From tea to tattoo was playtime for the garrison. Many smartly
dressed soldiers, with passes earned by good behavior, went out to
find amusement in the city. Visitors, some of them tourists from
America, made the rounds under the guidance of old soldiers. The
sergeant followed such a group of sight-seers through a postern
behind the armory and out onto the cliff. There he lounged under a
fir-tree above St. Margaret's Well and smoked a dandified cigar,
while Bobby explored the promenade and scraped acquaintance with
the strangers.
On the northern and southern sides the Castle wall rose from the
very edge of sheer precipices. Except for loopholes there were no
openings. But on the west there was a grassy terrace without the
wall, and below that the cliff fell away a little less steeply. The
declivity was clothed sparsely with hazel shrubs, thorns, whins and
thistles; and now and then a stunted fir or rowan tree or a group
of white-stemmed birks was stoutly rooted on a shelving ledge. Had
any one, the visitors asked, ever escaped down this wild crag?
Yes, Queen Margaret's children, the guide answered. Their father
dead, in battle, their saintly mother dead in the sanctuary of her
tiny chapel, the enemy battering at the gate, soldiers had lowered
the royal lady's body in a basket, and got the orphaned children
down, in safety and away, in a fog, over Queen's Ferry to
Dunfirmline in the Kingdom of Fife.
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