FOOTNOTES
[40] As I write an ancient map of Exeter is before me confirming this description.
CHAPTER VII.
CASTLE REDFYRNE.
It is necessary, for the fuller elucidation of our veracious narrative, that the reader should here be made acquainted with the earlier history of the Redfyrne family.
About twenty miles, or a little more, to the south-east of Glastonbury, over the Dorsetshire border, and not far from Sturminster, stood, three centuries ago, an old and mouldering castle, built in the days of the Barons’ wars.
It was surrounded by a wide moat, fed from the river Stour, which rolled its deep and sluggish flood in mazy windings through the ancient park, which, rich with hoary oak and mossy beech, surrounded the castle.
A part of the massive buildings had been adapted to the ideas of the sixteenth century, and fashioned so as to form a convenient dwelling for the family, while the Keep and other portions were left to decay. It formed a picturesque group, the modern dwelling, with its airy windows and open aspect, contrasting the venerable towers, which suggested dungeons, as deep as the walls were high; wherein the captives of past generations once wept, and “appealed from tyranny to God.”
Here, in the early days of “Bluff King Hal,” dwelt the good knight Sir Geoffrey Redfyrne, with his lady and their four children.
The eldest boy, Geoffrey, was the darling of his father’s heart, frank and generous, full of chivalrous courage, affectionate, and gifted with the power of winning affection. The younger boy, John, differed greatly—he was morose and selfish in disposition, vindictive and passionate; his only good quality the courage which was hereditary in his family.
As a natural consequence, the father’s preference for Geoffrey was almost too manifest, for it increased the secret hatred the younger brother, younger by a year only, bore to his elder, whom he continually crossed in a variety of ways—maiming his pet animals, leading him into scrapes and then betraying him, yet cunningly keeping his hand concealed when he was able.
They had of course many quarrels, but the elder was always as ready to forgive, as the younger to resent.
Of the sisters we shall not speak, further than to say that they were often peace-makers between their brothers, and that John was many a time forgiven at their intercession.
It was on the whole a happy family, and had the parents lived, the faults of the younger son might, under their judicious training, have been corrected. But into this unfortunate household came a deadly visitor—the plague.
It was conveyed into the village by a bale of cloth, consigned to a tailor, from abroad—the tailor’s family sickened, and all died; then those who out of Christian charity had attended them to render good offices in their last distress, sickened also, and infected their own households; from house to house the dreadful malady spread; the parish priest died, the physicians (leeches they called them) died; and, at last, the awful scourge reached the hall—for Sir Geoffrey could not keep away from his sick tenantry.
Death knocks with equal foot at the palaces of kings and the huts of the poor, the plague was no respecter of persons; the good and charitable knight carried the infection home, and ere three days had passed both he and his faithful wife were gone; she watched by him and nursed him till he died, and then falling sick at once, followed him to a better world.
Geoffrey and the two daughters were taken ill next; the boy recovered, the sisters died; the only member of the family who escaped altogether was John, owing perhaps to some physical peculiarity in his constitution, which enabled him to withstand the infection.
Not far from the castle, down the stream, stood Luckland Mill; a father, mother, six children, and an aged grandam, all lived there; but death came, and all died. The water splashed and foamed down the mill-course, the merry wheel ran on, while there were eight corpses in that house which none dared to bury. But the difficulty was solved,—the mill having ground out its corn, ran on, and as there was no one to stop it, caught fire at last from friction of the machinery, and was burnt to the ground, so the dead were “cremated” not buried.
We said eight bodies, for one child, the eldest daughter, named Madge, escaped the fate of her family, being on a visit to some distant relations, when the plague broke out.[41]
At length the pestilence abated, and the sorrow-stricken survivors, but a third of the former population, might estimate their losses, and gaze upon the vacant chairs in their dwellings, wishing often, in the desolation of their hearts, that they had been taken too.
A distant relation became guardian to the two boys at the castle; both of whom were sent to Glastonbury for their education, where John was always in trouble, and Geoffrey in favour.
