The House Of Lanyon

Aunt Cecy gave her a look which said, I told you you couldn’t keep on with that and attend to this business as well, and said aloud, “Where is Liza, anyway?”

“In the kitchen,” said Margaret. And then stopped short, looking through the window. Liza, far from being in the kitchen, must have slipped out the front door only a moment ago. She was crossing the road, going away from the house on some unknown errand.

Uncle Will turned to peer after her. “There she goes. Well, let’s hope all she wanted was a breath of air and that she b’ain’t runnin’ off with her red-haired swain yetawhile. You take an old man’s advice. Say nothing to her about him. Pretend we don’t know. No need to upset the wench. But get her wed, and fast. Get word off to Richard Lanyon tomorrow and tell him yes. That’s what I say.” Another wave of smoke poured out of the fireplace and he choked again. “Can’t anyone do something about this? Put a bucket of water on that there fire and get to sweeping the chimney!”

CHAPTER FOUR

ONE MAGICAL SUMMER

Peter’ll do as far as I’m concerned. When Liza heard her father say those words, she had heard enough. She sat back on her heels, miserably thinking, while the murmur of voices continued below her. At length she rose quietly from the floor, picked up a cloak, unbolted her door and stole out. The stairs were solid and didn’t creak. She went softly down them, glad that in this house they didn’t lead into the big main room as they did in many other houses, but into a tiny lobby where cloaks and spare footwear were kept, and from which the front door opened.

She could hear a buzz of talk and a clatter of pans in the kitchen. If anyone saw her, she would probably be called in to help and chided for having left it in the first place. She opened the front door as stealthily as she could, darted through, closed it and set off, crossing the road, trying to lose herself quickly behind the stalls in the middle of it, in case anyone should be looking from the window.

Bearing to the right, past the last cottages and the Abbot’s House opposite, she hurried out of the village. Then she turned off the main track, taking a path to the left, crossed a cornfield and emerged onto the track that led to the next village to the west, Alcombe, two miles off.

She felt uneasy as she crossed the field, for here, as at Allerbrook, the corn had been cut and a couple of village women were gleaning in the stubble. Although they were some way off and did not seem to notice her, she was nervously aware of them.

Beyond the cornfield stood a stone pillar on a plinth, a monument to the days of the great plague in the last century. Villages then had kept strangers out in case they brought disease with them, but commerce had to go on; wool and yarn, cloth and leather, butter and cheese, flour and ale must still be bought and sold and so, outside many villages, stone pillars or crosses had been set up to show where markets could be held.

“I’ll be by the plague cross at ten of the clock on Tuesday,” Christopher had said at their last meeting. “I’ll have an errand past there that day. The Luttrells send things now and then to an old serving man of theirs in Alcombe. He’s ailing nowadays. They often use me for charitable tasks like that, and lend me a pony. Meet me there if you can. I’ll wait for you for a while, though I’d better not linger too long.”

It was only just past ten o’clock, Liza thought as she slipped out of the field, out of sight of the gleaning women. Had he waited? Would he be there?

He was. There was his pony, hobbled and grazing by the track, and there was Christopher, his hair as bright as fire, sitting on the plinth.

“Christopher!”

He was looking the other way, perhaps expecting her to come along the main track instead of through the field, but he sprang up at the sound of her voice, and turned toward her. She ran into his arms and they closed about her. “Oh, Christopher! I’m so glad to see you!”

“Are you? What is it, sweeting? Something’s wrong, isn’t it? I can always tell.”

“Yes, I know you can!”

That was how it had been from the beginning, when they met in the spring, at the May Day fair in Dunster. It had been a fine day, and the fair was packed and raucous. There were extra stalls as well as the regular ones, offering every imaginable commodity: gloves, pottery, kitchen pans and fire irons, hats, belts, buckles, cheap trinkets, questionable remedies for assorted ills, lengths of silk and linen from far away as well as the local woollen cloth, sweet cakes and savoury snacks cooked on the spot over beds of glowing charcoal. There were entertainments, too: a juggler, tumblers, a minstrel playing a lute and singing, a troupe of dancers and a sword swallower.

