Chapter Eleven
LETHAN VALLEY
Can you remember the parable about the prodigal son and how his father killed the fatted calf when he returned home?
Well, that did not happen at my homecoming.
Instead, Mother looked me up and down, said: 'aye; you're home then,' and got on with her spinning.
That was my welcome back to Cardrona Tower.
No fanfares, no beating of drums, or sounding of trumpets.
A few words and a look, yet I was still glad to be home, in familiar surroundings and surrounded by friendly faces.
Yet although everything was the same, everything seemed different.
It was not of course: the Lethan was the same; it was me that had changed.
I had been outside the confines of the Lethan Valley, I had experienced violence and theft, I had met a great many very unpleasant men and I had my first visitation of the Tweedie Passion.
In short, I was a woman now while before I had been a girl.
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 me 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 ingleneuk 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 arrive, 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 explain, 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.