Bloody Valentine

by Douglas Skelton

  Of course, the Protestant Kirk thrived in Scotland. It was already too powerful for one killer cleric to damage. As for the commandment against killing, be it number five or six in the Godly pecking order, it would be broken many more times in the future by the Godly, if not by the ministers themselves.

  2

  THE WANDERER

  John Adam

  A pale moon blinked from behind skittering clouds as the tall man walked alone along the Highland track. It was a chilly night in late March and a snell wind whispered in the grass and sighed softly through the bracken. There were other rustlings in the undergrowth as nocturnal creatures rooted about after food and scurried away from potential predators. Further away, a sharp cry rang out as one of them didn’t scurry fast enough and fell prey to a sharp-eyed owl. There was death out there on that lonely trail and the man reeked of it. He walked at a brisk pace, not just to keep warm, but also to put as much distance as possible between himself and the ruined cottage high on the ridge behind.

  He had left the corpse of his wife there. He had killed her and left her there, her body hidden by a pile of stones. Now he had to get away from that haunted place and return to Dingwall, to his own fireplace, his own bed – and the other woman he called his wife.

  The sight of a figure ahead startled him. He had not expected to meet anyone – not on such an isolated road and not at that time of night. His thoughts jumped immediately to the dead body he had left behind. He had not planned for the corpse to be recovered any time soon but, if it was and he was reported as being seen in the vicinity, then his own life would be forfeit. He climbed over a wall to hide and waited to hear the person pass by – but no footsteps reached him.

  He peered over the wall but saw no one on the road. Perhaps he had been mistaken and the fleeting moonbeams had played tricks with his eyes. He set out again. Suddenly the figure reappeared and his flesh chilled and his hair bristled. He could not decide if it was male or female but he knew one thing – it was not of this earth. It was just a little way up the road, still the same distance from him as it had been at its first appearance. It stood there, a silent spectre briefly illuminated in the blinks of moonlight. Watching him. Waiting for him.

  The man turned and ran away as fast as he could but, every time he turned, the figure was there, neither closer nor further away, always watching. By the time he reached the edge of Maryburgh, the man was exhausted, more through nerves than exertion, so he sat down by the side of the road and filled his pipe. By the time he had fired up the tobacco and exhaled the smoke, the figure was gone. Whatever it was – a manifestation of his guilty conscience, or some supernatural visitor – he saw no more of it.

  He did, however, see his dead wife again.

  Early in the morning of 10 April 1835, fourteen-year-old Jane Stewart and eleven-year-old John Campbell were the first to catch a glimpse of the dead woman. They and Jane’s aunts, Margaret and Betty (aged twenty-eight and forty respectively), were on a new plantation on the heights of Kilcoy, a lonely moor on the Black Isle – which, confusingly, is neither black nor an island. They were replacing fir saplings damaged by recent frosts. It was hard, cold work so, after some time, the two youngsters decided to take a break in the ruins of an old cottage. Inside they found a brown glove lying on a heap of earth and stones. They thought at first it had been left there by a planter but then they discovered a piece of black gauze, like a veil, sticking through the earth. With the curiosity of children everywhere, they tugged at the piece of cloth until it would give no more. Whatever the material was attached to was buried under the rocks and earth. They called Jane’s aunts over and one of them began to dig away at the ground with her shovel. The first thing they found was a shoe. Then they realised with a lurch that there was still a foot inside it.

  The youngsters were sent to the home of William Forbes, thought of, locally, as a decent man, about a quarter of a mile away. They ran all the way and were weeping from fear as they reached his cottage at around nine in the morning. When the children arrived and told him their garbled story, the sixty-year-old was sitting cosily by the fire and he really had no great desire to step out into the cold spring morning. At any rate, from what he could gather all they had found was some old clothes. But Jane and John, gibbering excitedly in Gaelic, insisted that he come with them and see what they had found. So he reluctantly left his fireside and followed them to Kilcoy and up to the ruined cottage on the hill known as Millbuie.

