The Plymouth Cloak

EPILOGUE

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.