Jane Seton; or, The King's Advocate: A Scottish Historical Romance
Oh, my good, my kind Forrester, it is so like thee!"
"Here is your own sword--the old Italian blade you loved so well."
"I am glad thou'st brought it, for 'tis all my heritage," replied
Roland, as he buckled it on, and then unsheathed the blade and waved
it in the air.
"My castle in the west is at your service. Mount and ride, I implore
you, Vipont; for every moment of delay is fraught with danger to us
all!"
"Mount and ride, say you? Yes; but not to your castle in the west,
my dear friend--no! I have sworn to see Jane Seton once again before
she dies. Jane! Jane! that letter--ah! why didst thou send it, for
I would rather thou hadst stabbed me with a poniard? My good sword!
how great, how glorious a thing it is to be free, and to feel thee in
my hand. Now can I deal death for death, blow for blow, and blood
for blood! Oh, Forrester, I feel that wrong and oppression have made
me a very savage."
To crush his agony, he bit his lips till the blood came, and hastily,
but scrupulously examined the bridle and stirrups of the horse his
friend had brought him.
Breathlessly, and with a heart full of rage, Redhall from his place
of concealment had seen and overheard them.
"I have destroyed her, and shall he escape me?" he thought. "No, by
the Power of Heaven!" and, drawing his sword, he made stealthily
towards the Well-house Tower, for there was no time to give an alarm
elsewhere. Thrice he essayed to gain it, but in vain! for those he
wished to intercept stood right in the narrow path leading to the
gateway which the tower flanked; the cliff rose up on one side like a
wall, the deep water descended into darkness on the other.
"Hallo! we are watched!" cried old Lintstock, whose single eye was
worth a dozen of others, and had seen this dark figure which glided
near them in the gloom.
Full of rage and shame at being discovered, Redhall, who was too
proud and too brave to retreat, advanced boldly, with his sword in
his hand, exclaiming loudly--
"A rescue! a rescue! a rescue and escape! Ho, the guard! ho, in the
name of the king! treason! and breaking ward! treason! treason!"
"_Redhall!_" cried Roland, in a choking voice.
"We are lost!" said Forrester.
Roland could utter no more; he thought that destiny had delivered his
enemy over to his vengeance; and a wild tempest of holy fervour and
infernal fury filled his heart. He rushed upon him like a lion, and
they both engaged with blind desperation.
Their eyes were full of fire, their breasts burning with as much
hatred as could possibly animate two human hearts, and much more
intent on slaying each other than on protecting themselves, they
hewed and thrust, cutting showers of sparks from their swords in the
dark, while their blades rang like bells. They seemed to be
transformed into demons by their mortal hatred.
Resolved that even if himself should be slain, his enemy should not
escape, Redhall called incessantly to the guard in the adjacent
tower; and Sir John Forrester, with alarm, heard the voices of the
soldiers, who were part of his own corps of guards, and saw the glow
of their lighted matches reddening behind the loopholes, and through
the bars of the gate, as they prepared "to make service" against
those who were brawling on St. Cuthbert's roadway; in other words, to
fire on them.
Before this measure took place the combat was decided.
Stepping back a pace, and grasping his sword with both hands, Redhall
raised the hilt above his head, and dropping the blade behind him,
resolved to give a cut-down stroke, which would end the conflict and
his rival's life together; but Roland, quick as lightning, on seeing
his whole body unprotected, sprang forward, and ran more than two
feet of his double-edged sword through his body.
A groan of rage and agony escaped from Redhall; with his left hand he
grasped Roland's sword near the hilt, and fiercely writhed his body
forward upon it, to shorten the distance between himself and his
antagonist, in whose heart he endeavoured to bury a poniard which he
grasped in his right hand, and for which he had relinquished his
sword.
But seeing his deadly intention, Roland spurned him with his right
foot; he staggered backward, the blood gushed forth, and at the same
moment he rolled over the narrow path, and falling off the blade of
the sword, sank heavily into the dark water of the loch, thus being
stabbed and drowned almost at the same moment.
Roland uttered a wild laugh, leaped on horseback, and galloped madly
away by the base of the castle rock.
Forrester followed at full speed, but the frantic horseman had
disappeared like a spirit round the western side of the rock, and
even the sound of his horse's hoof's had died away.
At that instant a volley of six arquebuses flashed redly from the
parapets of the ravelin, and their bullets whistled about the ears of
old Lintstock, who immediately scrambled after Sir John Forrester;
but one pierced the brain of the poor page Sabrino, who fell dead on
the spot.
The discovery of his body next morning caused unusual consternation
in the "good town" of Edinburgh, and the expenditure of several
gallons of holy water, which were sprinkled upon the livid corpse and
the place where it lay; while the tidings went far and wide that "my
Lady of Ashkirk's devil had been found under the castle rock."
CHAPTER LIX.
THE PLACE OF DOOM.
"But when the appointed day was come,
No help appeared nye;
Then woeful, woeful was her heart,
And tears stood in her eye.
And now a fyer was built of wood,
And a stake was made of tree;
And now Queen Elinor forth was led,
A sorrowful sight to see."
