The Gowrie Conspiracy (23 page)

Davy Rose had inherited his cousin’s house in Potter’s Close, that same cousin whose sickness and sudden death had been the reason for his disappearance from Falkland. Now his future seemed assured, a man who could write a fine hand had little difficulty in finding employment in the city of Perth. Davy had other skills too but not one of them, he realised in desperation, was of any use in keeping Tam Eildor alive.

That task fell to Tansy and Jane who sat endlessly at his bedside, applying cold compresses and herbs in an
endeavour
to break the fever, the result of the John Ramsay’s stab wound to his arm having become infected.

Davy came into the bedchamber often, looked down on the sick man and considered the situation. ‘If his life is in danger, there is a physician who would remove his arm.’

‘No,’ said Tansy in panic. ‘We cannot do that.’

‘Many who come back from wars or have accidents
manage
very well with only one arm,’ Davy insisted. ‘They get used to it and it is better than being dead – a young man like that. Why, I ken three fellows lost limbs – ’

But Tansy was not listening. She refused to be persuaded. How could she ever make them believe that Tam did not belong in the year 1600, that he was on a time-quest from the future? If that was beyond their understanding how could they deal with that black triangle on the wrist of his injured arm, the guarantee of returning to his own time.

What was she to do? Watch him die?

And, praying for a miracle one day when all seemed lost, Davy brought in an old crone.

Tansy was not impressed. The woman looked like a witch, but she was told on the best authority by Davy that she was kin to the innkeeper and well-known and respected as a wise
woman.

‘Leave him to me, lassie. I will soon have him on his feet again.’ Giving Tansy a toothless grin, she produced a bundle and shook out a quantity of strange objects and ill-smelling herbs on to the table.

Observing Tansy’s look of astonishment, she said
reassuringly
, ‘Never fails, lass. Brought many a man, aye, and wives and bairns back from the very brink.’

‘Do you need my help?’ Tansy asked nervously, hoping that she did not.

The wizened old face peered at her. ‘Na, na, lassie. I will do fine on my own, thank ye kindly. Mebbe a mite to drink for my trouble.’

Tansy realised she had to have faith in someone, for there was little more she or anyone could do to save Tam now. He was dying anyway. She knew all the signs too well not to recognise them.

As if aware of her dilemma the old woman, already busy at the table, said

Gently, ‘Bide if ye wish, lass.’

Tansy, anxious and curious, decided to do so. She sat down in a chair, tired out with days and nights of nursing Tam. Even with Jane’s help she knew that Will was deeply
concerned
about her, but all he could do was sit by Tam’s bedside and watch for an hour or two in case Tam recovered
consciousness
.

Eager to see, sceptical about what the so-called wise woman was doing, she found her eyelids growing heavy. Fighting against sleep, her last glimpse was the sight of the old crone laying a hand on Tam’s forehead.

Tam had lost the world. He had wandered he knew not where and it was the touch of a soft hand carrying liquid to his lips that brought the dream.

Later he was never quite certain whether it was because of the fever that he had dreamed of Janet Beaton of whom he
knew he had no memory, but from Tansy’s description he seemed to recognise immediately when she put her hand on his forehead and sat by his bedside.

‘Tam Eildor,’ she smiled. ‘You came back as I promised Tansy you would. I am delighted to see you again and relieved to find that you are alive. A little longer and I fear I would have been too late.’

Her hand stroking his forehead was such a comfort. ‘But you cannot stay here,’ she said. ‘You know you must return to your own time.’

‘I have failed,’ he whispered.

‘No, you have not. You have what you came for, what lay behind the reasons for King James killing any who knew the truth he had at all costs to conceal.’

‘The document?’ Tam gasped.

‘The document is not here. It is in Edinburgh and you must go forward again. But wait until you are stronger to get the final answer.’

He wanted to ask her how, and where, but the words would not form themselves.

She was smiling gently. ‘You do not remember that we have met before.’

Faint memory stirred as once before when Will Hepburn had put the same question to him. But it was confused, a
half-remembered
dream.

