Stories of the Border Marches Part 12

THE GHOST OF PERCIVAL REED

When we look back on the past history of the Border, we might almost think that St. Andrew and St. George, who are supposed to keep watch and ward over North and South Britain, had overlooked that hilly stretch of country that lies between the Solway and the Tyne, leaving the heathen G.o.d Mars to work his turbulent will with it. From the days of the Roman Wall it was always a tourney-ground, and in the long years when English and Scots warred against each other, scarcely one day in any year went past without the spilling of blood on one or other of its hills or moors. Not only did the Borderers fight against those of other nations.

Constantly they fought amongst themselves. A quick-tempered, revengeful lot were the men of those Border clans. On the Northumberland side the quarrels were as frequent as they were amongst those hot-headed Scots--Kers and Scotts, Elliots and Turnbulls and Croziers.

In the sixteenth century one of the most powerful of the clans in the wild Northumbrian country was that of the Reeds of Redesdale. Even now it is a lonely part of the south land, that silent valley down which, from its source up amongst the Cheviots, the Rede flows eastward. Bog and heather and bracken still occupy the ground to right and to left of it, and there are few sounds besides the bleat of sheep or the cries of wild birds to break the silence of the hills and moors. But when the Reeds held power the hills often echoed to the lowing of driven cattle, to the hoof-beat of galloping horses, and to the sounds of a fight being fought to the death. A foray into England brought many a st.u.r.dy Scottish reiver riding over the Carter Bar; and Reeds, and Halls, and Ridleys were never averse from a night ride across the English Border when a Michaelmas moon smiled on the enterprise. The Reeds were a strong clan, but in power and in reputation they took only a second place, for the family of the Halls was stronger still. The head of the Hall clan lived at Girsonfield, a little to the north of Otterburn, a farmhouse which had belonged to the proprietors of Otterburn Castle since the time of Queen Elizabeth. Only a few stones of it now remain, and the new house stands on a much more exposed situation; but when Hall was its occupant, Girsonfield stood on a plot of rich green sward on the east side of the Otter.

Now it must have seemed to Hall of Girsonfield, the head of the chief of the northern clans, a very clear error in judgment for any of the powers that existed to pa.s.s him over and appoint as keeper of Redesdale his friend and neighbour, Percival Reed. To have to bow to Reed's authority, to obey his summons when called on to help to intercept a party of reiving Scots or to pursue them, hot trod, into Scotland, to hear the praises of Percival Reed in all mouths--these were bitter things to be swallowed by him who has come down to us as "the false-hearted Ha'." And so, having opened the door of his heart for the messengers of Satan to come in, Hall of Girsonfield had not long to wait for his tenants.

Clearly Percival Reed had no right to be keeper, but as he did his duties bravely and well, there was no chance of his being deposed, save by death. Never a day or a night was there when Hall and his friend Reed cantered together to meet some of the Scott or Elliot clan, or to rescue a drove of cattle or sheep from them, or from some of the Croziers or Turnbulls, but what Hall rode with murder in his heart. Reed was utterly unconscious. There was no scheme that he did not confide to him whom he took for his loyal friend, no success for which he did not jubilantly claim Hall's sympathy and congratulations. He laid bare the whole of his innocent heart, and Hall hated him all the more bitterly because of it.

"If he were not so handy with his Ferrara," brooded Hall.... "If only he had been a little slower that time in getting out his dag when Nixon had covered him." ... "If only his mare had not only stumbled, but had fallen there by the peat hag when Sandy's Jock so near had him...."

To Hall of Girsonfield Providence seemed to take special care of Percival Reed, for no other reason than to goad him to extremity. The devils who possessed him were skilfully nursing their prey.

There came at last a day, when no raids were afoot, when Hall met some of the Crozier clan, and opinions were frankly expressed with regard to the keeper of Redesdale. Things had been going badly with the Croziers.

Their beef-tubs were empty. The Borders were evidently going to the dogs. It was no longer possible for any hard-working reiver to make a living on them. Percival Reed would have to get his leave, or it was all up with reiving in Redesdale. To all of these complaints Hall lent a willing ear; nay, more, to their surprise, a sympathetic one. Apparently he, too, had some little schemes afoot, with which the keeper's over-vigilance had seriously interfered. What a merry jest it would be, next time the Croziers crossed the Border by moonlight, if the keeper's plans for that night were known to them, and if, instead of finding in the clan Hall enemies, they found them allies. The Croziers might have all the spoil, but the Halls would share the joke, and Percival Reed would crow less crouse for the future.

