In the year 1547, when the little Mary Queen of Scots was a chubby child of five years old, and her turbulent and rebellious kingdom, then wavering between Catholicism and a new faith, for which there was no other name but Heresy, was governed by the somewhat feeble authority of a regent, in the person of James Hamilton, second Earl of Arran, and next heir to the throne, the tower of Fawside was inhabited by Dame Alison Kennedy, widow of Sir John Fawside, who had been slain in a feud by the Hamiltons of Preston; and this stern woman—for singularly stern she was by nature—was a Kennedy of the house of Colzean, and cousin of that ferocious Earl of Cassilis, who, thirty-three years after the epoch of this our history, deliberately roasted Allan Stewart, commendator of Crossraguel, before a blazing fire, having first denuded him of his clothes, and basted him well with grease; and there, sputtering like a huge turkey, the hapless priest was turned upon a spit, until, with his scorched and shrivelled hand, he signed a charter, gifting all the lands of his abbey unto the earl and his heirs.
On the evening of the 1st of August, the Feast of St. Peter ad Vincula (or the Festival of the Chains), 1547, this lady was seated at the northern window of her hall, gazing with fixed and anxious eyes over the tract of country that lay between her castle and the sea. Untouched and neglected, her ivory-mounted spinning-wheel stood near her; close by were six other wheels of plainer construction, evincing that she and the women of her little household had been spinning since the time of dinner, which, in those stirring days, was taken at the hour of twelve.
The sun was setting beyond the purple hills of Dunblane, and its golden gleam lit all the far-extending shores of Lothian and of Fife, with their gray bluffs, green bays, and sandy beaches, the straggling burghs of Grail and Kinghorn, and many a fisher-village, all dark and weather-beaten by the stormy gales that blow from the German Sea. At anchor in Musselburgh Bay were a few of those small craft which were then termed topmen, from their peculiar rigging, and which traded with the low countries in wool, skins, salmon, cloth, silks, and wine. They had huge square poops, and low prows beaked with iron, and were always well equipped with falcons, crossbows, and arquebusses, as a defence against English pirates and Moorish rovers.
Save where a few cottages and a clump of trees dotted the slope here and there, the country was all open between the tower in which the lady sat, and the green knoll crowned by St. Michael's Kirk of Inveresk, and the high antique bridge and the thatched or stone-slated houses of the "honest town" of Musselburgh. This venerable municipality was then terminated on the westward by a beautiful chapel, dedicated to our Lady of Loretto, to whose shrine the late King James V., with taper in hand and feet and head bare, had made more than one pilgrimage for the health of his first queen, Magdalene of Valois, and of his second, Mary of Lorraine; for this old shrine shared all the fame and sanctity of its elder prototype in Italy. A great part of the adjacent town was in ruins, just as it had been left by the English after their invasion under Lord Hertford, three years before the date of our story.
Below the hill of Inveresk lay a deep and dangerous morass, named the Howe Mire, then the haunt of the heron, the wild goose, and coot, the water kelpie, and the will-o'-the-wisp.
Three miles distant from the window at which Dame Alison was seated rose the high and narrow tower of Preston; and when her wandering eyes fell on its grim dark mass, they flashed with a hateful glare, while the gloom of her pale anxious brow grew darker, and its stern lines more deep; for she hated the race of Hamilton, to whom it belonged, with all the hate an old Scottish feud inspired.
On the green slope of Fawside Hill the shepherds, grey-plaided and bonneted, were driving home to fold and penn the flocks which had browsed there the livelong harvest day; and these were all of that old Scottish breed which is now completely extinct, but was small, active, and keen-eyed, with tawny faces, hairy wool, and well-curved yellow horns.
The quiet evening aspect of the pastoral landscape on which the lady gazed was not made more lively by the grisly forms of two dead men hanging upon the arm of an oak tree about a bow-shot from the tower gate, where the black rooks and ravenous gleds were perching or wheeling in circles round them. These unfortunates had been "hangit in their buits," as they phrased it in those days, by order of the baroness; for there was then a law "that ilk baron might cleanse his lands of trespassers thrice in the year;" so, on finding two on her estate of Fawside, she ordered them to be hanged, and, in five minutes thereafter, old Roger of the Westmains, her bailie, had them dangling from an arm of the dule tree. Her neighbours averred that this severity was exercised because the culprits bore the name of Hamilton; and a greater horror was added to the episode by the discovery that certain portions of their limbs had been abstracted in the night,—"Doubtless," said the bailie, "by the witches of Salt Preston, for the furtherance of their damnable cantrips."
"Half-past eight," muttered Lady Alison, as the last segment of the ruddy sun sank behind the dark peak of Dumeyat, "and no sign's yet of horse or man upon the upland road. Woe to you, Westmains, for a loitering fool! Thou art too old to scourge, and too faithful to hang, or, by my husband's grave, my mood to-night would give thee to one or other—the rod or the rope!"
As she spoke her thoughts aloud, in that manner peculiar to those who think deeply and are much alone, she beat the paved floor passionately with the high heel of her shoe. There she sat alone in that quaint old hall, with the shadows of night closing around her—alone, because she was a woman whom, from her stern nature and wayward humour, many feared and few loved.