The superstitions are over with now.  She let the servants cover the looking glasses and open the windows.  They placed bread and salt on Katy’s chest whilst John and her older boys sat through the lykewake for days as she begged and prayed that Katy would awake, her cheery self again.  But she didn’t.

The child is kisted now, the dead bell rung and the men have carried her through the kirkyard, to the edge of this stark, open grave dug deep into the damp earth of the Carse.  A sombre crowd stand in the drizzle.

Janet, Katherine’s eldest, stands pale but tearless.  Her youngest, John, bides home with a nurse.  Only William and Bessie shed tears for their dead sister though Katherine wants to scream as the men lower her daughter into a hole already filling up with rain.

The minister, steps forward, paper in hand.  John Craigengelt is a dour, useless pastor. The babe in Katherine’s belly kicks against her diaphragm flushing out a memory of Katy kicking just so ten years before. Craigengelt clears his throat.  His paper is wilting in the rain.

“It is I know expected I should speak somewhat of little Catherine;,” he begins. ”And why should I frustrate your expectation?  For these speeches should not be Panegyrics, only to sing the praises of the dead but rather instructions for the living.  Yet I see not why their due commendations, because of their excellent though child-like virtues, should be suppressed, since God, in them, by them, is glorified and others edified. 

And hath not the Holy Spirit told us, in Proverbs Chapter Ten Verse Seven, that, as the memory of the wicked shall rot, so the memory of the just shall be blessed. The righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance as it says in Psalms Chapter One hundred and Twelve. Verse Six.  If with God, why not with man?”

It is not his sermon.  She knows it is taken from a book with her daughter’s name inserted here and there.  John seems less stoic now, irritated as he realises the Minister has brought a tome to read-out.  John likes bairns best when they are Katy’s age. Old enough to be smart and cheeky but not yet changed into their adult form.  So, Katy and her brother, John, are…were…is his current delight.  He teaches them tricks and crafts and contrivances, takes them out on her parks or about his enterprises, playful; not to learn his trades like his older sons.

He will miss her laughter about the house in Alloa amidst the hubbub of servants and their remaining seven children.

Craigengelt drones on, a dreep forming at the end of his nose.  Damp seeps through of her woolen coat.  Her daughter lies, waiting for the minister to finish, in the puddle below.

“The eyes of all who knew her, the tongues of all who heard of her do abundantly testify, not a private but a public sorrow. And shall we condemn that, which God and Nature commands? Christ and his Saints practised it. We find the Patriarchs and holy men mourning over their dead. Our blessed Saviour shed tears over Lazarus.  Shall it then be strange if we behold her worthy parents lifting up their voices with cries, being deprived of such a divided piece of themselves?”

Katherine’s reserve begins to crumble.  There have been so many deaths in her family in these last few years.  Is some murderous Justice is catching up with them?

Her own mother died giving birth to her: Katherine was her third child. 

Her father was a laird with lands at Costerhouse near Musselborough then. He had not yet slithered up to greatness. Her mother was from Pitcullo in Coupar.  They were cousins; both Balfours. Her grandfather was apparently a great man, a lawyer who rowed as a galley-slave with Master Knox after the siege of St. Andrews Castle.

Katherine was just William’s age when her father married again. He married the divorced daughter of the Earl of Errol. She doesn’t recall much of her father then.  He was well in with the King in those days and spent his time in Edinburgh whilst her step-mother moved in to Pitcullo House.

“Not to mourn, is not only graceless, but unnatural.” Craignelter says.

She didn’t mourn her father when he died two years ago.  Only the ruin he brought on them.

He and his older brother, Michael, followed the King as ‘Grooms of the Bedchamber’ when King James went South to take his English throne. Her father abandoned her in Coupar when she was Bessie’s age. 

Bessie will be Wee Katy’s age soon, God willing, and John will dote on her.  How would she feel if John abandoned Bessie and took away the step-mother she was barely getting used to?

“To be immoderate in our mourning is not Christian but Heathenish.”

After her father died, her older brothers sued one another for their his title of Baron Glenawny. It was a costly squabble but they both inherited, for a few months, one after the other then died one after the other.

