She was five and twenty, which in that valley in that year was a settled fact about a woman rather than an age, and the reason was not her face and it was not her portion.
Hugh Maxwell of Glenlee.
She was promised to him in 1517 when she was eighteen. He was four and twenty. He had a decent tower and eleven hundred merks and a laugh you could hear from the next field, and she did not love him and had entirely made up her mind to.
He was killed at the ford at Anwy in the March of 1518, four months before the wedding, coming back from a market.
Nobody was ever charged. Nobody is ever charged.
Andrew Scott of Balgray.
She was promised to him in the June of 1520 when she was one and twenty. He was thirty and he had a stammer he was ashamed of and she liked him a great deal better than she had liked Hugh Maxwell.
He was found in a barn at Kerrsyde in the December of 1521 with his neck broken and a beam above him that four men swore was sound.
There was never an inquest that found anything, and there never is, and that is the entire nature of a feud.
There is no court in it. That is the thing people who have not lived in one cannot understand. It is not a war and it is not lawlessness — there are courts within eleven miles and they sit four times a year and men go to them about sheep.
It is that everybody knows and nobody can prove, and that the price of proving it is another four dead.
What there is instead is a sentence.
Ailsa Kerr heard it in the February of 1522 at a wedding at Craigend, through a door, from a woman she had known since she was nine.
"Well — one is a misfortune."
The other half of it was never said in her hearing and she has never once needed it to be.
By the winter of 1523 she had been promised twice and had buried both, and there was not a family in four counties that would take a Kerr girl, and her father knew it and she knew it and neither of them had ever said it.
She was five and twenty. She had a book with sixty-four names in it and a brother in the chapel and a father whose eyes had gone.
And in the January, four days after he said the number out loud, Kerr of Kerrsyde put a paper on the table and said:
"Fergus Blackwood has written to me."