They brought him up on a hurdle at about four o'clock in the afternoon on the eleventh of November and there was still light in the sky, which she has always been grateful for and has never said so to anybody.
Callum Kerr was two and twenty.
He had been in the water eleven hours and the river had had him a while, and there was a mark on the back of his head that the priest looked at for a long time and did not mention in the hall.
Their father was at Ayr.
That is the thing that decided everything and nobody in that house has ever said it out loud: Kerr of Kerrsyde was at Ayr on the eleventh of November on a matter of a wardship, and he did not get back until the fourteenth.
So it was his daughter who went out into the yard.
She was five and twenty and she had run that household since her mother died in 1516, and she went out into the yard at four o'clock in the afternoon and put her hand on her brother's face and looked at the back of his head, and then stood up and said four things in the following order, in a voice that eleven people afterwards described as entirely level.
That he was to be taken into the chapel and not the hall.
That Effie was to fetch the two women from the mill.
That nobody was to ride anywhere at all until her father came back, and that if any man on that ground put a foot in a stirrup before the fourteenth she would know his name within the hour.
And that somebody was to go down to the ford and find his horse, because a horse standing over a man all night is a horse that has been standing over a man all night, and she wanted to know whether the beast had come back on its own or been brought.
Nobody in that yard had ever heard a woman ask that fourth question.
The man who went was called Tam and he was nineteen and he came back at six with a grey gelding and a bridle with a broken cheek strap and a report that took him about four minutes.
Ailsa Kerr listened to all four minutes.
Then she went into the chapel and shut the door and stayed there for about an hour with her brother, on her own, and what she said in there she has never told anybody, but she came out at seven and did not weep again in front of a living soul until 1529.
Here is what she had told him in the October, in the yard, in the rain, with his foot already in the stirrup.
"You will be killed at that ford."
"Ailsa — "
"You go down there at night, four miles from your own door, with drink in you, three or four times a week, to a woman my father will not have in this house. And there are four Blackwoods within three miles of that water.
"And I am telling you," she said, "in this yard, on the fourteenth of October, that you will be killed at that ford."
And Callum Kerr laughed at her, and kissed the top of her head, which he had done since she was nine, and rode out.