Her smile was sad now. ‘We were lovers once.’ She shook her head, sighed and and looked towards the sleeping Tansy. ‘No matter. Before you go get her to tell you the rest – ’

Tansy was stirring. Janet leaned over and kissed him
gently
on the lips. He closed his eyes trying to remember.

When he opened them again she had gone.

Two days later, claiming that it was thanks to Tansy and Jane’s excellent nursing and his natural resilience that the fever had passed, Tam was up and about again. The
inflammation
had receded in his injured arm and although Tansy
maintained that his recovery was due to the old wise woman from the inn, he made light of that.

‘You must have seen her, Tam. She was not a sight one would readily forget. An old witch, if ever I saw one.’

But Tam shook his head. He had no memory of an old woman.

And while Tansy was not really surprised, considering his delirium, he retained, with a certain diffidence, his silence about discussing with anyone his vision of Janet Beaton.

Tam had decided that some things were best left unsaid and, wondering what to do next, while Tansy and Jane
prepared
food to tempt his ever-growing appetite, Will put before him the broadsheets containing the king’s epistle and also that of the Reverend Galloway.

Watching him consume a large slice of game pie, Will looked at him and said, ‘I can hardly believe that you were so ill. It is like a miracle.’

And the business of miracles was very much to the taste of the king’s chaplain, Reverend Patrick Galloway in a sermon delivered at the Mercat Cross.

‘On Tuesday last, Alexander Ruthven came to Falkland to his Majesty and found him at his pastime. And so he leads him from Falkland to Perth, as a most innocent lamb to the slaughterhouse. There he gets his dinner, a cold dinner, yea, a very cold dinner – as they know who were there.’

He then went on reiterate the king’s account of an armed man with a drawn dagger and Alexander’s accusation,

‘“You were the death of my father; and here is a dagger to be avenged on you for that death.” Judge, good people, what danger your David was in. An innocent lamb, he was closed in twixt two hungry lions thirsting for his blood, and locked doors between him and his friends.

‘What sort of delivery got he? It was wholly miraculous. Five or six things which you will all call and acknowledge to be miracles. First of all, his Majesty standing between two armed men, he at his entry should have been astonished at
the sight of an armed man to take his life. Yet on the contrary this armed man was so astonished that he might neither move hand, foot nor hand. Was not this miraculous?

‘Yet further when Alexander had taken him by the gorge and had held the dagger to his breast, so that there were scarce two inches between his death and his life, even then by his gracious Christian and most loving words, he overcame the traitor. The words so moved the heart of the traitor that he began to enter into conditions with the king.

‘And so he went forth to his brother, from whom he received commission to despatch him hastily. He then coming up again brings a pair of silk garters in his hand. After he had locked the door he says, “You must die, therefore lay your hands together that I may bind thee”, to the intent, no doubt, that the king being bound, they might then have strangled him and cast him in a cave or pit which they had prepared for that use.

‘Now here is the third miracle. The King answers the
traitor
, “I was born a free prince, I shall never die bound.” With this each grips the other’s gorge till in wrestling the king overcomes and get him under him.

‘Now is this not miraculous? The Master of Gowrie, an able young man in comparison with the King, I am assured had strength double, yes threefold greater. And yet is overcome and cast under.

‘Now yet another miracle. When they are thus wrestling up comes John Ramsay by the black turnpike and, at the King’s command, gives the Master a death stroke.

‘Now yet a miracle. Into the chamber with the King gather four. My Lord Gowrie comes up and eight with him. At first he drives all four into a corner and never rests. But John Ramsay chanced to cry “Fie, cruel traitor, have you not done evil enough? You have got the King’s life, must you have ours?” At which he drew a little back, and in back going he got the stroke whereof he died.’

While preaching by royal command, the body of a man
named Henry Younger was brought to Falkland Palace. Suspected of being the man with the dagger and on his way to prove his alibi, but finding a party of armed searchers
making
their way towards him, he decided they might not be interested in his alibi after all and took to his heels.

