"Give me your lantern, and let me wander about by myself, Mr. Vondy."
"'Deed I will, Sir. Your Honour knows the Castle as well as I do."
There was said to be a subterranean passage under the harbour for escape in case of siege. Stowell found it (a noisome, slimy, rat-infested place, dripping with water) but the further end of it had been walled up.
There was a foul dungeon in which a Bishop had been confined when he came into collision with the civil authorities, and tradition had it that he had preached through a window to his people on the quay. Stowell found that also, but the window was narrow and barred.
There were ramparts round the four-square walls, but on one side they looked down into the back yards of the little houses that lay against the great fortress and on the other three sides they were exposed to the market-place, the Parliament-square and the harbour.
For the second time Stowell went home in the lowering nightfall with a heavy heart. As the time approached for the execution his agitation increased, and on Thursday night also he tossed about, thinking, thinking. At length he remembered something. He had a key to the Deemster's private entrance to the Castle, and though the door was always bolted on the inside, a plan of escape occurred to him.
On Friday morning he was in the jailer's room. It had been the guard-room of the Castle and was hung about with souvenirs of earlier times—maps, plans, a cutlass that had been captured in a fight with Spanish pirates, a blunderbuss that had been used by Manx Fencibles, a keyboard, a line of handcuffs, and a rope, in a glass case, that had been used in the hanging of a Manx criminal.
"You haven't many prisoners in the Castle now, Mr. Vondy?"
"Aw, no! Didn't your Honour discharge all but one at the last General Gaol?"
"And not much company?"