It was a quite simply arranged affair. The Halls entered with zest into the plot. Second place was not good enough for them, and the Reeds had boasted long enough.

And Percival Reed, in all innocence, soon heard rumour of a foray by the Croziers, and confided in his friend Girsonfield exactly how he meant to meet it. This information speedily found its way to the Scottish side of the Border, and in Hall of Girsonfield Reed found a more than usually willing supporter. The appointed night came, and ere they started in the uncertain light of a misty moon the keeper of Redesdale supped at Girsonfield. "Ye're loaded, are ye, Parcy?" asked the genial host in the burring Northumbrian voice we know so well even to-day. "I'll give a look to our primings while ye drink a stirrup-cup."

More than a look he gave. Strong spirit from the Low Countries might be good jumping powder for the Keeper of Redesdale, but it was a damping potion for the keeper's musket when gently poured on its priming. At Batenshope, on the Whitelee ground, Reeds and Halls and Croziers met, and a joyous crew were the Croziers that night as they homewards rode up the Rede valley. For at the first fire of Percival Reed's musket it burst, and he dropped from his horse a murdered man. The Reeds knew it for treason, and the subsequent conduct of the Halls left them no room for doubt. It was, indeed, a fine foundation for a family feud, and for generation after generation the feud went on.

What was the end of Hall of Girsonfield no one has chronicled; it is not hard to imagine the purgatory of his latter years.

But it is not of him but of his innocent victim that tales are still told in the Rede valley.

From the night when his spirit was by treachery and violence reft from his body, there was no rest for Percival Reed.

In the gloaming, when trees stand out in the semblance of highway robbers, and a Liddesdale drow meets a North Sea haar, his sorrowful spirit was wont to be seen by the lonely traveller, making moan, seeking rest. Far and near, through all that part of the Border that he had so faithfully "kept," the spirit wandered. A moan or sigh from it on the safe side of the Carter Bar would scatter a party of Scottish reivers across the moorland as no English army could have done. Any belated horseman riding out of the dark would take the heart out of the most valiant of Northumbrians because they feared that they saw "Parcy Reed."

Not always in the same form did the Keeper appear. That was the terror of it. At times he would come gallantly cantering across the moorland as he had done when blood ran warm in his veins. At other times he would be only a sough in the night wind. A feeling of dread, an undefinable something that froze the marrow and made the blood run cold. And yet, again, he would come as a fluttering, homeless soul, whimpering and formless, with a moaning cry for Justice--Justice--Judgment on him who had by black treachery hurried him unprepared to his end. The folk of Redesdale bore it until they could bear it no longer. The blood of many a Hall was spilt by the men of Percival Reed's clan without giving any ease to that clamouring ghost. At last they sought the help of a "skeely" man. He was only a thatcher, but whilst he plied his trade of covering mortal dwellings with sufficient to withstand the blasts of heaven, he had also studied deeply matters belonging to another sphere.

"Gifted," says his chronicler, "with words to lay it at rest," he summoned the ghost to his presence, and "offered it the place and form it might wish to have."

Five miles of land did that disembodied spirit of the Keeper of Redesdale choose for his own. As might be guessed, he fixed on the banks of the Rede, and he chose that part of it that lies between Todlawhaugh and Pringlehaugh. The fox that barks from the bracken on the hillside at early morning, the grouse that crows from the heather, the owl that hoots from the fir woods at night, to those did the ghost of Percival Reed act as keeper. By day he roosted, like a bat or a night bird, on some tree in a lonely wood. By night he kept his special part of the marches. Still the Keeper of Redesdale was Percival Reed. Todlaw Mill, in ruins long ago, was his favourite haunt, and there, as the decent folk of the valley went on the Sabbath to the meeting-house at Birdhope Cragg, they often saw him, a dreary sight for human eyes, patiently awaiting his freedom. The men would uncover their heads and bow as they pa.s.sed, and the Keeper of Redesdale, courteous in the spirit as in the body, would punctiliously return their salutations.

Thus did the years wear on until the appointed days were fulfilled, and the Rede Valley knew its Keeper no more. On the last day of the time fixed by him, the skeely man was thatching a cottage at the Woollaw.

Suddenly he felt something touch him, as though the wing of a bird had brushed by. He came down the ladder on which he stood, and it seemed as though the bird's feathers had brushed against his heart, and had come from a place where the cold and ice are not cold and ice as mortals know them, for "he was seized," says the chronicler, "with a cold trembling."

