I lay in prison until the twenty-ninth day of May, Royal Oak Day. I
know not quite how it came to pass, but none of my brother's efforts
toward my release met with any success. I heard afterward some
whispers as to the cause, being that so many of high degree were
concerned in the riots, and that if I, a poor devil of a convict
tutor, were let off too cheaply, why then the rest of them must be
let loose only at a rope's end, and that it would never do to send
me back to Drake Hill scot free, while Sir Humphrey Hyde and Major
Robert Beverly and my Lord Estes, and others, were in durance, and
some high in office in great danger of discovery. At all events,
whatever may have been the reason, my release could not be effected,
and in prison I lay for all those days, but with more comfort, since
either Catherine or Mary--Mary I think it must have been--made a
curtain for my window, which kept out that burning eye of the
western sun, and also fashioned a gnat veil to overspread my pallet,
so the flies could not get at me. I knew there were others in
prison, but knew not that three of them were led forth to be hung,
which might have been my fate, had I been a free man, nor knew that
another was released on condition that he build a bridge over
Dragon's Swamp.
This last chance, my friends had striven sorely to
get for me, but had not succeeded, though they had offered large
sums, my brother being willing to tax the estate heavily. Some
covert will there was at work against me, and it may be I could
mention it, but I like not mentioning covert wills, but only such as
be downright, and exercised openly in the faces of all men. I lay
there not so uncomfortably, being aware of a great delight that the
tobacco was cut, whether or no, as indeed it was on many
plantations, and the King cheated out of great wealth.
This end of proceedings, with no Bacon to lead us, did not surprise
nor disappoint me. Then, too, the fact that I was cleared of
suspicion of theft in the eyes of her I loved and her family, at
least, filled me with an ecstasy which sometimes awoke me from
slumber like a pain. And though I was quite resolved not to let that
beloved maid fling away herself upon me, unless my innocence was
proven world-wide, and to shield her at all costs to myself, yet
sometimes the hope that in after years I might be able to wed her
and not injure her, started up within me. She came to see me
whenever she could steal away, Madam Cavendish being still in that
state of hatred against me, for my participation in the riot, though
otherwise disposed enough to give her consent to our marriage on the
spot. And every day came my brother John and Catherine, and now and
then Parson Downs. And the parson used to bring me choice spirits in
his pocket, and tobacco, though I could touch only the latter for
fear of inflaming my wounds, and he used to sit and read me some of
Will Shakespeare's Plays, which he bore under his cassock, and a
prayer-book openly in hand, that being the only touch of hypocrisy
which ever I saw about Parson Downs.