Unicorn Rampant by Nigel Tranter

present.
    "You—aye you, Sir Johnnie. You go. Aye, you go doon there. See if it is to be trusted wi' our royal person. Try out this ill contrive and see what's what. You have spunk enough. Come back and tell me—if you can! Mind, if you dinna come back, I'm oot o' here like a wheasel! You be quiet, George Bruce!"
    Swallowing a grin, John stepped on to the platform and Bruce signed to the hoist-man to lower away.
    To a loud creaking and clanking the platform descended into darkness.
    "Yon's a right feartie!" the man Durie shouted, above the din. "Whae is he, at a'?"
    "That's the King."
    "Him . . .!" The rest was left unsaid.
    "He is none so ill." John found himself defending his sovereign. "Some things he fears excessively—plots and cold steel and deviltry and witchcraft, they say. It is believed because his mother the Queen Mary's secretary, Rizzio, was stabbed to death in front of her eyes just before James was born. He is courageous enough in other ways ..."
    His unseen companion sniffed but said nothing.
    It was getting hotter all the time in that black shaft. Presently a faint glimmer of light began to show through the cracks in the boarding beneath their feet and this developed into the yellow flame of a lamp hanging from a gleaming ebony roof where the platform clanked to a halt. John peered out. They seemed to be in something like a great cavern, dimly lit, walls and ceiling of chipped jet, with various openings off, some man-height, some only half that. Even as he looked a completely naked, black-streaked figure came crawling up on hands and knees out of one of the lower cavities, dragging a wicker basket filled with lumps of coal. This, when risen upright, the figure hoisted up staggeringly, to tip it into a large wooden trolley standing there, with others, in a black cloud of dust, before crouching down and entering the hole again, with the basket, like an animal into its burrow.
    "Saints above!" John exclaimed. "That . . . that was a child- A girl, I saw, I saw . . .!"
    "Aye, the lassies are right guid for hauling up yon braes," Durie explained. "They're ower low for grown folk."
    "But. . . but .. . down there! Below this ... ?"
    "Och, aye—the workings are further doon. The galleries where the hewers work, just. The men cut, the weemen drag the coal frae the face and the bairns draw it up the braes."
    John was silent.
    "Up, then?" the man asked, and at a nod started to pull on the ropes.
    Emerged again into the half-light of the upper entry, James cried out at sight of them.
    "You survived, man—God be praised! Is it secure and unjeopardous? Nae pitfalls?" He was relieved enough to chuckle. "Pitfalls, eh—right apt!"
    "None, Sire. Only strangeness and, and the unnatural. There are children down there."
    "Is that a fact? Och, then it should be safe enough." James allowed himself to be assisted on to the platform.
    There followed the problem of who was to accompany the monarch down, for the hoist would take only seven or eight at a t ime, and with John, whom he clutched rightly for safety, Sir George and the hoist-man, there was room only for three more, for James would by no means have the thing overloaded. He solved the matter by beckoning Ludovick on, then selecting the two lightest-looking men there, Chancellor Fyvie and Sir Gideon Murray, the Treasurer-Depute, rejecting Tam Hamilton as too large and the Earl of Southampton as having too gross a belly. Huddled together, this company descended, to loud instructions to Durie-man to go canny and to John to keep close, exclamations at the wicked darkness, the satanic heat and the noxious stench. John could feel the royal body pressed against his own, trembling.
    At the bottom, escaped out of the shaft, Bruce explained that this had been the first level of mining, but that as this seam of coal was worked out, they had had to probe down lower and lower, so that now they were working three seams at least two hundred feet further down, reached by these adits or