Some power, too strong for his own skill to combat, had laid hold on him, and shivering, still shivering, he fell into the hands of Death.

Such was the pa.s.sing of Percival Reed, Keeper of Redesdale, who took with him, when at length he relinquished his charge, a humble henchman, a hind of the Rede Valley.

DANDY JIM THE PACKMAN

It was the back end of the year. The crops were all in, and but little was left of the harvest moon that had seen the Kirn safely won on the farms up "Ousenam" Water. A disjaskit creature she looked as the wind drove a scud of dark cloud across her pale face, or when she peered over the black bank below her, only to be hidden once more by an angry drift of rain. It was no night for lonely wayfarers. Oxnam and Teviot were both in spate, and their moan could be heard when the wind rested for a little and allowed the fir trees to be still. Only for very short intervals, however, did the tireless wind cease, and always, after a short respite, the trees were attacked again, and made to beck and bow their dark heads like the nodding plumes of a hea.r.s.e. The road from Crailing was in places dour with mud, heavy-rutted by harvest carts, with ever and anon a great puddle that stretched across from ditch to ditch. But dismal or not dismal, the night had apparently no evil effect on the spirits of the one man who was trudging his homeward way from Crailing to Eckford.

Dandy Jim, the packman, was a young fellow who wanted more than evil weather and a dreich, black night to depress him. A fine, upstanding lad he was, with a glib English tongue that readily sold his wares, and which, along with a handsome, merry face, helped him with ease into the good graces of those whom he familiarly knew as "the la.s.ses." Dandy Jim had had many a flirtation, but now he felt that his roving days were nearly past. He was seriously thinking of matrimony.

"She's a bonny la.s.s," thought he contemplatively, dwelling on the charms of the young cook at the farmhouse he had left just past midnight, "bonny and thrifty, and as fond o' a laugh as I am mysel. That bit shop as ye come out o' Hexham, with red roses growing up the front o't, and fine-scented laylock bushes at the back, that would do us fine...."

And so, safely wrapped up in happy plans and in thoughts of his apple-cheeked lady-love, Jim manfully splashed through puddles and tramped through mud, conscience free, and fearful of nothing in earth or out of it. The graveyard at Eckford possessed no horrors for him.

"Bogles," quoth he, "what's a bogle? I threw muckle Sandy, the wrestler, at Lammas Fair, an' pity the bogle that meddles wi' me."

But, nevertheless, Jim, glancing towards the old church with its surrounding tombstones as he went by, saw something he did not expect, and quickly checked the defiant whistle that is, somehow, an infallible aid to the courage of even the bravest. There was a light over there among the graves, a flickering light that the wind lightly tossed, and that, somehow, did not suggest likeable things, even to Dandy Jim.

Stock-still he stood for a couple of minutes watching the yellow glimmer among the tombstones, and then, with grim suspicion in his mind, he walked up to the churchyard gate. Nowadays we have only an occasional "watch-tower" in an old kirkyard, or a rusted iron cage over a gra.s.s-grown grave to remind us of times when human hyaenas prowled abroad after nightfall, and carried off their white, cold prey to be chaffered for by surgeons for the dissecting-rooms. But Dandy Jim's day was the day of Burke and Hare, of Dr. Knox, and of many another murderous and scientific ghoul, and a lantern's gleam in a churchyard in the small hours usually meant but one thing. As he expected, a gig stood at the churchyard gate; a bony, strong-shouldered, chestnut mare tethered to the gate-post, munching, mouth in nose-bag. In the gig was a sack, standing upright--a remarkably tall sack, five foot ten high at least, stiffly balanced against the seat.

"Aye, aye," said Jim to himself, "it was a six-foot coffin when they planted Jock the day. Him an' me was much of an age and of a height, poor lad; and here he is now, off to Edinburgh to be made mincemeat of."

But even as he thought, he acted. The mare threw up an inquiring head as she felt a light step in the gig, and a sudden lightening of her load.

But the wind wailed round the church and the rain beat down, dimming the gla.s.s in the flickering lantern, and every now and then Jim could hear a pick striking against a stone or a heavy thud as of a spadeful of damp earth being beaten down. Out of the gig came the sack, and out of the sack speedily came the packman's erstwhile acquaintance, Jock. A gap in the hedge across the road conveniently accommodated Jock's unresisting body, over he went into the next field, and once again the mare started as Dandy Jim sprang into the gig with one bound and quickly struggled into the empty sack. He was only just in time. A parting clatter of pickaxe and thud of spade, a swing of the lantern, that sent a yellow light athwart some grey old headstones, rough voices and hasty steps, and two men appeared, pushed their implements into the back of the gig, released the mare from her nose-bag, clambered in, one on either side of the upright sack, and drove off at a quick trot.