  When he arrived, Mr Forbes took the spade and gingerly began to dig deeper but, when he uncovered a leg, he decided not to proceed any further. He took young John and walked to the house of innkeeper Alexander Macdonald. ‘There’s a melancholy thing down yonder,’ he told the forty-year-old publican. ‘It’s a dead corpse.’ After trudging up to the tumbledown cottage, he and Macdonald carefully pulled away a large rock and uncovered the dead woman’s head. They saw that her face was badly swollen and smeared with blood, which had streamed from her ears and solidified on the flesh. They realised they should not disturb the scene any further and so they covered the body up again as best they could, ‘lest the dogs get at it’. This was a job for the authorities and the party of women and men headed to Dingwall, six miles away, to raise the alarm.

  News of a dead woman on the lonely moor spread quickly and, naturally, excited the interest of a great many people. Soon not only the local procurator fiscal and doctor were up on the hill but also a vast array of what would, today, be called rubberneckers. These included the local schoolmaster, an army officer of the Middlesex Regiment, residing in the area on half pay at the time, and a local carter – cart and all. As the crowd watched, the doctors had the body completely uncovered and removed it to Dingwall Town Hall for further examination. The ground underneath, they noted when the body was taken away, was saturated with the woman’s blood. Her face was swollen and of a livid appearance, her tongue was thrust about an inch from the mouth and blood had discharged from her nose and ears. They found discoloration under the right ear and that both lower jawbones were fractured near the mouth. Two lacerated wounds on the scalp corresponded to the shape of a stone found under the head but it was obvious to the medical experts that the woman had been beaten to death. They wrote:

  On dissection, the brain was distended with dark-coloured blood, but in no way sufficient to explain the cause of death. The brain was firm and natural in every part. The lungs were natural, the heart loaded with fat but not diseased, stomach contained a fluid like barley broth and contents of abdomen generally healthy. From our examination and dissection of the body we have no hesitation in stating it to be our opinion that death was caused by the violence of the blows the deceased sustained about the head.

  So this was no accident – no wall had tumbled down on a poor traveller. The woman had been murdered. There were questions to be answered. Who was she? And what was she doing up on that lonely road in the first place? If they could answer those questions, perhaps they could catch her killer.

  The handbill was printed in Dingwall on 11 April 1835 and distributed there and in nearby Inverness. It read:

  MURDER!

  Whereas the body of a FEMALE was found about 8 o’clock in the morning yesterday – FRIDAY – the 10th instant, in the ruins of a hut within the new Plantation on the heights of Kilcoy, bearing such marks of violence as leave no doubt she was cruelly murdered.

  APPEARANCE OF THE BODY

  The BODY is apparently that of a married woman about 40 years of age; 5 feet 7 inches high, stout in figure; dark brown hair, mixed with some grey hairs, long at the back of the head, cut short over the forehead; wore a false front or curls of dark brown hair; coarse, flat features, thick lips, small nose marked by small pox; had a scar from the centre of the forehead downwards across the nose, and left cheek, 4 and a half inches in length, apparently occasioned by small pox, or a burn.

  DRESS

  The DRESS was a black silk velvet bonnet, lined with black silk Persian, trimmed with black silk
ribbons; a net cap, a black figured bobbin net veil; a mantle of claret coloured cloth, bound with black satin; a check verona handkerchief; a small crimson merino shawl with light border; a purple or puce worsted gown (lindsey woolsey or winchey of home manufacture) trimmed with velvet; a puce figured silk band; a light blue petticoat, and an under dark blue petticoat, both home made woollen stuff, a pair of coarse blue worsted stockings, white in the toes; cloth selvage garters; shoes such as usually sold in shops, mended under the toes and heels; a cotton shift, marked on the breast with the letters JB; a coarse flannel jacket; a pair of drab jean stays; a pocket made of printed cotton, tied with a piece of blue striped tape, and containing four-pence of copper, and a small pill box marked ‘J. Mackenzie, Chemist and Druggist, Forres’. The last word scored through, wore a plain marriage ring marled ‘Gold’ on the inside, on the 3rd finger of the left hand; and gloves of green kid.

