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room lit only by black candles, Alice, the old nurse, who had in fact been Decimus' own etnurse. The poet had been the fifteenth child and the tenth son of Sir Marcus Meredith and his City-heiress wife—hence the commemorative Latin name Decimus. He had also been the only boy to survive; Alice must have done well by him. Decimus! You could not imagine such a name being bestowed on a baby today, at any rate not being a tenth child. Admittedly the Merediths had ended up with a mere four children—out of fifteen—since two of their five girls had also died in infancy.
    So Dame Alice knelt alone by the great bed draped in its black velvet hangings; plenty of those available in the early seventeenth century when Death was never further away than the threshold of the room. According to "Heaven's True Mourning, " Decimus had been laid in the bed in which his own mother had recently died, as his life slowly bled away. That "pious and revered daughter of a City- merchant who brought honour as well as fortune" to the family name, in the words of the memorial, had preceded her single surviving son by only a few weeks. "She led the way, he followed trustingly as when he was a child."
    At some time, then, in the night, when the black candles had burnt low, in that "dead of night when men most easily give up their souls to God," robbers had come silently and secretly to Lackland Court. They had found their way without difficulty through the Great Chamber: with the King's cause so heavily defeated that day, and the Lord dying, they had not thought to put guards.
    Perhaps Alice slept on her watch, wearied by the long day of horror and its tragic climax. For when she awoke the body was gone. The heavy black coverlet was torn aside, and the corpse was vanished. The old woman had some story of men-at-arms, knights, black knights, visions of the devil, but surely these were merely unhappy visions as she slept. The body of Decimus Lord Lackland had never been found.
    It had in fact never been seen again since that night, not his bones, not his skeleton, no trace. The coffin alone had been placed in the family vault: sadly and symbolically empty. The tablet above it had in sonorous and long-winded Latin recorded the capture of the body "and yet his soul they could not take" - (' Sed animam non rapture posse.. .) And even that tablet had not been destined to rest very long in place. The chapel, which was much older than the house itself, had been very badly damaged by mortars during the siege of Lackland Court three years later. In a reverse of the usual pious story of miraculous preservation it was the chapel which had burnt and the house which had emerged virtually unscathed. (The Parliamentarian excuse for pounding the house of God was the fact that ammunition and troops were stored there, something hotly denied by the Royalists.) In the eighteenth century the chapel had been allowed to become a suitably ivy-clad folly; the tablet, Jemima believed, had been removed to Taynford Cathedral.
    Returning to the abduction of the body, who could have done such a thing? The Roundheads - the Parliamentarian army, as Jemima must learn to call them - were naturally blamed as they were blamed for every desecration. Was it their need to extinguish the legend as well as the life of the Cavalier hero which had led to such a gross deed against the dead? Contemporary sources were either unhelpful or contradictory on the subject, according to Rupert, and Jemima, having checked them for herself, agreed.
    Clarendon, for example, in his long eulogy of the character of the poet and his wife, elected not to mention the disappearance of his corpse. " Heaven's True Mourning ," while suggesting that the deed was an act of vengeance on the part of the Parliamentarians, on a par with the impiety of those who would five years later kill King Charles the First, had nevertheless not named those personally responsible. Wicked John Aubrey on the other hand, ever one to