For some time they proceeded in silence.

"A good haul," at last one man remarked; "a young chap--in fine condition."

"A heavy load for the little mare," said he who held the reins; "fifteen stone if he's a pound. Not an easy one to tackle afore he died for want o' breath."

Packman Jim lurched against the speaker ere the words were well out of his mouth. With an oath the man shoved him back, and Jim stiffly leaned against the seat in as nearly the att.i.tude of the corpse, to whom he was acting as understudy, as he was able to a.s.sume. They had got a little beyond Kalefoot, and the flooded river was sending its moaning voice above the sough of the wind and the drip of the rain when one of the men spoke again to his companion. His voice was husky, and he spoke in a low tone as though he feared some eavesdropper.

"Before G.o.d, man," he said, "I can feel the body moving." The other, in his voice all the horror of a dread he had been trying to hide, answered in a shrill scream, "It's _warm_, I tell ye!--the corpse is _warm!_"

Then came Dandy Jim's opportunity. His face was white enough in the uncertain glimmer of the gig's lamps when he thrust his head out of the sack and looked first at one and then at another of his companions. In a deep and hollow voice he spoke:

"If you had been where I hae been, your body would burn too," said he.

A screech and a roar were, according to Dandy Jim, the result of his remark, and on either side of the gig a man cast himself out into the darkness, the rain, and the mud, and ran--ran--in heedless terror for an unknown sanctuary. What happened to the pair no subsequent historian has recorded, but when Dandy Jim shortly afterwards wed an apple-cheeked cook and took up his abode in a rose-covered cottage near Hexham, he no longer trudged the Border roads with a pack on his back, but drove a useful gig, drawn by a very willing, strong-shouldered, chestnut mare.

THE VAMPIRES OF BERWICK AND MELROSE

At Berwick-on-Tweed a man had died. In life he was a man of much weight, one of the wealthiest of the freemen. He did his good deeds with pomp.

The devoutness of his religion was visible for every man to see, and his look of sanct.i.ty as he went to pray was surely an example and a reproach to every rough mariner whose boat was moored in the harbour beneath the walls.

But when death came to him, an evil thing befell the reputation of that holy man of means.

Those tongues that had been tied in his lifetime began to wag. The dark pa.s.sages of his history, of the doors to which he had held the keys, were thrown open. And a horrified town discovered that their respected fellow-citizen had been a man of foul life, guilty of many a fraud and of many a crime, and that a dog's death had been too good a death for him. What wonder that every decent person in the town spoke of him with horror? But the horror they had of him who had so deceived them was but a little thing when compared with the hideous dread that the impostor inspired ere he had lain for a week in his grave in Berwick. Men who lived in those days had many an evil thing to dread, for wolves, ghouls, and vampires were as terribly real to them as in our day are the microbes of cancer, of fever, or of tuberculosis. And when a man who was notoriously a sinner came to his end, there was in the grave no rest for him, nor was there peace for his fellow-men. Night after night he was sure to rise from his tomb and go a-hunting for a human prey. He sucked blood, and so drained the life of the innocent clean away. He devoured human flesh. He chased his victims as though he were a mad dog, sending them crazed by his bite, or worrying and mangling them to a dreadful death.

This citizen, then, was not likely to rest in peace, and but a night or two after the earth had been heaped over his grave, he was up and out and rushing through the dark streets where his decorous footsteps had so often fallen solidly by day, so often slunk stealthily by night.

By Satan's agency he was set free, all men averred, yet the master that he had faithfully served did but little to pleasure him. For all the night through, as long as darkness lasted, the dead sinner was hunted through the deserted streets by a pack of baying h.e.l.l-hounds. Round the walls, down by the quay, up Hyde Hill, through the Scots Gate, down lanes and byeways and back again round the walls--a weariful hunt it was. Thankfully must the quarry have welcomed the first streaks of light on the grey sea line, when the chase was ended and he was permitted to rest in his coffin once more.

Only the bravest durst venture out of doors after dusk, and the good people of Berwick lay a-trembling in their beds as the hunt swept past their very doors, and the blood-curdling howls of the hounds turned their hearts to water within them.