Threave’s Castle looms as dark by day,
With its walls of moorland grey,
And the sad and sullen stream
Which, like some dank, unwholesome dream,
Creeps on its stagnant way,
In mossy pool and quagmire pent
Around the island battlement.
Dismal is the granite pile
With barbican and flanking tower,
That frown beneath the merry smile
Of laughing noontide hour.
Dismal is the island when,
With herbage rank and stunted thorn
That clothe the blood-besprinkled fen
In leaf and bough forlorn,
Some evil spirit haunts it yet.
The dreary annals of the past
Athwart the meadow wan and wet
Their spectral shadows cast;
No feathered minstrel tunes his throat
On lowly bush or lofty spray;
No skylark pipes his dulcet note
In the sun’s yellow ray;
And still the prisoned oxen low
To reach the farther shore,
Like captives of the spear and bow
In Douglas raids of yore;
No rural lover comes to hide
The stolen tryst at eventide;
And the otter seeks his prey,
And the wild duck leads her brood,
And desolation and decay
Sleep in the ghastly solitude.
Mr Batten was called over to the luncheon party by Connie Fenwicke, who cried, “I say, Mr Batten, leave the author to meditate, and come and have something to eat. And you also, Captain Wyman. Allan will come when he’s hungry; he’s feasting on ruins at present.”
Wyman excused himself for a moment, but Mr Batten succumbed to the temptation of cold partridge and claret.
With Walter, I walked behind one of the round flanking towers, scrambling over the fallen masonry, and when out of sight of the others we commenced to search carefully for any traces of previous visitors there. The rank grass and weeds were trodden down here and there by recent footsteps; but we concluded that it had been done by some of our party who had wandered about the place prior to our own landing. We wondered whether Lord Glenelg or his companions had already been there; but the absence of any evidence that the laird’s boat had been used for months convinced us that they had not.
“Our first direction is to follow the shadow of the keep to its easterly angle when the sun shines, at 3:30, on the sixth of September,” I began, when Walter interrupted me with:
“But has it occurred to you that since that record was written the calendar has been altered? What was the sixth of September in the sixteenth century is not the sixth of September in the present day.”
“By Jove?” I gasped. “I never thought of that. But what is the precise difference?”
“I happened to be looking that very point up not long ago,” said Walter, “which is what brought it to my mind now. About 1582 Pope Gregory XIII decreed that ten days should be omitted, and October fifth was reckoned as the fifteenth. But this was not universal till 1751, when a bill was passed for regulating the commencement of the year, and for correcting the calendar. By that bill eleven days were omitted after the second of September, so that the ensuing day was the fourteenth.”
“In that case, then, September sixth of Godfrey Lovel’s day is really our September seventeenth. That gives us nearly two weeks more time than we had counted on,” I remarked. “Yet it will be half-past three before we leave today, and we shall then, at any rate, be able to see the vicinity of the spot, although we cannot fix it exactly until the day and hour indicated.”
“I wonder whether we shall really find the casket?” Walter said, eagerly. “To me this is just the sort of place where some treasure lies buried. The day before we left town I went to the British Museum and looked up the history of the place. Our record in The Closed Book is certainly borne out by history. Maxwell of Terregles was keeper of the Threave in Godfrey’s day, the dawn of the Reformation, and seems to have had rather a rough time of it, just as the old monk has written. John Gordon of Lochinvar, Dean Vaus of Soulseat, the Macdowalls of Freuch and of Mindork, who burned Brodick Castle and invaded Arran, and James Earl of Bothwell, of Earlston, as mentioned by Godfrey Lovel, were all his prominent contemporaries. Therefore it is certainly likely that the ex-favourite of Lucrezia Borgia did actually conceal the casket intrusted to him somewhere on this island, which in his day was, of course, impregnable.”