Richard Whiting was then one of the younger brethren, and one of the tutors of the boys, and it befel more than once that John fell under his just correction, and tasted the rod, an infliction he never forgave. It is needless to say that Geoffrey was a general favourite.
They left school in due time, and arrived at manhood. Geoffrey made one campaign in the French wars, which had a singular result: he was taken captive, and captivated the daughter of his captor; so that on the conclusion of peace, she returned with him to England as Lady Redfyrne.
John remained at home to attend to the estate in his brother’s absence—he did not care for the military life, being too idle; and he was fast sinking into the bachelor brother, who keeps the accounts, looks after the hounds, and makes himself useful in a hundred odd ways, but who feels his own position less comfortable as time moves on and a young family arises, not his own, superseding him.
But all the time, his darker disposition was only suppressed; it was his intention to be lord of the manor, if by any means (and he was not scrupulous as to what means) he might grasp his brother’s inheritance; a younger brother’s portion he despised or gambled away.
“Sui profusus, alieni appietens,”[42] as Sallust wrote of Catiline.
The occasion came; just before his wife’s confinement, poor Geoffrey, to the grief of all who knew him, died after a brief illness. He came home from hunting, wet through, and confiding in the strength of his constitution, omitted, as he often had before, to change his garments; he caught a severe cold, pleurisy set in, and, for the want of such remedies as in the hands of modern science might have saved him, he died.
We are now coming to that portion of our narrative already revealed by Madge of Luckland, for that aged crone was indeed the survivor of the family at the mill.
After his brother’s death, Sir John claimed the estate, as of right, and imagined himself the lawful lord of the manor, when he was informed that, as he had already dreaded, there were hopes of a direct heir.
For a brief time he wrestled with the devil; hard as he was he could not forget the pleading tone of his dying brother,—
“John, dear John, take care of Catharine, and should there be a boy, be a father to him for my sake; when we meet again in another world, thou shalt tell me thou hast discharged the trust: God deal with thee, as thou dealest with her.”
When it became certain that the widow was near her confinement, Sir John had an interview with Madge of Luckland, over whom he had acquired an evil influence: the reader is aware how he used it, and what crime he urged her to commit. But unfortunately for his fell purpose, Madge, in her capacity of nurse, had conceived a strong affection for the sweet helpless lady, with her broken English, and pretty ways. In short, she was true to her better nature, and false to her patron.
After Sir John had gazed for one brief moment at the dead babe, whose identity he doubted not, he departed from the castle on urgent business; the deed was done, and he was glad to go, for he trembled while he repented not.
He was absent a whole month, during which he was busily engaged in pushing his fortune at court, where he had been previously presented: it was at this period he made the acquaintance of Thomas Cromwell, then Secretary to Wolsey.
At length the time arrived for his return for the first time as lord of the manor, and an avant courier arrived at Castle Redfyrne to announce his approaching arrival.
It was then that Madge, fearful of the consequences, should she be unable to conceal the existence of the babe,—who was meanwhile nursed by a gipsy mother,—advised Catharine Redfyrne to fly to the shrine of S. Joseph at Glastonbury, assuring her that the good old Abbot would recollect her husband and protect his child.
It was arranged that she should leave the castle in the darkest hour, before the dawn of the winter’s day; for the new servants were devoted to their lord’s interests, and might not allow her to depart. Madge enquired whether the lady could ride, as she would undertake herself to procure a steed.
Catharine asserted that she was a good horse-woman, and had no fear of the journey; also that she knew the country, having been to Glastonbury with her lord. The weather was frosty, and there was no sign of any change for the worse; the weather prophets, as upon a later occasion,[43] gave no intimation of an approaching storm.
Before dawn on Holy Innocents’ Day, Madge awoke the young widow; together they left the castle while the whole household was asleep. They crossed the star-lit park to the Luckland Mill, now rebuilt, where Madge had procured the horse. They found it awaiting them, and the gipsy was there, by appointment, with the babe. One other person alone was in the secret, the miller.
They parted with many tears, and never met in this world again. Poor Madge, her life had been stained by sin; let this act of Christian charity plead her forgiveness.
