Penelope Brandling: A Tale of the Welsh coast in the Eighteenth CenturyLee, Vernon
General
Penelope Brandling: A Tale of the Welsh coast in the Eighteenth Century
Lee, Vernon
Castles -- Fiction; Gothic fiction; Married women -- Fiction; Smugglers -- Fiction; Uncles -- Fiction; Wales -- Fiction
The foregoing pages are sufficient record for those of my children and
grandchildren who have heard the tale from my lips, and sufficient
explanation for the remoter posterity of Eustace Brandling and myself,
of the mystery which overhung their family in the latter part of the
eighteenth century. I have only a few legal details to add.
By the explosion which my husband's skill in chemistry and mechanics had
enabled him to procure and to time, all the main buildings of St.
Salvat's Castle had been utterly destroyed; hiding in their ruins the
fate alike of the faithful Davies and of the atrocious Hubert; and
hiding, for anything, that was known to the contrary, two other
presumable victims--my husband and myself. The gang of villains,
deprived of its headquarters, and deprived of its master spirit,
speedily fell to pieces. Richard and Gwyn appear to have come to a
violent end in quarrelling over the booty of the last wicked expedition;
Simon and Evan, and some of their followers ended in prison, on a charge
of pillaging the ruins and digging for treasure while the property, in
the absence of it master, was still in the hands of the law; but it is
probable that this condemnation was intended to save them from a worse
punishment, as the authorities gradually got wind of the real trade
which had been carried on in the castle.
From the villains of St. Salvat's Eustace and I were now safe. But we
had taken the law into our own hands; and the justice which had been
unable to defend us while innocent, was bound to punish our acts towards
the guilty. My husband's words had been true: he and I were outlaws and
felons. Our case was privily placed before the King and his ministers,
when we had left England and had rejoined my mother in her country. In
consideration of the unusual circumstances it was decided that the
baronetcy should not lapse, nor the lands be forfeited to the Crown, but
be held over for our possible heirs, while ourselves should be accounted
as mysteriously disappeared, and forbidden to enter the kingdom. So we
wandered for many years in the new world and the old; and it was far
from St. Salvat's that our children were successively born. And it was
only on the death of my dear husband, which occurred in 1802, that a
Brandling, our eldest son, reappeared and claimed his title and
inheritance. It was the wish of my son Piers that I should accompany him
and his wife to England, and help to rebuild the home which I had helped
to destroy. But the recollection of the place had only grown in terror,
and I have ever adhered to my resolution not to set eyes on it again. I
have spent the years of my widowhood at Grandfey, my dear dead mother's
little property in Switzerland, where Eustace and I had been so happy
before he succeeded to St. Salvat's. And it is at Grandfey, among the
meadows again white with hemlock and the lime avenues again in blossom,
that I await, amid the sound of cowbells and of mountain streams, Death,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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