At the east end of the hill there then lay many deep pits, overgrown with whin and bushes; deep, dangerous, and half-filled with water, the haunt of the hare and fuimart. These were known as the Quarry Holes, and were often the scene of a ducking for sorcery, and legal drowning for various crimes; and to these he fled for shelter and concealment; for though hundreds would gladly have afforded him both on his own barony of Bolton, which was only eighteen miles distant, and had been gifted to the (as yet unsuspected) secretary Maitland—there was not a man in Edinburgh but would instantly have surrendered him into the hands of the civil authorities—and to that punishment awarded him as Bothwell’s abettor in the death of the Lord Darnley.
There, overcome by long deprivation of sleep, and the bitterness of his thoughts for many a weary night and day, a deep slumber fell upon him, and the noonday sun of the morrow had soared into the wide blue vault of heaven, ere he awoke to consciousness and a remembrance of where he was—the fate from which he had escaped—the existence and the last devotion of Mariette.
Her existence! While lying in that desolate spot, he knew not what had been acted in the city that lay below the brow of the hill where he lurked in security.
In the grey twilight of that autumnal morning, which a dense and murky mist from the German sea rendered yet more gloomy, the prisoner in the tower of Holyrood had been led forth by the half-intoxicated doomster to die; and passing in her male disguise for Hepburn of Bolton, the repentant Mariette—as an atonement for the falsehood she had practised towards him—a faithlessness that had hurried him into crimes against his country, and plans of vengeance on his king—died on the scaffold, where her brother had perished but the day before—died with the secret of her sex on her lips—and died happy, that in doing so she might, by allaying all suspicion and pursuit, enable her lover to escape.
Young Hepburn knew not of this; but anxiously watched the passing day, and longed for evening, when he was to meet her at the Rood Chapel, a lonely little oratory situated on the open muirland midway between the Calton Hill and St. Anthony’s Porte, the southern gate of Leith.