Thus they were led—or rather driven—with every species of cruel indignity, to Edinburgh; but the jails there were already full; there was no place in which to stow such noxious animals! Had Charles the Second been there, according to his own statement, he would have had no difficulty in dealing with them; but bad as the Council was, it was not quite so brutal, it would seem, as the King.
“Put them in the Greyfriars Churchyard,” was the order—and to that celebrated spot they were marched.
Seated at her back window in Candlemaker Row, Mrs Black observed, with some surprise and curiosity, the sad procession wending its way among the tombs and round the church. The news of the fight at Bothwell Bridge had only just reached the city, and she knew nothing of the details. Mrs Wallace and Jean Black were seated beside her knitting.
“Wha’ll they be, noo?” soliloquised Mrs Black.
“Maybe prisoners taken at Bothwell Brig,” suggested Mrs Wallace.
Jean started, dropped her knitting, and said in a low, anxious voice, as she gazed earnestly at the procession, “If—if it’s them, uncle Andrew an’—an’—the others may be amang them!”
The procession was not more than a hundred yards distant—near enough for sharp, loving eyes to distinguish friends.
“I see them!” cried Jean eagerly.
Next moment she had leaped over the window, which was not much over six feet from the ground. She doubled round a tombstone, and, running towards the prisoners, got near enough to see the head of the procession pass through a large iron gate at the south-west corner of the churchyard, and to see clearly that her uncle and Quentin Dick were there—tied together. Here a soldier stopped her. As she turned to entreat permission to pass on she encountered the anxious gaze of Will Wallace as he passed. There was time for the glance of recognition, that was all. A few minutes more and the long procession had passed into what afterwards proved to be one of the most terrible prisons of which we have any record in history.
Jean Black was thrust out of the churchyard along with a crowd of others who had entered by the front gate. Filled with dismay and anxious forebodings, she returned to her temporary home in the Row.