Three bullets fired from calivers were found in his body. His widow had these carefully extracted, with the intention of returning them to Claude Hamilton with terrible interest; and thrice she dipped the dead man's dagger in the blood that oozed from his wounds, with the hope that, in a future time, her oldest boy might cleanse the blade in the blood of the slayer.
Dame Alison was a fierce and stern woman, "animated by such terrible passions as the heroines of the middle ages alone possessed." The partner and partaker of all her husband's ideas, his rights and wrongs—real or imaginary,—she now became inspired by one prevailing thought, and one only—revenge;—and so absorbed was she by this devouring passion, that nothing in this world seemed to possess the least interest or value, unless it might feed this demon, or further the terrible object she had in view. Secluded in her gloomy tower, with her two sons, William and Florence at her knee, she told them a thousand times the dark, bloody story of the old hereditary feud and hate—of their father's fall, and how, when tall men and strong soldiers, they must avenge it, by slaying him who proved his destroyer in time of truce and tryst—slaying him as they would a wolf in his den, or a serpent in his lair. And as she poured these wild incentives to future bloodshed into their boyish ears, she would point to where the tower of Preston reared its tall grim outline between them and the sea, and say such things as such a mother, living in that wild age and warlike land, alone could say, till the little impulsive hearts of the boys panted like her own, in anticipation of the hour that would lay Hamilton at their feet, and avenge that day's slaughter on Gladsmuir and Fawside brae.
She gave each one of the bullets found in her husband's corpse; the third she reserved and wore at her neck, with the intention that if her sons' hands failed her when they grew to manhood, she had still one left for vengeance in her own.
She would have appealed to the king; but the house of Hamilton was then in the zenith of its power, and complaints against one of a sept so numerous could find no echo at Falkland or at Holyrood; and so the years passed on.
Because Sir John had died unconfessed, and had been suspected of Lollardy, the Vicar of Tranent had at first refused him Church rites. For this affront, the stern dame denied him the corse-presents exacted then by the priests, and until the Reformation, in 1559—to wit, the best cow of the deceased; the umest-claith, or uppermost covering on the bed whereon he lay, together with the silver commonly called Kirk-richts; and farther, she threatened to send Westmains with a troop of horse, to burn both kirk and vicarage about the ears of his reverence.
Yearly, on the anniversary of her husband's fall, she went, with hair dishevelled, feet bare, and a taper in her hand, to hear mass said for his soul, in the church of Tranent; and after the service, with an irreverence which even the old vicar failed to restrain, she invoked the curses of Heaven on the Hamiltons of Preston. Her sons heard these things; they sank deep into their little hearts, and absorbed all their thoughts.
Often when she prayed at her husband's tomb (it had now become her altar) she imagined that strange sounds came from it; that she heard him chiding her delay in avenging him in this world and joining him in the next; and these morbid fancies fostered yet more her spirit of revenge.
By her injunctions, the gudeman of Westmains left nothing undone to render the boys hardy, stout, and athletic, and expert in the use of weapons of every kind; thus, ere William, the eldest, who possessed great comeliness of face and beauty of person, had reached his twelfth year, he was master of the sword and dagger, the bow and arquebuse; and he could toss a pike, pitch a bar, or handle a quarterstaff with the best man in the barony. His brother Florence had gone to France, as page in the suite of Anne de la Tour de Vendome (the widowed duchess of the regent, John of Albany), who had promised Lady Alison he would return the most accomplished cavalier in Scotland; and, as related, he had now been seven years absent.
Fired by the story which his mother never ceased repeating and enforcing, by touching references to the empty chair which stood unused by the hall fire, to the unused plate that was placed daily on the hall table, to keep alive the memory of the slain man whose rusty arms and mouldering garments were hung in conspicuous places, and to all of which Dame Alison hourly drew the attention of her boys,—fired by the reiteration of all this, one evening, in the autumn of 1541, when Hamilton of Preston had just returned from the battle of Haldenrig, where the army of Henry VIII. had been defeated with considerable slaughter, William Fawside, then in his fourteenth year, without consulting his mother, Father John of Tranent, or his warlike preceptor, old Roger of the Westmains, presented himself at the iron gate of Preston tower, and, while his swelling heart beat high and his smooth cheek flushed crimson with the consciousness of his own audacity, he demanded of the surly and bearded warder admittance to the laird. The servants of the latter narrowly and insolently scrutinized the boy, who bore the arms of his house, gules, a fess between three besants, worked in crimson and gold on the breast of his velvet doublet.
"See that he has nae weapon—nae sting aboot him, the young wasp!" said Symon Brodie, the butler, whose name and convivial habits have come down to us in a famous old drinking song.