Jonette Burne is almost ready. Her youngest sister, Marion, chides her to keep still as she plaits another hank of Jonette’s hair and pins it in with the others amidst the ornate arrangement Jonette cannot yet see. Elline, her middle sister – the pretty one – stands before her, eyes alight with mischief and excitement.
They have draped a shawl over the shoulders of the dress, her figure cinched tight(ish) in her pale grey bodice.
The second bell for the first sermon has already rung out across Falkirk’s knot of a hundred houses, calling all good folk. These days, they all have to be good – or at least seem so.
“Hurry,” she says.
Marion pats the top of her head. “There, aa done.”
As the three sisters leave the small upstairs bedchamber, Elline jokes, “At least there’ll be mair space in bed the night,”
Jonette feels another wave of dread. She turns back to imprint the small upstairs room where she and her sisters have slept through childhood into maidenhood. A four-poster bed, a kist, a straight backed chair. Linen and coverlets. Kern idols and sweet herbs. And the chaos of their collective dressing and undressing.
This is the end of that intimate sisterhood. Tonight, she will sleep beside Gilbert who probably snores and will, in any case, be drunk by then.
“Aye, fur you!” she says.
For Elline and for who else? she wonders.
Her father would turn in his grave if he knew Elline was sneaking Johne Mitchell into their bedchamber whilst her mother snored in her chamber. Just for a kiss and a cuddle, Elline insists, and never without Jonette and Marion for company. So, the two sisters lie in the bed they share whilst Elline and John canoodle on the other side of the chaumer. Marion keeps a keener eye on the pair than Jonette does: but that is maybe just curiosity.
And curiosity can be a snare. Now there will be one less chaperone to keep her pretty sister chaste.
That chaumer. Her sisters’ bodies. Intimacies. Marion is windy in the night. Elline talks in her sleep. The Jonette and Marion giggle at her prattling. And here is Jonette, courted but (almost) never kissed, about to become a woman.
They are on the stair that leads down to the shop when they hear the pipes, awkward and squeaky as the bag fills and the piper adjusts his drone. Piping? On a Sabbath morning? A frissance of dread and awe shivers through her. A tariff will have to be paid for Gilbert’s mischief, a knowing transgression to make her wedding day special.
“Yer aal man’s a rogue,” Elline says.
“Aye, right fae the wedding bed tae the stool,” Marion says. “I hope ye’ll can sit comfortably!”
Elline giggles. Jonette isn’t convinced that will be a problem.
At the foot of the narrow stairway, her mother, still sombre in the widow’s weeds she will not set aside, is having kittens.
“Is this you?” she says.
“Nae me.”
“Fur you?”
“I’d hae thocht so.” Jonette cannot help but grin.
“An will ye be coverin yer heid in the kirk?”
“No the day, mither,” she says, resolved.
The piper’s tuning has unfankled into a tune. The wedding party is on the street outside. There are about twenty folk in all, as well-dressed as they can manage and wearing an unusual amount of colour for a Sunday. All the women’s heads are covered except Jonette’s. The privilege of a bride. She hopes the Minister and Elders will see it so. The piper will be another matter.
Gilbert stands beside his hired piper, beaming.
He is a grizzled old thing. Older than her mother. Older than her father was but not yet dead. When he first came about to court. Jonette thought that it was her mother he was after. Sly old boar. But her mother knew better from the start; she put up with the indignities, though the piper might be the last straw.
Jonnete’s grandfather was a merchant-burgess in Dunfermline. The Mungalls are only maltsters from Mungill. Gilbert has his malthouse in the town and is well in with the Maltsters Guild these days.
Before he died, Jonette’s father sold Gilbert’s malt to Edinburgh brewers. So, the old rogue was always about the booth when her father was alive, haggling over the ale he always brought with him as a sweetener, though whether it was to sweeten her father’s company or his own cares she could never tell.
Jonette’s soon-to-be-husband beams at her from across the dubby street, a look that inspires a certain amount of affection amidst the general dread she feels. With his blue bunnet at a jaunty angle and his waistcoat askew, he has, at least, had someone shave his face.
And the piper!
The third bell is ringing.
Gilbert is a widower. His first wife and his two wee girls were taken by ‘God’s wrath’ fifteen years ago, quarantined on the Burgh Muir in a miserable hovel. Whatever food they received had to be left at the boundary of the Muir for whoever was well-enough to collect it for them; first his wife and then Gilbert. His bairns are buried in unhallowed ground outside the town. He was infected too but survived and, eventually, the Burgesses allowed him to return to the town.
In the months after that, they say, he was a distraught and bitter man. And who might not be, losing a young wife and two daughters under ten? As the wedding party begins to follow the piper to the kirk, Jonette reflects that his dishevelment then suggests a capacity for love. And that’s a comfort.
But will he love her?
Walking by his side, she cannot detect a whiff of drink off him above the reek of the middens. It is the Sabbath so, perhaps…though it seems unlikely.
Her betrothed is no stranger to the stool of repentance. An occupational hazard, he explains, since the kirk added drunkenness to its list of ‘crimes’, after fornication, adultery, Sabbath breaking and vagrancy.