And, creating an alleyway through the crowd and inspiring a different mood among the onlookers, an unhappy man stripped to the waist except for a length of undyed cloth slung around his neck. Splashed with dirt and marked with bruises, he was escorted by the two men who that year were Dunster’s constables. Ahead of them walked a boy banging a drum for the crowd’s attention and announcing that by order of the Weavers Guild of Dunster, here came Bart Webber, who had been mixing flax with his woollen yarn to make his cloth, and selling it as pure Dunster wool, and had been fined for it at the last manor court.

It could have been worse. The hapless Master Webber hadn’t been whipped or put in the stocks, and the crowd was good-humoured and not in a mood for brutality. Many of them knew him socially, which inclined them to restraint or even, in some cases, sympathy. He was still drawing a few jeers, though, and an occasional missile—handfuls of mud and one or two mouldy onions, which had caused the bruises. His situation was quite wretched enough and his face was a mask of misery and embarrassment. Liza, distressed, turned quickly away.

Her parents had often told her she felt things too deeply and ought to be more sensible. They clicked regretful tongues when she persisted in going for walks on her own or when they found her in the garden after dark—“mooning after the moon,” as her father put it—or being stunned by the splendour of the constellation of Orion, making its mighty pattern in the winter sky. Yes, Nicholas said, of course the moon looked like a silver dish—or a lopsided face or a little curved boat, depending on which phase it was in—and yes, of course the stars were beautiful. But most people had more sense than to stand outside catching cold, especially when there was work to be done indoors.

Sometimes Liza felt that she was dedicating her entire life to appearing sensible when inside herself, she often didn’t feel sensible at all, but wild and vulnerable, like a red deer hind, fleeing before the hounds.

Now she wanted to get well away from poor Bart Webber. Elena and Laurence, who were with her, stayed to stare but Liza, abandoning them, edged back through the crowd. Then she realised that a young man who had been standing next to Laurence had turned away, too, and was beside her and seemed to want to speak to her. She looked at him in surprise, and he said kindly, “You didn’t like seeing that, did you?”

She stopped and studied him. He wore a clerk’s black gown and a priest’s tonsure. The ring of hair left by the tonsure was an astonishing shade of flame-red. “I know him,” she said. “Bart Webber. He’s dined with us. No, I didn’t like seeing him—like that.” It occurred to her that the young clerk had been watching her and that this was impertinent of him. With a rush of indignation she said, “You were looking at me?”

“Forgive me,” he said mildly. “But when I saw you move away alone—well, in such a throng, you shouldn’t be on your own.”

“I was with cousins, but they’re still back there. I’ve other relatives somewhere about, though, and my home is over there.” She pointed.

“Let me walk with you to your door, or until you find some of your family.” His voice was intentionally gentle, cooling her flash of annoyance. “You never know. There could be cutpurses about.”

She let him escort her and as they walked, they talked. He was Christopher Clerk, halfway to priesthood, studying with the chaplain at the castle. She was Liza Weaver, daughter of Nicholas Weaver who, with his family, owned three Dunster houses and was head of a business which carried on both spinning and weaving. “Our cloth’s quite well-known, and so is my mother’s special fine thread.”

“You sound as though you’re proud of your family,” he said.

“I am! And you must be proud of your vocation, and of living in a castle! Is it very grand, with paintings and carpets from the east and silken cushions for the ladies?”

“All those things, but my quarters are plain, as they should be. I wouldn’t have it otherwise. I felt called to be a priest, and once that happens, a man doesn’t seek to live in luxury.”

“Do you mean you give it up even though you miss it, or you somehow don’t miss it because you don’t want it anymore?” Liza asked, interested. She often caught sight of the Abbot of Cleeve and his entourage of monks coming and going from their house and had many times wondered what made them choose such lives. Were they happy, always wearing such plain white wool garments and never marrying?

“Some of us cease wanting the pleasures of the senses,” Christopher told her, “and others give them up. They are the price. But if you really value something, you don’t mind paying for it.”