On her way back to the castle, Madge was struck by the wondrous but ominous beauty of the dawn, first a streak of pale blue, which then seemed upheaved by sheets of crimson fire; the eye was almost dazzled by the brilliancy of the deepening blaze, as if the eastern heavens were in conflagration.
“A red sky at night is the shepherds’ delight, but a red sky in the morning is the shepherds’ warning,” muttered Madge, fearing there would be bad weather.
It was one of those lovely winter days when the blue sky and fleecy clouds and the brilliant atmosphere are more delightful than in summer, but towards evening the wind set in steadily from the east, the heavens assumed a dull leaden hue, and just before sunset, down came the first flakes of snow.
Thicker flakes! thicker! thicker! the night darker; the snow deeper, each hour.
The reader knows the rest, if he has read the prologue to our tale. The horse must have refused to proceed, nor was he ever found, he must have perished in the snow; but the miller did not dare to make enquiries for fear of exciting suspicion. It was lucky that the same snow procured a brief respite for Madge, for Sir John could not get home for more than a week, and when he came was met by the intelligence that the mother had fled, as it was supposed, in a fit of mental derangement, caused by grief over the loss of her infant; and that she had perished, as they thought, in the snow.
But how she had perished, and where, was never known to Sir John; Madge persuaded him that she had strayed into the river, but no body was ever found when the thaw, after some weeks of intense frost, permitted a search; the miller kept his secret, and Sir John was content to leave the matter in mystery, and to reap the benefit.
But he never afterwards liked the presence of Madge, his supposed confederate, and he sent her from the neighbourhood, so that he lost sight of her for twenty years.
How they met at last the reader has learned.
Sir John, hardened as he was, could not for a time shake off the remembrance of his brother’s last words; often in sleep that brother seemed to stand by him. “I bade thee guard my poor wife and child, how hast thou kept thy trust?” He remembered the mournful way in which Geoffrey, when they were little children, had reproached him for the death of a pet which he had maliciously caused, and the boy and man were mingled in his dreams.
Should he ever have to bear the reproach in another world!
He shook the thought off—parried it with the shield of unbelief.
How like the poor ostrich, who hides his head in the sand, and thinks, because it cannot see its pursuers, it is itself unseen!
But still he frequented Church, went regularly each Sunday to Mass, and each year to Confession; indeed it would have been dangerous to do otherwise, or to confess his unbelief, as he avowed to Madge on her death-bed.
By-and-bye Cromwell began to organize that terrible system of espionage, which filled the scaffolds with victims. Dorset was unrepresented in the prying brotherhood; he thought of his old friend, Sir John, in whom he had discovered a kindred spirit when both served Wolsey, and offered him the post. Sir John eagerly accepted the confidence, and began at once to exercise his office, to watch his neighbours, to entrap them in unguarded conversations, and so to denounce them if he found the opportunity, and all the time he was unsuspected, or even Cromwell could hardly have saved him from the just fury of his countrymen.
And in this capacity he had no small share in the tragedy at Glastonbury; he hated the Abbot as we have seen, and willingly employed all his craft in bringing his old tutor to the gibbet and quartering block, and when the victim suffered he was there, on the Tor Hill, and revelled in the ghastly butchery of the man who had once striven to check his opening vices.
When the fall of his patron, Cromwell, took place, Sir John was for the time in imminent danger, but he extricated himself by a master stroke: he attended in his place, as knight of the shire, and voted for cutting off his friend’s head without a trial, by process of Bill of Attainder; thus by this skilful trimming of his sails he escaped the storm; but the idea was not original, Archbishop Cranmer did the same.[44]
He had for a near neighbour Squire Grabber, and had often admired the evil qualities of young Nicholas, from whom, in the exercise of his vocation, he had gained many valuable pieces of information, which he had duly conveyed to Cromwell.
When the Martyrdom on the Tor Hill was accomplished, and the Abbey suppressed, Sir John proposed to his neighbour to let young Nick begin the business of life (as was then customary even amongst the sons of gentlefolk) as his page, not, be it understood, in any menial sense of the word.
The squire consented, and the reader knows the consequences, so far as we have yet had space to unfold them.
