool to give the valley exactly what they wanted. Now nobody could accuse him of anything except being a vibrant youth, a man with the Tweedie Passion, which all knew about and nobody would gainsay.

  'Mother…' I leaned closer to her, embarrassed that her husband's philandering should be so publically revealed.

  Mother shook her head. 'We are all Tweedies now,' she said softly, and stood up.

  'I wish to speak!' Mother said, and silence fell on the gathering as men and the few women waited to hear what the Lady Lethan had to say about her husband's bastard son.

  'George!' Mother said loudly. 'Welcome to our surname, our valley and our family!'

  She sat down again as the great hall erupted in a huge roar of approval and probably relief. All knew that my mother was a formidable woman, well able to take care of herself verbally and physically. Now they had heard her formally accept the issue of Father's pre-marital loins into her household there was no reason for any other to take issue. George Graham, the Yorling, was accepted as part of the Tweedies of Lethan Valley.

  'Now the Veitches will pay the reckoning in full, and we shall sign the deeds of their repentance in red ink and with a sharp quill!' Father said as the gathering roared approval of bloodshed, violence and death. I slipped away with my head confused and my eyes stinging with hot tears. I was not sure why.

  Chapter Twelve

  LETHAN VALLEY

  OCTOBER 1585

  'So I have a brother,' I did not soften my words with a preamble.

  Father looked up from the table where he was eating, with half a leg of reived mutton before him and a flagon of good claret. 'You have a brother,' he confirmed. I could tell by the narrowing of his eyes that he expected me to lay blame on him. I could not do that after my experience with Hugh.

  'I always wanted a brother,' I said, and saw Father's expression soften.

  'We all need kin,' he said.

  I nodded at that. 'I think there is more you need to tell me, Father.' I slid onto a bench opposite him, folding my skirt neatly beneath me. 'Such as why he rode into the valley and abducted me.'

  Father could never look innocent. His attempt was ludicrous, with spreading hands and wide open eyes. 'Why should I know that?'

  'Because you know everything that happens in this valley,' I held his gaze. 'And you knew he was your son.' I tapped my fingers on the table, copying Mother's gestures when she insisted on a reply. 'You knew he was coming, Father and you allowed him to ride free. I noticed that there were no injuries in the fighting and only one young lad was taken captive.'

  Father's smile was wide and as reassuring as a cat's gape at a mouse-hole. 'Yes, Jeannie, I arranged the Yorling's attack.'

  'Why?' I said. 'And none of your lies, Father. I am in no mood to brook more falsehoods.'

  'Oh?' Father raised his eyebrows. 'The fox cub threatens the old wolf.' His laugh was loud and equally perfidious. 'I arranged that raid to capture you, of course, my daughter. Oh you were never in any danger. George would not have hurt a hair on your cossetted little head.'

  'So why then?' I asked.

  'Why do you think?' Father asked. 'You have an understanding with Robert of Whitecleuch. The two of have promised all sorts of foolish things ever since childhood.'
>
  I had thought that Father did not care one way or another whether I married Robert. Now I looked into his devious face and realised that he had been watching everything all the time and hatching his own plans for my future. 'Carry on, Father,' I said.

  'Robert of Whitecleuch will not be a good leader for Tweedies,' Father said seriously. 'He is slow, ponderous and cannot wield a sword. When I asked the Yorling to take you away, I had one of two things in mind.'

  I am not sure how I felt when I heard that Father had arranged that I should be abducted by a group of men I had never met in my life. 'What were these two things, Father?'

  'Either Robert would finally prove himself a man,' Father said, 'Or he would make such a fool of himself that you would finally see how useless he was for you and the valley, and you would choose somebody more suitable.'

  'So the entire raid was false?' I said.

  'It was all false,' Father said.

  'Robert did not know that,' I said. 'He might have killed the Yorling, my brother George.'

  Father's great laugh boomed out around his chamber. 'Robert could not hurt the Yorling if he tried for a month!' The idea seemed to amuse him so much that I felt my anger built up.

  'Robert's not that bad,' I said. 'At least he came to look for me.'

  Father's laughter ended abruptly. 'If your mother had been taken by a raiding party, I would be in the saddle and raising a hot trod within half an hour. Robert did not do that.'

  I said nothing. I remembered how tenderly the Yorling had treated me in his ride away from the Lethan Valley, and how he had camped high on the hill with few precautions. At the time I had thought it bold; now I saw that he was not hiding from Robert but allowing him the opportunity to track and capture me back, if he so willed.

  'The Yorling tells me that while he awaited Robert's trod, Wild Will came instead.' Father said.

  'That is how it happened,' I agreed. I remembered that professional onslaught by the Armstrongs and the ease with which they had overcome the Yorling's men. I had not realised, then, that the Yorling had been inviting such an attack and so their resistance had been slight.