The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century by Thomas Longueville
page 26 of 132 (19%)
page 26 of 132 (19%)
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Thomas and Lady Howard, and Sir Edmund and Lady Withipole.
Suddenly, to Coke's great satisfaction, Lady Elizabeth became, as he supposed, calm and quiet. It was his habit to go to bed at nine o'clock, and to get up very early. One night he went to bed at his usual hour, under the impression that his wife was settling down nicely and resigning herself to the inevitable. While he was in his beauty-sleep, soon after ten, that excellent lady quietly left the house with her daughter, and walked some little distance to a coach, which she had engaged to be in waiting for them at an appointed place. In this coach they travelled by unfrequented and circuitous roads, until they arrived at a house near Oatlands, a place belonging to the Earl of Argyll, but rented at that time by Lady Elizabeth's cousin, Sir Edmund Withipole. The distance from Holborn to Oatlands, as the crow flies, is about twenty miles; but, by the roundabout roads which the fugitives took in order to prevent attempts to trace them, the distance must have been considerable, and the journey, in the clumsy coach of the period, over the rutted highways and the still worse by-roads of those times, must have been long and wearisome. Oatlands is close to Weybridge, to the south-west of London, in Surrey, just over the boundary of Middlesex and about a mile to the south of the river Thames. In Sir Edmund Withipole's house Lady Elizabeth and her daughter lived in the strictest seclusion, and all precautions were taken to prevent the place of their retreat from becoming known. And great caution was necessary, for Lady Elizabeth and Frances were almost within a dozen miles of Stoke Pogis, their country home; so that they would have been in danger of being recognised, if they had appeared outside the house. |
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