Harriet’s right. There’s not a moment to lose. A few of your things are here in a bag. Get down to the shore as fast as you can. You know Lime Cove. That’s where the boat is. Get in and get off as fast as you can.”
I said: “I must go …”
“You must come with me, my child,” replied Harriet. “You are cold right through.
The mist is dangerous and you have been out in it all night. Go now, dear boy, and God be with you.”
That was how it happened. He had to go straight down to the cove and he had to go alone.
There at the cove his enemies were waiting for him. They seized him as he was making his way to the boat.
One of the servants told us that he had been seen, hands tied, riding on a horse in the midst of a company of soldiers who were taking him back to London.
The weeks which followed were the most wretchedly tragic in my life up to that time, for it soon became clear that I should never be Jocelyn’s wife. His trial was brief; his sentence was carried out almost immediately. His guilt was clear, they said.
Why else should he have run away? I had nightmares. I dreamed I was there at the scaffold when he laid his fair head on the block. In my dreams I saw the executioner’s bloody hands as he held up that beloved head now severed from the body which I had loved.
I was stunned. There could never have been such misery as I was suffering. Jocelyn … dead! Never to see him again! Never to feel Ms arms about me!
How I wished I had been beside him. I wished they had taken me with him. I wished that I had died beside him, for there seemed no point in living on without him.
How quickly everything could change! I had been so happy. I had dreamed of our going to France together, living there so blissfully happy, and coming back later… husband and wife.
I should never know peace again. I had lost my dear one. My life was finished. There could never be any happiness for me again.
I could not eat. I could sleep only fitfully and then I was haunted by nightmares.
In these I was at the scaffold. I saw the executioner with that beautiful, well-loved head in his hands-a head without a body. The voice echoed through my dreams: “Behold the head of a traitor.”
He was no traitor. He was just a good, kind man … the man I loved.
I thought: My life is finished. I shall never be happy again.
Harriet was wonderful to me. She looked after me through those weeks. She would not allow me to return home.
Gradually I learned what had happened and it did not relieve my misery to know that I was responsible for his capture.
It was Harriet who broke it to me. “You’ll have to know how they were led to him,” she said. “Now you mustn’t blame yourself in any way. You gave him the greatest happiness any one person can give another. I know that. You loved him and he loved you. So you must not fret. You will grow out of this. One does. You remember the ring he gave you... plighting your troth?”
“The ring!” I cried. “Yes, the ring. It will be there beneath the court cupboard.
I shall treasure it forever.”
“You will never see it again, my child.”
“What do you mean, Harriet?”
“It was not behind the cupboard.”
“Then it was found! But it couldn’t have been. I searched everywhere.”
“Your mother has told me what happened. She took a dress from the cupboard and gave it to Chastity to lengthen or alter in some way. Chastity was to take it home with her. She went into the kitchen to have a word with her mother. The dress was over her arm, I imagine. There was a ring caught up in the lace.”
I felt sick with misery. Why had I not examined the dress! Why had I been so foolish, so careless as to have deluded myself into thinking the ring had fallen behind the cupboard!
“Jasper was in the kitchen at the time,” went on Harriet.
“Oh, no, no no!” I cried.
“Alas, yes. He seized the ring. He thinks all such baubles sinful. He examined it, saw the crest and the name inside. Then it was remembered that food had disappeared from the pantry … and conclusions were drawn. He told no one in the house what he intended to do. He took the ring to London and went to see Titus Gates.”
“I hate Jasper,” I cried. “I hate his black, bigoted soul.”
“He said he was doing his duty. Of course you can guess what happened. You were under suspicion immediately. Your parents did not know about it then because Jasper had acted without telling anyone. Oates’s men wanted to know where you had gone and that led them here. They have been asking questions in the neighbourhood. They discovered that a young actor calling himself John Frisby was here. The description fitted Jocelyn.”
“Did they come here, Harriet?”
