It was in the mid-morning, that musket shots rang out from the house. I ran to the chapel door and looked out into the courtyard. In the hail of return shots and smoke from the gunpowder, men scattered from the house as the Sheriff’s soldiers returned fire. One after another the plotters fell, bloodied, to the ground.
I turned when the door adjoining the chapel to the house creaked open. Robert Catesby crawled in, his formerly handsome face white as he bled freely from a gaping wound to his chest. How he managed to drag his body across the stone floor I could not tell.
“Master Catesby.” I ran and knelt beside him, but he rolled onto his side and looked up, pointing at a beautifully illuminated icon of the Virgin Mary.
“Give her to me,” he whispered.
The man was only a breath or two fro
