Page:A book of the west; being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall.djvu/361

Rh this date very old, was probably bedridden; the shock of her son's death was too much for her, and she died a month later. Knowing her to be ill, her first cousin, Sir William Courtenay, hastened to her bedside, and, probably with the connivance of a trusted maid, Thomasine Wills, persuaded the old lady to make over to him all her landed estates, to the exclusion of her two daughters, who were alive and married. It was an infamous piece of roguery, and it brought no luck on the Courtenays.

Popular feeling was outraged and has revenged itself on her, who really was not so much to blame as Sir William Courtenay, in painting her in the blackest colours. She is popularly represented as having murdered her first three husbands, as conceiving a deadly hatred against her daughter Elizabeth, who apparently died early, but cannot be traced, and as not exactly walking but riding after death. When the clock strikes twelve every night she is supposed to start in a coach made of bones from the gateway of Fitzford House, drawn by headless horses; before the carriage runs a sable hound with one eye in the middle of his forehead. The spectral coach makes its way to Okehampton, where the hound plucks a blade of grass from the castle mound, and then the cortege returns to Fitzford, where the blade is laid on the threshold of the gate. This is Lady Howard's penance, and it will last till every blade of grass on the mound of Okehampton Castle hill has been plucked, which will not be till the crack of doom, as the grass grows faster than the hound can carry it off.