Taken by the Border Rebel
Page 21
The Storwicks, he noted, to their credit, were kind to the lad. Well, some said being touched made one closer to God.
They did, he noticed, steer clear of Belde. Cate’s dog stayed closer to her than usual, overwhelmed, perhaps, by the stench of too many Storwicks in one room. Johnnie might be her husband, but the beast had never relinquished responsibility for her.
Rob lifted his voice, finally, after the dancing was done. Bessie and Thomas danced as well as Rob sang. They’d even persuaded Rob to take a step or two with Stella, though his father always said Brunsons did not dance.
Perhaps his father had been wrong.
Still, Rob sang better than he danced. And that night, they sang all the Brunson tunes. The one about the dog, the one about Bessie going to court, and finally, the Brunson Ballad, all the countless verses of it.
He even sang the one he had written for Hobbes Storwick, happy to raise a toast to the man along with his kin.
‘I’ve a new song tonight,’ he said, ‘in honour of this day.’
A Brunson man is tall and strong
And stubborn as the day is long
But one was lost and now he’s found
By the Storwick woman, come around
Brunson and Storwick applauded together when he was done.
‘I think that’s what happened,’ Stella whispered, much later, when they were alone in the head man’s bed. ‘I think the Lost Storwick was the one who saved the First Brunson.’
He smiled. Still fanciful, sometimes, his Stella was. ‘Maybe.’
‘Well, someone did. He didn’t just rise from the dead.’
‘I suppose,’ he said. ‘Although he might have been the man who found her. After all, they called her Leitakona. That means the woman who both sought and found.’
She was beaming again. ‘And then she was lost no more.’
Author’s Afterword
This book concludes the stories of the Brunson family. And it brings me, finally, to the incident that inspired the entire series.
As I’ve tried to show, the history of the Borders, real or imagined, is carried by its ballads. And one of the most famous of them is ‘The Ballad of Johnnie Armstrong’. It tells the story of the time King James V came to the Borders to prove he could, indeed, keep order in his own kingdom.
From what we can tell of the truth, Johnnie Armstrong, or Johnnie of Gilnocke, was one of the most notorious raiders on the Borders. And to the local people he had preyed upon, bringing the man to justice might have been a welcome relief. Indeed, a few years after, Sir David Lindsay, King James’s in-house playwright, made mention of it in one of his productions.
But history is written—or rewritten—by the storytellers. And the composer of Johnnie’s ballad saw it a bit differently. According to the ballad, Johnnie, the ‘King of the Borders’, was murdered when he was lured to a meeting with the King by a ‘loving letter’ that insisted he come unarmed.
He did, with forty retainers, dressed in their finest splendour to honour the King, whereupon the King called him a traitor. Armstrong begged for his life, and that of his men, offering the King all manner of gifts, including ‘four-and-twenty milk-white steeds’ if he were spared. His final offer was that the King should receive yearly rent, more accurately, the ‘blackmail’ from all dwellers in the area of the Borders where Johnnie held sway, ‘Gilnockie to Newcastleton.’
Alas, to no avail. Seeing he was to die, Johnnie made an impassioned speech, claiming he had never harmed a Scot, but only the English—and so had served the King well.
It’s hard to summon sympathy for the King in the ballad, so deceitful that he tricks his subject into a trap. The song also suggests the King was jealous of Johnnie’s fine clothes, another less-than-admirable trait. As he realises he is to die, Johnnie says
I have asked grace at a graceless face,
But there is none for my men and me.
…
I would have kept the Border side
In spite of thy peers and thee.
So poor Johnnie and his men were hanged and lived no more. Neither, legend has it, did the trees from which they swung.
I wanted to rewrite the story. I wanted Johnnie Armstrong to have a happy ending.
And so rode my Brunsons.
There are parallels to truth in my tale. The Brunsons may remind some of the Armstrongs. Some aspects of Thomas Carwell’s story were inspired by the Maxwell family, though my families are all imaginary.
King James, of course, is not. James V really did travel to the Borders during the summers of 1529 and 1530, trying desperately to restore order to what was the most lawless ground on the island. Some suggest he had something to prove to his uncle, King Henry VIII of England. You can trace James’s itineraries and he did travel as far west as Dumfries, where Thomas Carwell lived.
But the rest, Brunsons, Storwicks and Carwell, never existed.
At least, I don’t think they did. But on the Borders, it is not always easy to tell.
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
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First published in Great Britain 2013
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited.
Harlequin (UK) Limited, Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road,
Richmond, Surrey TW9 1SR
© Wendy B Gifford 2013
eISBN: 978-1-472-00368-3
Table of Contents
Excerpt
About the Author
Author Note
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Copyright