“And the sentinel at your Royal Highness’s ante-chamber door?” enquired Strickland in an injured voice.
“The door must go wanting one after all—unless you yourself covet the post, Strickland? In that case you can lend your cloak to Captain Cameron.” And at the look on Strickland’s face he laughed. “I was but jesting. Like the man in the Gospel, I have two cloaks—here, Ardroy, if ’twill serve for that excessive height of yours. . . . Now for my great-great-great-grandsire’s private stair!”
CHAPTER II
The three men followed him in silence down the narrow, twisting stair, Ewen bringing up the rear, and wondering why disapproval made one feel so old. And, after O’Sullivan had given the word of the day and passed them out of Holyrood House, they were soon walking briskly, not up the Canongate itself, but up the slope parallel to it, the ‘back of the Canongate’, the Prince in front with the Irishman, Ewen behind with Strickland, both the latter very silent. Flurries of the October wind plucked at their cloaks as they went in the semi-darkness, sometimes swooping at them from the open grassy spaces of the King’s Park on their left, at others appearing to originate mysteriously in the tall line of houses of the Canongate with their intervening gardens on the right. They met nobody until they came to the Cowgate Port, and, O’Sullivan again giving the word to the guard, were admitted within the town walls and the nightly stenches of Edinburgh proper.
In the Cowgate there were still a few folk abroad, and a couple of drunkards, emerging unexpectedly from a close, all but knocked into the Prince. As he moved quickly aside to avoid collision, a man passing in the opposite direction was obliged to step into the gutter. It was quite natural that this man should turn his head to see the reason for being thus incommoded, but unfortunate that the Prince’s cloak should at that instant slip from its position. Ewen could only hope that the passer-by had not recognised him; there was at least nothing to indicate that he had. He went on his way without a pause, and the four adventurers resumed theirs.
As they emerged into the Grassmarket the great mass of the Castle Rock, half distinguishable against the sky, and crowned with a few lights, lifted itself as if in menace; but a few steps farther and it was blocked from view by the houses on the other side of that wide open space. Lights still burned in some of these, but everything was quiet.
“That is the house,” said the Prince in a low voice, but it was not easy to know at which he was pointing across the Grassmarket, since they all adjoined each other. “The entrance, however, is neither here nor in the West Bow, but up a close leading out of the Grassmarket, so Murray says.”
Holding their fluttering cloaks about them they crossed the Grassmarket. Away to their right, when they were over, wound the curve of the West Bow. At the mouth of the close which the Prince indicated Ewen, seeing that O’Sullivan seemed to be going to allow his master to walk first up the dark passage, strode forward, and without apology placed himself in front, and so preceded them all up the alley, his hand on his sword. He liked this place not at all.
In a moment he felt a twitch on his cloak from behind. “This will be the door of the house,” said the Prince’s voice. “See if you can summon someone. They keep uncommonly early hours hereabouts; I trust the household is not already abed.”