Kate Sedley - The Plymouth Cloak

'And of course he accepted this challenge to his manhood.'

'Of course, as I had known he would.' Janet raised her hands and covered her eyes for a moment. When she removed them, she looked almost as if she might swoon. 'I never thought it would be so difficult to kill a man. I had taken one of the kitchen knives with me, carefully sharpened, and imagined that I had only to plunge it into his breast to strike him dead. But it wasn't like that at all. He was waiting for me when I arrived and immediately embraced me and kissed my lips. God help me, I even felt the stirrings of response! I tried to push him away, but he kept nuzzling my hair, which I had left uncovered and unbound, telling me how clever he had been in getting you to sleep outside the bedchamber door. I asked why he had brought a cudgel with him, and he answered that he felt safer roaming around in the dark if he had protection against thieves and footpads. I know now that he had other enemies to fear.'

'And he told you it was mine.'?'

'The cudgel.'? He must have done, or I shouldn't have known. But I don't recall his actual words. I was bracing myself to strike. I managed at last to free myself from his arms, brought the knife out of my pocket and plunged it into his breast.' She made a sound which was half sob, half laugh. 'The look of astonishment on his face was ludicrous. He could not believe what was happening. There was no reason that he knew of why I should wish to kill him. He fell to his knees, trying to pull out the knife which had gone in up to the haft. Blood was trickling from the side of his mouth, but he was still alive. In horror, I picked up the cudgel — your cudgel — which he had placed on the ground and began hitting him with it, again and again, on the back of the head.' She shuddered. 'I was covered with blood. It was horrible, but all I could think of was my little boy, robbed of his mother and his proper life, turned into a dwarf for the pleasure of some Milanese or Florentine nobleman.

Eventually, when I was finally satisfied that Philip Underdown was dead, I threw down the cudgel and ran back here as fast as I could. You'll find the blood-stained dress at the bottom of the robe-chest in my room, hidden under my other clothes.' We stared at one another across the table. 'So now you know what really happened,' she said at last. 'What do you intend to do?'

'I don't know,' I answered slowly. 'I can't find it in my heart to blame you. In your place, I think I would have done the same.'

'But you don't think it fair to let someone else, not even a self-confessed murderer, take the blame for something he did not do?'

A shout came from the courtyard and there was the sudden bustle of an arrival. Thomas Sawyer had returned with the Sheriff's officer. It was time to go out and welcome them and tell them what I knew.'

'Was it you,' I asked, 'who put the bunch of daisies and the knotgrass in our bedchamber?'

Janet got to her feet, smoothing down her skirt. 'Yes. I don't really know why I did it, except to remind him of what he had done, of the lives he had broken, never to be mended. But you didn't let him see them. Perhaps if you had, at the very end, he might have understood why he was killed.'

In all the years between then and now, half a century which has seen so much change and made us more cynical in our way of thinking, I have often wondered if I did right to let Janet Overy go free and escape the consequences of her deed.

And I have never found the answer. It still must be a crime in the eyes of God to let another person suffer for your wrongdoing, even if that person is evil and would have suffered the full penalty of the law for other misdeeds. Yet I could not bring myself even then to denounce her for what she did to Philip Underdown; and since I have held my own children in my arms and watched them grow to sturdy man and womanhood, I have never regretted my decision for an instant. How I shall fare on the Day of Judgement, when I stand at last before the Creator of us all, the Being who is privy to the secrets of everyone's heart, I do not know. Shall I be judged more harshly for my collusion in covering up the truth or for my lack of repentance? Only God can decide.

I suppose I can argue that at least I told the Sheriffs officer no lies. I simply did not tell him all the truth. I made no accusation against Jeremiah Fletcher except to repeat his admission that he had twice tried to take Philip's life during the past five days, and that he was a self-confessed agent for the enemies of the King: a traitor as well as a murderer. But it was not the Sergeant's fault that he looked no further for the slayer of a royal messenger who was carrying an important letter to the Duke of Brittany.

Janet and I watched in silence the following morning as Jeremiah Fletcher was led away in chains. In fact, we spoke very little, avoiding each other's company, after that conversation in the kitchen. We said a brief goodbye before I returned to Plymouth, taking with me my borrowed rouncey, but leaving Philip's flea-bitten grey to enjoy his new home.

The Sheriff's officer had promised to send a messenger to Simon Whitehead at Falmouth, but gave his approval to my plan to go myself to Brittany if I had heard nothing to the contrary by the time the Falcon arrived in Sutton harbour.

What is there left to say of this adventure, except that I went to Brittany and delivered King Edward's letter to Duke Francis in person? It was the first time I had ever left these shores, and the first time I ever saw that Lesser Britain, with whose inhabitants we share a common heritage, and of which, in ancient times, this island was known as the Greater part. When I returned to Plymouth several weeks later, I found my rouncey patiently waiting for me at the stables where I had left him, and together we made our way back to Exeter and the Bishop's Palace. I made my report to His Grace, said farewell to the horse, picked up my pack and thankfully resumed my life on the open road.

I heard many months later, by roundabout ways, that the Duke of Gloucester's men had come searching for me in Exeter two weeks after I left, and that the Duke was angry with Bishop John Bothe for letting me go unrewarded. But in those far-off days, I was young and footloose and fancy-free, wanting nothing but my freedom. The life I had chosen had its hardships and pitfalls, but I answered to no man, owed no one anything but myself.

As for the success of my mission, everyone knows now that Duke Francis stayed his hand, offering no succour to the beleaguered Earl of Oxford on St Michael's Mount. After that first desperate assault on the fortress, when Sir John Arundel and so many of his troops were slain in the sand at the foot of the main stairway, the attacks dwindled in number until, finally, the new sheriff, Sir John Fortescue, was content to blockade the Mount by land and sea, eventually starving the Earl and his men into submission the following February.

Oxford was sent to Calais where he spent the next nine years as a prisoner in Hammes Castle. Henry Tudor and his Uncle Jasper remained as 'guests' in Brittany.

I never saw Janet Overy again, but during one of my visits to that part of the country, I was told by someone who had known her that she had left Trenowth Manor quite suddenly to go on pilgrimage to Rome, and had never returned.

Sometimes she haunts my dreams; a lost, melancholy ghost, wandering from one Italian city to another, searching, endlessly searching, for a poor maimed and stunted man who was once her beautiful child. And I wake with the tears running down my face, wishing that Philip Underdown and I had never set foot in Trenowth; that she had been left to eke out her broken life in peace.