The White Lady

by Brett Rutherford

Part Four of "A Northumbrian Wedding"

And now I turn, and facing me,
the polar opposite of the old invader
and his dragon visage, there stands
tall as an oak, The White Lady.

I see, again, the black-hued rats,
how dark they clot the landscape,
blotting with sable hues the fields of wheat,
spoiling the grape, and the apple harvest.

She sings with flute-like tone, “Away! Away!”
The rats stop. She waves her hand
toward the River Tyne below, to where
the rich groom’s yacht
     has shouldered out the fisher-boats.

“Away! Away!” she cries,
and the rats surge up below us,
flooding the gangplank to vanish
into the yacht’s interior. As fast
as they had come, the dark wave
of pestilence thins out, is gone.
Packed they must be in every inch
of space below the decks, all but
invisible steerage passengers,
bound like their predecessor rodents
to teeming Manhattan. “Away! Away!”
she sings again, and all
are gone and still.

                                I swoon at this,
and without knowing how, I find myself
again in the company of one
whose feet are lily-pads, who then
returned me to the wedding hall.

The bride is lovely. None seem
to notice that her pristine gown
is made entirely of small, white mice.
The groom’s cloak seems full
of raven wings and clinging martlets.
Beaks, snouts, and claws reach out
at wedding cake and goblets.
All is as planned, and as my
crisply engraved invite presaged.
Guests come in the guise of animals.
As merry it is as a Furry convention.
Though no one is drunk, the dancing
grows more and more wild as sun
sinks and a silver moon rises.

Who said that Northumberland is stern,
has never been to a Robson-Rutherford Wedding!

 

 

March 3, 2023, from a preceding night’s dream.

Lord Rutherford's Castle

 

by Brett Rutherford

Part Three of "A Northumbrian Wedding"

As crowds flow past and into the banquet hall,
I find myself alone. The barred door
of the castle keep, bronze studded with iron,
forbids my passage. I knock
my umbrella against its dark shielding.
A hollow booming echoes back — I dread
that Lord Rutherford, my cousin drear,
as much averse to weddings as to funerals,
will come running in his bathrobe,
or that some chain-mailed retainer
will pull the vast door ajar and menace
me with the very sword we brought
into this land from Flanders. But no,
my knock presumptuous just fades away.

I spy a lesser door, and stones
whose curious hand-holds pose
a challenge like some Chinese puzzle box.
Somehow my hands know where
to put themselves. With ease,
one cornerstone pulls out; the door
on a spring’d hinge just opens itself,
and in and up I go. My feet
know when to tread, and where
exactly one must side-step so as
to miss a plummeting to brain-dash.
As quick as a rabbit racing, I find
myself at the castle’s high precipice,
standing on checkerboard flagstones.

A rude stone sculpture, crumbling
and eaten away by ivy, rears up,
half-man, half-dragon, but faces in,
as though to guard from eyes the view —

And what I see! Oh, words
for once have almost failed me.
A horizon high, impossibly so,
two rivers meeting, and on
its level island, white and gold,
three towers by time unchanged:

a cathedral as new as on the day
it was completed, rainbow-hued
as its multi-colored windows
gleam brighter than the sun
without; a great, good hall
to shelter the merchant arts and serve
workman, lords, scholars and clerks;
and higher than both, a castle
beyond the dream of fairy-tales
with trees and hanging gardens blessed,
a place of neither strife nor war.

Rats at the Wedding

 by Brett Rutherford

Part Two of "A Northumbrian Wedding"

I have come
for the Robson-Rutherford wedding.
The inn’s last room is mine,
secured by my distant-cousin status.
My room overlooks the Tyne.
The castle beyond is all a-stir,
the grand hall packed with visitors.

Yet the old keep and its twisted turret
is barred and closed.
     Lord Rutherford forbids
the tread of curious idlers
upon its steep unbannistered steps,
windows unpaned; uneven-floored
the crenellated tower-top is, where
one might plummet to the very dungeon.

I pass a train depot and shelter
whose sign points out
the way to London, Edinburgh,
Paris, and Rome, though no one
seems to come or go
by either train or autobus. Indeed,
a colony of wharf-rats, obscenely fat
have taken residence on every bench
and nest in piles of yellow ticket stubs.

“Don’t mind them,” Lady Robson advises.
“As she is marrying an American,
the silly creature, we’ve drawn the rats.
Off to New York they go, and not
a moment too soon for Northumberland.”
This is an elder lady’s fantasy, I guess.

How such a Pied-Piper feat could be
accomplished was beyond my figuring.

Assuredly the rats are here for cake,
like all the distant relatives come on
with smiling insincerity and gifts
(white elephants that rotate fete to fete).

Rats, rice, and diamonds, the stuff
of weddings since ancient times.