_Sir Aldrinyar, an old Ballad._
On this night a strange sound floated upward to the Castle of
Edinburgh from the city below; it was like the murmur of distant
waves, or of the rising wind shaking the branches of a forest. This
was occasioned by the crowding of the people towards the _Place of
Doom_, as it was graphically named.
It was a dark midnight, moonless and starless; the eyes of thousands
were raised inquisitively to the black, opaque mass of the castle
rock and the zone of lofty towers which then engirdled its summit,
with their embrasured battlements and frowning cannon.
Culprits usually suffered at a place on the south side of the
Castle-hill, where a green bank of several hundred yards sloped
steeply downward from the ramparts of the Spur, to the north ends of
the closes in the Grass-market, a broad arena which, from its
fantastic architecture, has been said closely to resemble the Plaza
of a Spanish or Italian town, and which lies in a valley to the south
of the castle.
The wall of the city, which descended at an angle of nearly fifty
degrees from the rock on which the fortress is built until it
intersected the streets beneath at the King's Meuse, closed this
sloping bank on the west. The back of a narrow close, which was
demolished in the civil war of 1743, enclosed it on the east, and the
Spur, with its strong rampart and twenty pieces of brass cannon,
overlooked it on the north. There were then no Castle-terrace or
Western Approach to disfigure the city on the south, and this green
and verdant bank descended smoothly and gradually downwards to the
great market-place.
The stake was placed on a small natural platform a few yards square,
the same place where Thomas Forrest, vicar of Dollar, John Keillior,
and John Beverage, two Dominican priests, Duncan Simpson, and Sir
Robert Forrest, a gentleman of Stirlingshire, were burned for heresy
in presence of the regal court, on the night of the 2nd of March, two
years after the events we are about to relate. This was the place of
death until the year 1681, when the Scottish government deprived the
city of it for military purposes.
The stake was a strong column of oak, roughly dressed by a hatchet,
and had rivetted upon it the _branks_, or witch's bridle, which hung
at the end of a short chain. This instrument, which was considered
so necessary in punishments by fire, and which was soon to become so
famous in Scotland, that every burgh required one, was a circle of
iron, formed of four parts, connected by steel hinges, and adapted to
encircle the neck, like the modern _jougs_, which may sometimes be
seen at kirk-doors. The chain was behind; in front was the broad gag
which entered the mouth, and pressed down the tongue to prevent the
unhappy wretch, whose head was locked within it, crying aloud; and
after the execution, this diabolical invention, which was usually
found among the ashes of the fire and of the skeleton, with fragments
of bones and teeth adhering to it, was carefully preserved by the
thrifty baillies in the council-chamber until the next "worrying," as
it was termed.
Several horseloads of faggots, nicely split, and tied up in bundles,
were piled three feet deep around the stake by the concurrents, or
assistants of Sanders Screw, in absence of Dobbie, whom a blow from
Leslie's sword had left half dead at a cottage near Inverteil; and on
these bundles they poured several buckets of tar and oil, thereafter
sprinkling the whole with gunpowder and sulphur. These operations
soothed the excitement and impatience of the expectant thousands, who
long before the fatal hour had taken possession of the whole ground
about the stake, a circle round which was kept open by the halberds
of the provost, while beyond there were a party of fifty mounted
spearmen under his kinsman, Sir Andrew Preston of Grourtoun, who was
sheathed in complete armour. Every second trooper bore a lighted
torch; thus the mob could see with ease, and be seen.
In addition to the inhabitants of the city, nearly all those of the
four municipalities, or burghs of regality, which lay without the
barriers--viz., the Portsburgh, lying before the West-port; the
Canongate, without the Netherbow-port; the Potter-row, which lay
before the Kirk-of-field-port; and the Calton, lying without St.
Andrew's port, or the Craig-end-gate, were collected in the spacious
area of the Grass-market, and on the steep face of the castle bank.
The walls of the ravelin which crowned it on the north; the
bartizans, roofs, windows, even the chimney-heads and pediments,
every ledge and part of the houses on the west; and the ends of those
which closed the ground below, were crowded with spectators. The
market-place was like a sea of upturned faces, all visible in the
torchlight, though far down below; and the hum of their myriad
voices, mingled with many a shrill cry or threat, the clink of steel
or clatter of iron hoofs, as the armed horsemen rode to and fro
keeping order among them, ascended the side of the hill, and echoed
among the rocks and towers of the fortress, where the poor victim for
whom they waited was kneeling at her prayers.
So great was the crowd in the market, that even the bartizans of the
Greyfriars' monastery, a large building which formed part of the
street, and had been built by James I. about a hundred years before,
for Cornelius of Zurich and certain canons of Cologne, together with
the loftier houses of the Knights of Torphichen, in the Bow, though
still more distant, were covered with spectators.
Clad in thin grey cassocks girt with knotted cords, the Greyfriars
ran about among the people, barefooted, and carrying little wooden
boxes to receive money from the charitable and religious to pay for
"masses and prayers for the soul of the poor lost heretic and
sorceress,"--prayers and masses for the poor girl who was yet living.
Solemn mass, as for the dead, was to have been said in the chapel of
St. Margaret, the queen of Scotland, by Father St. Bernard, and the
chaplain of the fortress; but the baillies, the portly deacons of the