The Gowrie Conspiracy

by Alanna Knight

  ‘It is good to see you again,’ said Tansy and burst into tears.

  Will put his am around her. ‘Her foster-brothers, Jane, the Earl and his brother – at Gowrie House – ’ he began.

  Jane shivered. ‘We know. Will you come with us, sir? We live just along there.’ Pointing to a narrow street, ‘You can leave your coach at the inn by the bridge here. It will be quite safe.’

  Giving instructions to the coachman, they followed her down a narrow street where gabled houses leaned toward each other across the cobbles.

  With Will gallantly insisting on carrying one of her water bags, she led the way up a forestair, knocked twice on the door, hesitated and then twice again.

  ‘This is just a precaution,’ she whispered. ‘So that Uncle knows it is me. He is mortal afraid that we might have been followed from Falkland,’ she added as a key was turned in the lock.

  The door opened to be filled by the massive frame of Davy Rose.

  His puzzlement and pleasure at these unexpected visitors was quickly quenched by a glimpse of Tansy’s white tear-stained face.

  Gently he led her to a chair, produced a goblet of madeira for her to sip and as she waveringly introduced Will as her new husband, Jane clapped her hands but looked mildly astonished, having heard something of Tansy’s sad first marriage.

  Tansy smiled shyly and reached for Will’s hand. ‘We have known each other for many years. We were on our way to Edinburgh and stopped to – to look in at Gowrie-’

  Suddenly she burst into tears again and Davy said, ‘A terrible business. Both young men – ’ He stopped, too shocked to continue.

  ‘And Tam too,’ Looking at Jane, she clutched her hand and whispered, ‘Master Eildor, Jane.’

  Davy and Jane exchanged glances. ‘You had better tell them, Uncle.’

  Davy nodded. ‘We heard the town bell and went to see what it was all about…’

  In the turret room of Gowrie House, that same bell ringing the alarm to rally the citizens of Perth stirred Tam. He had lain as one dead on the floor beside the lifeless bodies of the Earl and the Master of Ruthven.

  Weeping, he looked for the last time on those two young faces, Alexander so disfigured by Ramsay’s knife as to be unrecognisable and John’s face untouched, pale and serene in death.

  The effort of getting to his feet was agonising. Somehow he staggered down the turnpike stair and saw a discarded cloak. Tearing off his shirt, he wrapped it round his arm which was bleeding heavily. Wearing the cloak tight around himself, praying that he would not be stopped and challenged, he kept to the shadows and slipped across the garden where a side gate led on to the main thoroughfare.

  Hoping to lose himself among the ordinary citizens of Perth who were milling about the area, aware only that he had to put some distance between himself and Gowrie House, he crossed the road into a narrow entry.

  That last effort, the agony in his shoulder and the loss of blood was too much. Too weak to continue, he sank down on the ground and huddled in his borrowed cloak, shivering uncontrollably.

  He would wait for the king’s guards to find him, make him prisoner. But they were already too late.

  For this was death…

  ‘And that was where we found Master Eildor,’ said Davy. ‘We had taken the quick way to the Shoe Gait and we saw this body lying there. I hardly recognised him again. But I was sure he was dead –’

  Hearing Tansy’s cry, Jane put in quickly, ‘He is alive. Tell her, he is here, safe with us.’

  At Tansy’s bewildered face, she added, ‘You will find him through there,’ she whispered, pointing to a door. And with a proud glance at Davy, ‘Uncle carried him home.’

  Tansy looked at him gratefully. For a moment all else of the day’s horrors put aside in this one miracle.

  Her dream had been wrong. Tam was still alive.

  ‘He is bad hurt,’ warned Davy. ‘We are doing what we can but he has lost a lot of blood.’

  Tansy followed Jane quickly into the other room.

  Tam was lying on a pallet. He was very still, corpse-like, his face as white as her own.

  Kneeling beside him, she took his hands, chafed them in her own. ‘Oh, Tam – I thought I would never see you again. You are alive. Thank God!’

  He opened his eyes, as if that action took considerable effort. Seeing her he smiled weakly. ‘Only just, I fancy. And thank Davy Rose, for I was near death when he found me.’

  Leaning over, Tansy kissed his forehead and noted with some alarm that it was fever-damp. ‘You are safe now and we will soon have you well again.’

  And at that, the practical Tansy took over. ‘Now let us see this arm,’ she said. Blood was seeping through Jane’s rough bandaging. ‘We must stem the flow,’ Tansy said to her.

  Jane nodded. ‘I have water heated, and clean linen ready.’

  Carefully Tansy bathed his arm, observing how narrowly the dagger thrust had missed the dark triangle on his wrist. That was a miracle too, she thought. And opening the small leather purse she wore around her waist, she took out needle and calmly threaded it.

  Tam watched her idly, as if all this was happening to someone else.

  ‘Have you usquebaugh – some strong spirit?’ she asked Davy. He said yes and produced a goblet, thinking it was for Tam to drink.

  Tansy smiled. ‘A small receptacle, a saucer would be enough. This is to make sure the wound is clean.’

  And to the man lying there, ‘This is going to hurt, Tam.’ Holding the two gaping edges of the dagger thrust together, she dabbed on the liquid and took up needle and thread. ‘This must be done. Otherwise you will bleed to death.’

  ‘They told me your stitches were delicate. So let us see some of them,’ he said bravely.

  He had winced when she dabbed on the liquid but the sewing was much worse.