A Gift of Daffodils

 by Brett Rutherford

Part One of "A Northumbrian Wedding"

1.

A Gift of Daffodils

“I was given the gift of daffodils.” —
“How sad,” I say. “So brief a bloom
despite the glory they bring for a day.” —
“Come see,” the old one, smiling, says.

She puts her apron aside and rises,
strutting the cobblestones on spindly legs.
Her feet, I see, end not in shoes
but wide-spread lily pads. Duck feet
could not be more sure of tread
as she led me to the shaded wall
beneath St. Cuthbert’s church. There,
tiny narcissus-daffodils peeped up.
“That’s fine,” said I, “but in a week
the petals fade and fall. Yon rose
blooms over and over again. Mistress,
I shall gift you a bed of roses.” —

“Nay, sir, with daffodils I stay,
for what I plant here, blazons
above.” Just then, as I looked up,
the organ pealed in all its octaves
and light filled from within
the ancient, stained-glass window,
not a saints suffering, or Christ a-cross,
but an endless vista of gold
and white athwart green spears,
twenty feet high and every inch
a portrait of exploding daffodils.

Where Do Rutherfords Come From?

Before the 1600s, my Rutherford ancestors vanish across the Scottish border. We came from the "Debatable Lands," a border region where bands of men called "reivers" indiscriminately plundered and killed anyone who had the misfortune to be in their way. Often both England and Scotland ignored the raids, or even encouraged them. It maintained a dangerous no-man's-land between the two countries.


The clan Rutherford of West Teviotdale of the Middle March was among them. Today they would be regarded as serial killers, as they seemed to take great pleasure and pride in their work. The reiver bands ranged from a dozen to as many as 3,000 when incursions were made far beyond the border.


Sir Walter Scott was descended from Rutherfords, and in his first published long poem, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," (1805) he relates an assassination carried out by "A hot and hardy Rutherford/ whom men called Dickon Draw-the-Sword" (Canto VI, Part VII).


The story of the Reivers and the Debatable Land is outlined here. The ruined towers and fortresses are where my ancestors wreaked havoc.

Border reivers on Wikipedia


This map, which traces the horrific feuds and battles of "The Debatable Lands," shows the original home of the Rutherfords and Robsons, my ancestors. Unfortunately the full map is out of print. But with this most recent bit of research, I now know where we came from back to the 1300s.





The town of Hawick even has an annual festival where the descendants of the fearsome Reivers dress up as borderland marauders. The principal focus of the people of Hawick appears to be RUGBY. The name of the town is pronounced "Hoick." This page traces Hawick back to the 600s (an Angle settlement) and the arrival of the Normans in the 1100s.


About Hawick in Undiscovered Scotland



A tantalizing line from another Reivers page: "In 1598 in an incident, the Scottish Halls and the Rutherfords were allegedly singled out by English officers as two surnames to whom no quarter should be given." King James I, after 1603, set out to eliminate the Debatable Land and drive out all its inhabitants, who were scattered across the border and far and wide. (This is how my Rutherford ancestors wound up in Northumberland.)


Hawick is our ancestral home from the 1300s to 1603. My great grandmother was Annie Robson Rutherford, her Robsons having wound up in Blackblakehope in Northumberland. So the Rutherfords and Robsons were probably intermarrying for hundreds of years.

Another clan site lists Robertus Dominus de Rodyrforde and other even earlier Rutherfords.

Although most of these lines went extinct, there is no doubt that all other Rutherford are offshoots of this Rutherford clan. I do not have the begats and marryings that directly connect the Northumberland Rutherfords of Elsdon, but the history pretty much locks it up. No one was named Rutherford because they thought it was a nice name to be connected to.


This is the Rutherford coat of arms:

 

Now I have another generation back on the marauding, limb-hacking, cattle-thieving clan Rutherford of Teviotdale. Yesterday I posted about Dickon "Draw-the-Sword" Rutherford who is in Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel."


A footnote provides more details about an earlier Reiver, a Rutherford with a plundering band of nine sons:


"The Rutherfords of Hunthill were an ancient race of Border Lairds, whose names occur in history, sometimes as defending the frontier against the English, sometimes as disturbing the peace of their own country. Dickon Draw-the-Sword was son to the ancient warrior, called in tradition the Cock of Hunthill, remarkable for leading into battle nine sons, gallant warriors, all sons of the aged champion.


"Mr. Rutherford, late of New York, in a letter to the editor, soon after these songs were published, quoted, when upwards of eighty years old, a ballad apparently the same with the Raid of the Reidsquare, but which apparently is lost, except the following lines :


"Bauld Rutherford ho was fu' stoat,
With all ha nine sons him about,
He brought the lads of Jedhrught out,
And bauldly fought that day."



Britannicus adds:

*** ***

And to think that I spared my enemies...

I need na' ha' dun that.