When she saw me she stopped calling and trying to raise him. “Mauganl He felll I think he’s … Maugan, he fell from half way up. I I was behind him but I could not catch him ,,
Sir Anthony was still breathing but in the flickering light his face was soap-grey and very old. As I tried to drag him into a better position others of the family came including servants, and presently he was lifted and carried back to his chamber. There he lay stertorous, a trickle of saliva damping the corner of his mouth, while talk and argument eddied over him.
Elizabeth’s story was that she had been awakened by her father who had told her to dress and come downstairs, as he had a message for her to take. It was only when Thomas pointed out that Godfrey Brett was not roused and they went to his chamber and found the bed empty that she burst into tears and told the truth. Sir Anthony had not fallen on the way downstairs: he had fallen backwards as he was going up after seeing Godfrey on his best horse and away.
“So!” shouted Thomas. “The rat’s gone! By morning he’ll be, be half across Cornwall! But if he’s taken Hilary she’s a distinctive mare and maybe we can trace him. Come, Uncle, what did I say? If we leave now we might even catch up with him before he leaves the woods!”
“No,” said Sir Francis. “Leave him go.”
“But “
“Leave him go. The bargain that he made still stands. But I did not expect that he would run tonight. I thought his courage would have stuck till morning.”
“It was not that way,” said Elizabeth, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “It was my father who insisted he should go at once. It was against his own wishes that Godfrey Brett left.”
As they discussed it I stepped back, feeling myself an intruder in this scene. I pictured Godfrey Brett spurring towards Truro, looking for the next family who would hide him. There were others, no doubt, and plenty.
Old Henry, one of the ostlers, was brought in and stared helplessly at the sick man. He fingered the livid bruise at the side of Sir Anthony’s neck and said in a whining voice that he would draw off blood to give the Master some easement.
Gertrude Arundell, Jonathan’s wife, came to stand beside me as he began. She too had gone thinner this summer; at sixteen she looked mature. Then I saw her glance towards the door and draw in a sharp breath; Godfrey Brett was standing beside Elizabeth.
The only sound for some moments was the drip of blood into the bowl.
Sir Francis straightened up. “Well, sir, did your horse go lame? “
“Yes,” said Brett, and came into the room. “Yes, sir, it was lamed by the sound of a fall as I was crossing the yard to the stables. So it never started. I have been waiting in Sir Anthony’s study until Miss Elizabeth brought me word. It seems that my old friend is mortal sick.”
“I think he has had an apoplexy.”
“Then he will need me.”
“You came back at your own peril.”
“We do all things, sir, at our own peril. It is man’s privilege and destiny.” He walked to the bed.
By the morning Sir Anthony had come round, but he could not speak and lay listlessly, eyes dulled under the white brows; but now and then a gleam of intelligence showed, like some one coming to a window and peering through the shutter. Lady Arundell and Godfrey Brett never left him.
Towards evening the sick man recovered enough to know what was being said to him and to nod emphatically when Brett asked if he should administer extreme unction. Only Lady Arundell stayed in the room while the anointing was performed; later when others went in it was possible to see a dampness round Sir Anthony’s eyelids. Shortly afterwards he relapsed into a state of coma. When you passed the door of his room you could hear the slow heavy snore of a dying man.
He lasted through the night. I half expected Brett to make good his escape this time, now that all that could be done had been done, but he was still there when dawn broke.
It was a warm heavy day. The trees had encroached on the house in the last two years; the gardens were neglected and flies hovered over rotted branches and damp ferns. Foxgloves and nettles and brambles fought for light and sun under the silent trees. When one opened the window there was no fresh air, only a smell of dank vegetation and the buzzing of flies and bees. It had rained again in the night.
About seven the family was called to the bedroom. Sir Anthony’s eyes were open and he had stopped snoring. Godfrey Brett stood by the bed holding a crucifix for him to see. Thomas stood by the window, his faint shadow darkening the floor.
After a while the dying man moved his head an inch to take in the people about him. Brett was intoning in Latin. Sir Anthony raised a hand and made a gesture which might have been the sign of the cross. Outside rooks cawed in the tall cypress trees. The hand came slowly to rest and the mouth slowly opened, the lips parting reluctantly as if stuck with glue; the head rolled.
Thomas uttered a strange noise at the window. I do not know if it was grief, or if it was satisfaction at being one step nearer his inheritance.
To arrest Godfrey Brett at once was now the obvious course, since Sir Anthony would no longer suffer from the disclosure. Thomas was all for seeing it done. Sir Francis hesitated.
Thomas said they now had nothing to fear from an inquiry; his father had not been in his right mind when employing this man; no one could prove otherwise; no one else was to blame; Brett could hurt no one. Thomas further argued that there was now more danger in letting him go since, if he was later caught, he could accuse not Sir Anthony but Sir Francis Godolphin of abetting his entry into the kingdom. What high officer responsible to the Queen would dare to give such a man his freedom? Or suppose Brett got clear away,‘how would everyone feel then? Sir Francis rubbed his grey beard.
I do not know if consideration for Brett’s decision to stay and be with Sir Anthony to the end had any bearing on Sir Francis’s doubt. Largely I think it was still consideration for the house of Tolverne. If an inquiry were ever held, the house and its occupants, even if cleared, would remain under a cloud. And Jonathan, now head of it, was not a man to bear up stoutly under disgrace. There was a frailty in him, a lack of conviction, which would stand him in ill stead before a court of inquiry. Then there was Elizabeth, a convinced Catholic now and in a hysterical frame of mind. Even Lady Arundell, with her attachment for her late husband and in early bereavement, might not stand up well.
Because there was no further excuse to stay, I left before a decision was come to. But I learned later that Sir Francis with typical discretion had found a middle way. He kept Brett under house arrest for four days until after the funeral, and in the meantime set afoot discreet inquiries in Truro. Two days after Sir Anthony was borne to his last resting place in Philleigh Church, where he still lies, a Breton vessel, the Violette, of 40 tons, bound from Truro to Dieppe with a cargo of uncoloured woollen cloth, took in sail at Tolverne Pool just long enough for a row boat, which had been loitering in her path, to put aboard one tall black-clad Catholic who temporarily was to be allowed to be neither missionary nor martyr. I understand that Brett took it calmly, as he took most things calmly in his dedicated life. It was no policy of the Counter-Reformation to sacrifice its sons without good cause.
Mistress Alice Arundell now lived at Tregony, so it was scarcely out of my way to call first at the farm in the hills behind St Clement’s Point. It was raining hard and blowing, on the first of August, 1594. As I rode Copley up the last ridge to the farm, his hooves were squelching in brown mud. The trees on the other side of the river near Malpas were hung with a widow’s veil of rain. I had passed field after field in which the corn was beaten flat; sheep huddled for protection under dripping and waving trees; cattle hung their heads; here and there men and women worked about the barns, sacks over shoulders and tied round legs; it rained as if it would never stop.