“Mourn then we may, we should, but to exceed in our mourning as those who have no hope, we may not, we should not.”

Her father was an ambitious man.  Exploiting the King’s favour, he acquired property in Ireland that had been forfeited by rebellious earls.  Together, he and her step-mother travelled to Ireland to dispossess the Irish proprietors and their tenants, first in Antrim and then in Tyrone.  By the time she was 13, her father and uncle also held Maguire land in Fermanagh.  When she was Janet’s age, her father bought his brother’s estates in Ireland and became the largest undertaker there.  His friend, the King of Scotland, England and Ireland, made him Baron of Glenawny, a Peer. He populated his estates with ruffians and reivers from Liddesdale to evict the native Irish.

The unborn child turns again in her belly.  This is her ninth pregnancy since she married John Stein twenty years ago. She is forty-two.

The mourners are soaked through and the paper is soggy in the Minister’s hands.  Some are shivering.  Droukit.  She worries for her children in this chill.

“Here indeed on earth we have distinction of states, callings, persons, and that justly; but Pallida Mors, this change doth equal all.  You know the comparison of the chess men.  While the play lasts, there is distinction of them; being esteemed as they may best serve our purpose.  But the play ended, and check-mate given, all promiscuously are hurled in the box and often the least lies above the greatest.”

Had she been her father’s pawn then? 

She married John in the year the King visited Alloa and stayed with the Earl of Mar.  Until then, her father had never visited her since he left for London and she had never been to visit him in England or in Ireland.  But he came with his pal, the King, to Alloa and summoned her to join him.  She was twenty-two.  He said she should be married.  She wondered who in King James’ court he had in mind until he introduced her to Mr. John Stein, burgess of Alloa.

The Steins had held land around Clackmannan for generations but are not noble.  John’s grandfather began distilling whisky for profit after the Reformation and the next generations extended their interest to coal and salt, manufacturing those commodities for export to Edinburgh and farther afield. Their profits afforded them a fine dwelling house in Alloa.  She realised it was Stein that her father intended her to marry.

A pawn then?  More precisely, collateral for a loan.

Her father was the biggest landowner in Fermanagh with estates in Knockninny and Magherastephana, but Ireland is a wild place and hard to draw a profit from.  There were costs in bigging up Castle Balfour near Lisnaskea.   Good tenants were hard to come by and the dispossessed Popish natives were not to be trusted.  His tenants there were mostly broken Borderers, Elliotts and Armstrongs, offered transplantation as an alternative to the noose.  An injection of capital was necessary.  Katherine brought no tocher but the promise of connection and, in time, rank.

His second wife died not long after she and John married and, at fifty-five, her father transacted to marry a fifteen year old girl, Anne Blayney, who brought a tocher of £1200. But after the wedding, he reneged on the settlement claiming the girl had been unchaste before and after their wedding.  Lawsuits festered into feud.  Her half-sister’s husband was murdered by the Blayney faction when she was just nineteen, the age of Katherine’s eldest now.  His obduracy bankrupted him.  The Irish estates were sold for £3000 a few months before he died, intestate.  The title lapsed with her older brother Alexander who had no heir.  Whatever loan John was owed was never repaid.

Nevertheless, together the Steins prospered and made children whilst her father ruined himself, as a man and as a proprietor, by scandalous stratagems and his feud with the Blawneys. 

All of which might have been a tale told behind a screen, a distant if pernicious disappointment, were it not for the deaths of the Barons one after the other, the suspicion of recent and historic iniquities and now the death of her bonny daughter, as if God’s judgement, like contagion, penetrated the screen.  Does the bible not say unto the fourth generation?

The ink must be blurring on the Minister’s page.

“So here, though… men be more… regarded … the … differences… yet when …the play of this life is ended, then… we are equally hurled… in the ..in the grave… a poor man’s dust lies above the rich.  When ye behold…a heap of bones, who can say… here are the rich mans, there are the poor’s?”

Rich or poor?  Great or common?

She wants the sextons to fill in the grave and spare wee Katy any more of this rain. She cups her swollen belly through the sodden fabric of her dress. John looks as if he might murder the Minister where he stands. At least, she reflects, she has a home.

© John Bolland 2026