Читать книгу Jane Seton; or, The King's Advocate. A Scottish Historical Romance онлайн

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The bells of the Carmelites, on the north side of the city, of the Dominicans on the south, of the Franciscans in the Grassmarket, and other large establishments, were all ringing for morning mass, when the cavalcade returned; and Roland, sick at heart, and dispirited, without bidding adieu to the king (who with his company passed on to prayer in the abbey church), dismounted at the door of his own lodgings, and throwing the bridle of his horse to his servant, demanded breakfast, for he was in too furious a mood to attend mass. He was anxious to see Lord Ashkirk, but, encouraged by his disguise, and trusting implicitly in the old domestics of the house, that rash noble had gone to visit his family.

Breakfast was prepared and laid on the table by Roland's servant, Linton Stock, whose name had been professionally shortened into Lintstock. He was an old, iron-visaged culvernier, of King James IV.'s days (as the countess would say), hard-featured, wiry-haired, weather-beaten, and empurpled with hard drinking. It was his constant boast that he had levelled one of Borthwick's Brass Sisters on the field of Flodden, and thrawn Mow at the siege of Tantallan. Like Hannibal, this veteran had only one eye, for Mow (a famous cannon of Scottish antiquity) lost a piece of her muzzle every time she was discharged; and one of the said pieces deprived Lintstock of his dexter eye, which, as he said, ever after saved him the trouble of closing it when taking aim, or adjusting the quoins under the breach of a culverin. For wages he had all his master's cast cloaks, doublets, and breeches; and being borne on the muster-roll of the king's gunners, his pay, which was somewhere about three-halfpence Scots per diem made him independent of all mankind.