Not that there had been any hochmagandy with Jonette: not even since their betrothal and the reading of the banns. That could wait – as long as possible as far as Jonette is concerned. Perhaps she should have taken the risk earlier, when she had been tempted by handsome young men and boys ambitious to find a cheap entry into the merchant guild. But a young woman’s reputation for virtue is a precious thing and besides, her father was fussy and Elline, only two years younger, quickly surpassed her as the eligible daughter.
So now she’ll surrender her body to grey haired Gilbert, maltman and toper. That said, on this Sunday noon, there seems to be life in the old goat yet.
Up the street ahead, one of the Session Elders ducks into a vennel as they approach. Elders snoop around the houses of the town every Sunday, spying whilst the minister preaches, spotting anyone breaking the sabbath by working, taking exercise, drinking or failing to attend the kirk[i].
Chosen to be one of the searchers for the day, this Pharisee, apparently, has no stomach for a confrontation with their wedding party. He will pile in with the condemnation soon enough after the deed is done.
But here she is, walking to the kirk bare-headed behind a piper, feeling light now and defiant. Later strong drink will be taken and there will be feasting and promiscuous dancing in the street. Jonnete is crossing a line, not only out of maidenhood but maybe out of propriety. No longer subject to her mother’s rule but thirled to obedience to this jaunty old rogue – at least in theory. She might not even go to the second sermon this afternoon if her husband forbade her.
Gilbert explained to her, while they were courting, that, although the kirk disapproves of “avarice, oppression of the poor, excess, riotous cheer, banqueting, immoderate dancing and whoredom”, the Minister and Elders, seem less concerned with avarice or oppression but were gie hot on dancing and merry company. Christmas is cancelled. Carolling banned. There must be no bonfires on Midsummer Eve. Even the poor souls who journey on May Sundays to Christ’s Well, near the town, to seek their health are persecuted!
Fighting talk – though he was tipsy in her mother’s kitchen at the time. Gilbert is very articulate and opinionated in his cups. But his confession, of sorts, touched something in her. This is who I am.
“Aye, Gilbert. But dinna ye get caught!”
Those fines might be her fines now and her Sundays on the stool.
Gilbert says, “The fines jist go tae the poor box onyhoo. Think o it as an act o Christian charity tae mak merry an get caught.”
Elline alleges he was a notorious frequenter of Christ’s Well himself, on May Day evenings, walking out – though how would she know? She never has herself. No night walking for Patrick Burne’s daughters. As if such a thing was never heard of in Dunfermline. But Gilbert has been charged, among many others, with going to the wee trough at the base of the dyke “to seek his health.”
As with all other instances of superstition and idolatry, the Session has issued a statute on the matter; “repent in sack-cloth and linen three several Sabbaths, and pay twenty pounds scots for each fault.” If they cannot pay, miscreants are locked in the tolbooth and fed only bread and water for eight days.
Gilbert, of course, is good for the £20 donation to the poor box, at least now and again, so he avoids warding. But was he looking for his health or his hole, she wonders? Fifteen years a widower. What is a man to do? Control his iniquitous carnal impulses obviously. She wonders if, as a safely married woman, she should explore her own iniquitous carnal impulses. Glancing at her future husband, Jonette decides she might not.
He tried once, when she visited his home and malthouse. Her mother was her chaperone but both of them connived to slip away from her supervision and climb up to the malting loft together. Jonnete knew the risk. She was excited by it.
Compared to the maudlin old man she had seen in her father’s booth, Gilbert seemed alive and fair-tricket to show her around.
Maltsters and brewers had changed their methods since they squeezed the ale-wives out of the trade, he explained. Now he imported hops from England to replace myrtle and broom in the seasoning of ale. Good beer, he said, should be ‘fresshe and cleare, it must not be ropy, nor smoky, nor it must have nae wefte nor tayle.’ And drunk before it’s five days old! He grinned.
These days, he told her, beer is exported far and wide from the dark cellars in Edinburgh. It is no longer fresh. But it is cheap.
“Best drink the local stuff onywye,” he said. “An brew yer ain!” he said, slipping his arm around her waist. She was pinched against him by his strong forearm as he explained how he dried his barley over straw: oat-straw or barley-straw, wheat straw if he can get it for it is most substantial, longest lasting, makes the sharpest fire, and yields the least flame. Wood-smoked beer looks darker but is mean, he explained. He is a patient craftsman.
Perhaps it was rauch of her to resist when he tried to kiss her. It was a queer sensation. Just a sip. But here she is a virgin, no prior tasting of the brew though tonight he might drink the whole firkin.
As they come in sight of the Old Kirk’s tower, the piper unravels into silence. In the stir of expectation, Jonette wonders if that’s what she is, at 23, ‘fresshe and cleare, not ropy, nor smoky, with no wefte nor tayle’? And home brewed over a decade of house-calls and haggling.
As they step inside the kirk, the reader is finishing a verse from the Song of Songs.
Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden and eat his pleasant fruits.
The Minister is waiting to ascend to his pulpit, his scowl rehearsed. Gilbert is beaming at her and Jonette wonders what the rest of the day will bring in terms of condemnation and delight.
[i] Kirk officers receive of percentage of the fines for any hint of sexual impropriety they report to the Session. Another reason for a girl to have a care for her virtue.
© John Bolland 2026
Notes
[i] John Knox
[ii] Andrew Boorde 1542