  PLACE WHERE FOUND

  The PLACE where the body was found, is at the top of the Millbuie on the heights of Kilcoy, in the Parish of Killiernan or Redcastle, County of Ross, and between 200 and 300 yards in a straight line eastwards from the house of Alexander Macdonald, Changekeeper, which stands close to the Parliamentary Road leading over the Millbuie.

  The Public are earnestly requested to communicate to the Procurator Fiscal of Ross, Dingwall, any circumstances which may lead to the discovery of the name and usual residence of the deceased, and of the person or persons by whom she has been murdered.

  The body lies in the Town Hall of Dingwall, and it will be kept uninterred until Wednesday the 15th instant: to afford an opportunity of identifying it.

  In a house in Dingwall, a quarryman, known to his neighbours and workmates as John Anderson, returned home that night to find his young English wife Dorothy filled with the news of the gruesome discovery. The rumour was that the dead woman was the wife of a shepherd, for there was a wedding ring on her finger and why else would she be in such a desolate spot? ‘How I feel for her husband, the poor man, when he hears of the mangled state in which his wife’s body has been found,’ Dorothy said.

  John said nothing but, though he seemed to have little interest in the sad affair, he knew more about it than he was letting on. He had secrets: some his young wife knew about, others she did not. In fact, he was not John Anderson at all but John Adam. He and Dorothy were not even legally married. In the eyes of the law and the Church, John was married – but to another woman. To him it had been a marriage of convenience – his wife had cash and property and he had wanted it. But, as soon as he got it, she became decidedly inconvenient. And now she lay wrapped in preservative cloth in Dingwall Town Hall.

  John Adam was born on a farm on Lord Airlie’s estate near Forfar on 1 January 1804. He grew up tall and good-looking but he was none too keen on hard work. He had two distinct skills, however – he could charm the ladies and he could lie like a salesman. The Adam family had farmed the Craigieloch holding for three centuries. When John was fourteen, his God-fearing father died and the running of the land was left to him. Unsurprisingly, he showed no ability whatsoever and was soon working at another farm to help pay the family’s way.

  As the years passed, he grew taller and even more handsome. This attracted the girls and, by the time he was nineteen, he found himself in trouble with the Kirk Session for the seduction of two respectable young women of the parish. The scandal was heightened by the fact that one was not only his cousin but was also deaf and dumb. John Adam had broken hearts left, right and centre but this proved to be the final straw and he was packed off to work on a farm near Brechin. His wandering ways had begun.

  At Brechin he met an older woman who, coincidentally, was named Jean Brechin. She was a cook for the family and earned good money. John turned on the charm and she fell for it. There was talk of marriage but only on her part – John was not yet ready to take the plunge. He later said that he could not even look at a younger woman without provoking Jean’s jealous rage.

  Before long, he took himself off to Aberdeen in search of pastures and conquests new. There he discovered a new circle of friends and the delights of Deism. As the son of a Kirk elder, the young man was unlikely to reject religion totally and Deism accepted the existence of God but not the teachings of the organised Church. This left John and his friends free to ignore the stifling rules and regulations of the Kirk and follow their own path. For John, this path naturally led to the favours of a number of local ladies and it was not long before he was on the road again, fleeing irate fathers and husbands.

  He settled for a time in Lanarkshire and here, it seems, he fell in love. This time he proposed marriage and was accepted. The date was set but the wedded bliss the couple hoped for was not to be. One night shortly before they were due to walk down the aisle, John had a series of disturbing dreams. Three times, his bride-to-be appeared beside his bed, her flesh pale and her body swathed in a winding sheet. ‘John,’ she said sadly each time, ‘we shall never be married. My time in this world will be very short. But, mark, you will die an awful death! You and I shall be happy in the world to come.’

  The following day, John could not shake off the terror that had gripped him in the night. He decided he had to see his beloved so he obtained time off from his employer and walked to her father’s house, arriving just as darkness fell. As he approached the door he heard the sound of hymn singing which was unusual as it was not the Sabbath. He peeped through the window and saw the family clustered around the body of his intended who had died suddenly that morning.

