Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/840

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DEVONSHIRE CHARACTERS

of Lord Morley) she eventually married. Katherine, her mother, and the other ladies endeavoured to return to their chambers, but Richard Weekes, with bared sword, stood in the doorway of the parlour, from which room the stairs ascended to that part of the house in which the deeds were kept, and swore that he would suffer no one to go up the said stairs. On Katherine's making a second attempt to do so, he "threw her violently on the ground upon her head." Mr. Parker, seeing this done in the presence of a justice of the peace, Alexander Wood, of North Tawton, rightly apprehended that he was a partisan of Richard, and determined to ride off in quest of a more impartial justice.

Stepping out of the house in his "pantables" (pantoufles, slippers) to get his horse in readiness, and returning to the hall door for his boots, Parker was refused admittance, "and his boots denied to be delivered to him, although he desired they might be delivered to him out of the window, so that he was forced, having been indisposed that day, and by that means in his pantables, to take his servant's boots, which he caused to be pluckt off on purpose."

Richard then turned the guests out into the dark, many of whom, "though gentlewomen of quality," were forced to sleep "at mean houses, and some to lie in hay-lofts." But Katherine, her mother, and grandmother were allowed to sit up all night in the hall. At about midnight, to their dismay, Katherine and her companions heard Richard Weekes and his myrmidons go up the stairs and smash open, "with hatchet and iron bar," the locked doors of her own chamber and of the muniment-room.

Among the "writings" that Richard thus got hold of was the deed of entail, which was her last weapon