“But which group are you in?” Liza asked acutely, and privately marvelled at her own outspokenness. He might well accuse her of impertinence! Yet it seemed easy to talk to him, as easy as though she had known him all her life.

“I’m among those who have to make an effort. But as I said, the price is worth it.” She turned her head to look at his face and he gave her a grin, a tough, cheerful, entirely masculine grin, and she found herself smiling back. His eyes, which were the warm golden-brown of amber or sweet chestnuts, glowed with laughter, and without warning, her breath seemed to halt for a moment and her heart turned a somersault.

“I won’t say it’s always easy,” he said, searching her face with his eyes, and she knew, without further explanation, with a certainty that would not be denied, a certainty as solid as the simple fact that two plus two made four, that now, this moment, was a time when it wasn’t easy. That he was talking, obliquely, about her.

About them.

About us. But we met only five minutes ago!

At that moment she caught sight of her parents, apparently arguing and just going in at their door, for dinner no doubt, since it was past noon. With a few words of farewell and thanks for his company, she took her leave of Christopher and followed them into the house, to find that an argument was indeed in progress, and that it was about Bart Webber.

“To my mind, Margaret, it’s enough, what he went through today. There’s no need to keep on about it and say we can’t have him and Alison to dine or ask them to Liza’s wedding when it comes….”

“I don’t agree, Nicholas. I can’t. I’m sorry for Alison and I’d sooner lie dead and in my coffin than be in her shoes, but have them at my table…no, it won’t do. It’s makin’ out we don’t take honesty seriously and we do.”

“But…”

Margaret would win, of course. When it came to social niceties she usually did, and as other households often followed the Weaver lead, Liza now felt sorry for Mistress Webber as well as for Bart. Her parents broke off their wrangle when they saw her and greeted her, and to her surprise, they seemed to notice nothing strange about her.

Liza herself gave the Webbers little further thought, for she was engrossed with the astounding experience she had just had, and amazed that it had apparently left no mark upon her. She felt as though it should have done; as though the wave of hair which always crept from under her neat white coif should have changed from beechnut brown to bright green, or as though luminous footprints should appear wherever she trod.

But after all, what had really taken place? Nothing that anyone could have seen, and nothing that could be repeated. Very likely she would never set eyes on the red-haired clerk again. Whatever had happened, it would never be repeated. She had better forget it. That would be sensible.

No doubt it would have been, but a perverse providence seemed determined to reunite them. Two mornings later, going to the herb plot at the far end of the garden to fetch flavourings for dinner, she discovered a small brown-and-white dog industriously digging a hole under the mint.

“Here, stop that! Where did you come from?” said Liza, advancing on the intruder and picking it up. It yapped at her indignantly and struggled, while Liza stood with it in her arms, wondering how it had got in. Then she saw that there was a hole under the wooden fence which bounded the end of the garden. Beyond, meadowland sloped away, down toward Dunster’s harbour. It was silting up these days. Just now, the tide was out and a number of small boats from the Dunster fishing community lay aground, waiting for the sea to come back and refloat them. The sea itself was a band of iridescent blue and silver, far away, with the coast of Wales beyond.

To the right, however, the meadow was bounded by the castle hill and its covering of trees. The Luttrells’ black cattle were in the pasture, and a man was hurrying across it from the direction of the trees and the castle. He saw her and waved, and came on faster. “You’ve got him!” he said breathlessly as he came up to the fence. “Wagtail! You wicked dog!”

“Is he yours?” Liza asked. “He shouldn’t be let loose to scrabble in people’s gardens. Someone might throw stones at him or kick him!”

Wagtail barked again and struggled in her arms. And then she recognised the man. He was once more in clerical black, though this time in the more practical form of hose and jerkin, and he had pulled a dark cap over his fiery tonsure. Some of his red hair was visible, though, with an oak leaf absurdly clinging to it. Christopher Clerk, the young man who had read her mind and knew that she was sorry for the swindler Bart Webber.