  It was time for him to move on again and, this time, he pitched up in Glasgow where he resumed his old ways with the women, both married and single. He also added a few new skills – like robbing his older conquests of their savings. Finally, for reasons best known to himself – perhaps because life was proving somewhat warm for him in Civvy Street – on 7 January 1831 he enlisted in the 2nd Dragoon Guards and eventually found himself in England.

  Dorothy Elliot was around twenty when she met the dashing, hazel-eyed Private John Adam. The young man was 6 ft 1 in., handsome and well built. He appeared to be the answer to a maiden’s prayer as he strutted about in his uniform. He was, however, quite bald and had taken to wearing a wig. The daughter of Derbyshire miner Edward Elliot, Dorothy was assistant cook in the home of Ralph Ordish, the landlord of the Red Lion Inn in Derby where John Adam was billeted. She took one look at the handsome Scot and, like many others before her, fell for him. It was Christmas Day 1833 when they first met and, by the following March, the romance was burning brightly. By then, John had been moved to the village of Duffield and, one Sunday, Dorothy and the wife of a Sergeant Ramsdale went to visit their men. By the time she got back to Derby, the Ordish house and business were shut up for the night and she could not get back in. Mrs Ordish was affronted that the young girl had stayed out all night and promptly terminated her employment.

  Dorothy returned to her father’s home in Wirksworth and it was there that John Adam called on her – this time out of uniform. He told her he’d been granted a leave of absence to allow him to return to Scotland and begged her to come with him. She hesitated. He had asked her this before but, because she was a decent girl, she did not wish to go away with a man unless there was a walk down the aisle first. Her family was already unhappy with the relationship so Adam urged her to tell them that they were already wed. He would marry her, he promised, but they could do it on the way.

  There was some measure of urgency to his desire to get away from England for he had received no leave of absence from the military. He had, in fact, deserted. This was a serious enough crime without him compounding his felony by making off with sixty pounds in notes and sovereigns.

  Dorothy, who obviously loved and trusted John very much, finally agreed to run away with him and the couple caught the mail coach north. But the wedding never took place. John had promised he’d marry her at the first staging post they came to, which was Sheffield, but, when they arrived there, he claimed they d
id not have enough time. He promised to wed her at York, Edinburgh and Perth but, each time, he made some excuse not to tie the knot. Finally, exhausted by the madcap dash northwards but still single, Dorothy found herself walking five miles to Adam’s mother’s farm at Craiggieloch which was now managed by John’s brother James. They stayed there for about a week and the family, believing the couple to be man and wife, treated Dorothy with great kindness.

  John’s itchy feet would not let him rest, however. He knew the army would be looking for him, if only to get their money back, and he wanted to move on. He told Dorothy that a local girl with whom he had once had an illegitimate child was pestering him. He had given her some of his money, he explained, but she wanted more. So, to avoid being cleaned out, he felt it was time they took their leave. They left on foot, walking for eight or nine days over the hills, via Braemar and Tomintoul, before arriving in Inverness. Along the way, John confessed to Dorothy that there was more than one bastard child and he would have to adopt a false name to avoid being discovered. Given his reputation, these tales may well have had more than grain of truth in them although he was more likely trying to avoid detection by the authorities. Dorothy, of course, believed everything he said. She was head over heels in love with the handsome Scotsman and clearly would go anywhere and do anything he asked.

  Now calling themselves Mr and Mrs John Anderson, the couple lingered a week in Inverness while the remainder of his English notes were exchanged for Scots currency before pressing on to Dingwall where he found a job in a quarry. The work was seasonal, though, and they soon found themselves in financial trouble. It was winter now and, for the young woman, the gilt had worn off the relationship. She missed her family and friends and she was unhappy with the way their life was going. She wanted to be married. John was unwilling to take another step towards the altar and said he did not have the cash to send her home. He only had one pound and he could not spare it. If she would just be patient, he would make everything right. But Dorothy was not to be put off. She had packed her bags and was eager to be away. He pointed out to her that it was winter and the journey home would be hazardous. He suggested that she should wait until the warm weather came and said that, if she would wait until summer, then he would accompany her. She agreed to stay but their funds dropped with the temperature. Finally, John told her he would visit his family and borrow some cash from them.