They cornered him in a cornfield where one Henry Bruce put a rapier through him, for which he was made a colonel by royal command. As for Galloway never wishing to lose a chance of drama, he had spread his arms above the human sacrifice and proclaimed to the King.

‘Thank God. The traitor that should have slain you could not be taken alive, but there he lies dead.’

But they got the wrong man. This was a new candidate for the role of the quaking man who was given out in
proclamation
as a ‘black grim man’ where in fact Henderson who had rapidly removed himself from the scene, had a ruddy
complexion
and a brown beard.

Shortly after Galloway’s recitation came a dramatic announcement that he had that very day received a letter from the missing witness to the miracles, none other than Henderson, the real quaking man with the dagger in the
turret
who was to have aided the king’s dispatch.

There were some caustic remarks concerning Galloway when he repeated his performance in Glasgow, miracles and all, declaring to the skeptics, ‘God forgive them that say the King cannot be believed.’

As an interesting postscript he brought in the powers of darkness. ‘If the Earl of Gowrie had bidden still in Scotland he might perchance not have attempted such a treason. But when he went to Padua there he studied necromancy. His own tutor, Mr Rynd, testifies that he had those characters upon him that he loved so much that if he forgot to put them in his breeks he would run up and down like a madman.’

Reading the broadsheet distributed so widely containing the king’s “Discourse on an Unnatural and Vile Conspiracy”, Tam found it much as he remembered, except for the lie about
the pot of gold coins which had been carefully substituted for the real reason of James’s visit to Gowrie and the tragedy that followed.

The Casket Letters and the secret document.

Rumour was, according to Will and Davy, that not all
ministers
were convinced by the king’s epistle, or Mr Galloway’s miracles. Most brought reluctantly to heel only by the threat of permanent banishment and the loss of their livings, they had it on good authority that Robert Bruce remained firmly sceptical and defiant.

All was quiet in Perth. Danger and terror no longer stalked its streets and in Davy’s house plans for a journey were being made. In Methlour, Martin and Simon appalled, like most honest folk, by the murder at Gowrie House understood Will and Tansy’s decision to abandon their proposed visit to Edinburgh and Dirleton.

Tansy had received a message from her foster-mother that, while bringing no relief to bitter grief, brought joy that the two younger sons, William and Patrick, had escaped King James’s vengeance. Warned in time, Lady Gowrie had seen them across the Border to England just hours before the king’s men came to arrest them.

The plan was now to travel to Falkland Palace with Tam and once Tansy had retrieved her possessions, Will and she would return again to Kirktullo to pick up the threads of their life together.

There were tearful scenes when the time came to leave
little
Jane and Davy but promises were made of future visits to the Hepburns. It was harder for Tam to bid them farewell, knowing full well that he could give no such promise of any future meeting.

And so the three set off once again in Will’s coach. The groom, disappointed at the cancelled jaunt to Edinburgh, had been compensated by a promising romance with the
innkeeper
’s niece.

They avoided Gowrie House and at the end of their twelve
mile journey found Falkland Palace similarly deserted since the court had returned to Edinburgh. The Keeper of the Gatehouse gave Tansy the keys to her lodging. Sad and strangely silent, she knew she would never return.

And neither would Tam. He need fear no more encounters with the amorous king. King James had no doubt forgotten all about the simple fisherman by now. But of one thing he was certain. The king who had taken so many lives had, by his intervention, spared him from John Ramsay’s death-stroke. While Will and the groom carried out her possessions to the waiting coach, Tansy walked with Tam into the garden, both silent, absorbed by their own sadness. So much tragedy that had begun with the murder of Margaret Agnew. Even that would never be fully explained without the document for which Davy Rose’s home, as well as Gowrie House, had been ransacked in vain.

At last they reached the seat where they had first met – oh, what seemed so long ago.

They sat down together. Tam’s arm was still bandaged in a sling and saying, ‘It is almost healed now, but you will take care,’ she took his hand in hers.

‘Before you go there is something you should know, Tam Eildor.’