  And pain was not at an end. Once his right arm was bandaged there was even worse to come. He fainted clean away when Will held him while Davy thrust his shoulder back into its socket.

  When Davy grinned and said it had been wrenched out and not broken, he should have been relieved and grateful, but the agony was just as great.

  Eventually it was over and he was able to tell them what he had witnessed in the Gallery Chamber of Gowrie House, being cautious and sparing with details, observing Tansy’s white-faced anguish and saying only that both brothers had been stabbed and died immediately.

  He ended quickly, touching lightly upon how had also been daggered by John Ramsay and of his escape through the gardens with the angry crowd gazing up at the house.

  ‘I saw them leading the servants away, but there was nothing I could do.’

  ‘And we were just a few yards away from you,’ said Tansy.

  Tam shook his head. ‘I had no idea where I was heading. I had some vague idea about getting back to Falkland once darkness fell. But I had no money – nothing. All my possessions were in Gowrie. When I collapsed in that alley I had no hope of survival.’

  Pausing, he looked across at Davy and Jane. ‘And then you came on the scene.’

  Davy grinned. ‘We almost fell over you.’

  Lighting candles against the growing darkness, Jane said, ‘It was like a miracle.

  Some twelve miles away at Falkland Palace, King James was preparing his own miracle for consumption by a gullible public.

  Pursued by the relentless storm, he and his courtiers had arrived back at the royal apartments. James rode in, wet and angry, expecting to be met by a queen distraught at the dangers that had beset her “dearest bedfellow” and giving thanks for the miracle of his survival.

  Instead, unconcerned for his discomfort, his Annie reviled him. For she had heard about the murder of her dearest Alexander and his brother John.

  Screaming at him for daring to suggest that she should dismiss Beatrix and Barbara Ruthven from her service, she shuddered at his approach, at his very presence in her bedchamber.

  There was the blood of the Gowries on his hands, and the hands o
f all his huntsmen. The sun that had so innocently arisen that morning, like so many others in that warm summer had died in blood.

  The king left her presence closing the door on her cries and fury. There was no dealing with Annie in such a mood, for she seemed almost out of her wits with grief for the slaughter of the Ruthvens. The first to dare question him and to assault him with angry reproaches.

  ‘There was no treason, James. This was plain murder, the motive I do not doubt was gold.’

  So now he, King of Scotland, God’s Anointed, had to justify his actions to the whole world. Sleep was impossible. He wished to make his case and so he sat down and wrote eight thousand words, “A Discourse of the Vile Unnatural Conspiracy” that the Ruthvens had wrought against him.

  In it the missing casket with its damning document that he had sought so wildly had undergone a transformation. It was now once more a pot of gold in a field outside Perth, hidden under a man’s cloak.

  James included his speech with Alexander Ruthven, his pious reference with some inevitable Latin tags on the difference between such gold and treasure trove.

  The news reached the Edinburgh preachers by nine o’clock on the following morning, August 6. By ten o’clock the Privy Council received a letter from the king, the preachers were called first “before the council of the town” and the King’s epistle read to them.

  ‘It bore that his Majesty was delivered out of a peril, and therefore that we should be commanded to go to our Kirks, convene our people, ring bells, and give God praise and thanks for His Majesty’s miraculous from that vile treason.’

  After due deliberation they decided that “they could not be certain of the treason” but would speak of delivery “from a great danger”. Or they would wait and when quite sure of the reason, would blaze it abroad.

  James was furious at not receiving the preachers’ full support and his arguments and threats fell on deaf ears. Later he was to say, in justification to the one minister, Robert Bruce, who stood out refusing to accept the validity of his report on the conspiracy: ‘If I had wanted their lives, I had causes enough. I needed not to hazard myself so.’

  To Bruce and many others, this was tantamount to saying that he regarded the two Ruthvens as dangerous traitors and the day he rode to their house in Perth, he had deliberately played hostage and put his life in danger despite this knowledge. Not for the sake of an illusory pot of gold the traitors had used as bait to trap him, but in hope that the real object of his search about which they were in total ignorance would be revealed.

  James had learned through the years to be cautious, that even with sufficient causes for a man’s death, it did not always pay to hustle him to the block by judicial process. He had rushed the young Ruthven’s grandfather, the first Earl, to the scaffold but it had not secured him possession of the casket letters. That secret had died with him.

  Others through the years who were suspected of damning knowledge, an ever growing-list, had been turned over to the executioners but also died without revealing anything concerning his secret.

  And so for James it had become a case of waiting and watching with the young and vulnerable Alexander Ruthven and taking a chance, hazarding his own life when it seemed that success in his long-drawn out enterprise was in his grasp at last. The certainty that the secret he dreaded was firmly confined in some press or hiding place in Gowrie House conjured up the final desperate degradation that James could inflict, so that the corpses of the two dead brothers not only had their pockets turned out but also had their home ransacked.

  In an effort to win the popular support, he issued a proclamation guaranteed to please all his loyal subjects. August the fifth was to be observed in perpetuity as a public holiday, a day of thanksgiving and rejoicing with prayers said in all churches for His Majesty the King’s miraculous deliverance.

  In the days that followed while the preachers, sceptical and unimpressed by this bounteous gesture, awaited further developments, Tam Eildor lay not far distant from the ill-fated and now deserted Gowrie House, in the grip of a fever that seemed likely to quench his life.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  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.