“Good job for him, sir. Can’t have quarrelling in a garrison. I began to think he was going to mutiny outright, and if he’d shown his teeth any more, I suppose I should have had to remind him that there were some deep, dark dungeons underground as a first dose, and the stone gallows up at the far corner of the ramparts for the very worst cases.”
“But do you think that stone bar thing was ever used for executing people?”
“Sure of it, sir; and there’s the opening underneath leading down to that square patch beneath the walls.”
“But it may have been to hoist food or other things up during a siege.”
“Ah, it may have been, sir,” said Ben, grimly; “but I don’t quite see why they should have chosen to make it just over the bit of a patch of ground between the walls and the moat where you couldn’t get the forage to without a boat, and when there were a gate-way and bridge. ’Sides, too, why should they pick the old burying-place of the castle?”
“But that was not the old burying-place, surely, Ben?”
“You ask Dick Grey, gardener, what he found when her ladyship wanted the ivy planted there to cover that bit o’ wall. It was full of ’em.”
Roy shuddered.
“That’s so, sir. I expect in the old fighting days they used to bury ’em there; and as it’s just under that there gallows, why, of course, it was used for traitors or spies as well. That reminds me, sir, as a lot of that ivy ought to be cut away. We don’t want any one to make a ladder of it for getting into the place.”
“Leave it for the present. It could be torn down in an hour if there was any need.”