The House Of Lanyon
Valerie Anand
When two ambitious families occupy the same patch of English soil, rivalry is sure to take root and flourish.A glimmer of initiative swells into blind desire, and minor hurts, nursed with jealousy, fester into a malignant hatred. When a bitter feud is born, the price for this wild and beautiful piece of ground will take more than three generations to settle. Richard Lanyon answers to no one save the aristocratic Sweetwater family, owners of the land he farms.His bitter resentment is legend within the bounds of their tiny Exmoor community, but as their tenant, Richard must do their bidding. Still, even noblemen don't have the power to contain ruthless ambition, and the Sweetwaters are no exception. Driven to succeed, Richard is prepared to take what is not his, and to forfeit the happiness of his family to claim the entitlements he lusts for.In this epic story Valerie Anand creates a vivid portrait of fifteenth-century English life that resonates with the age-old themes of ambition, power, desire and greed.
the HOUSE of LANYON
The House of Lanyon
Valerie Anand
This book is dedicated, most affectionately and gratefully, to all members of the Exmoor Society, and in particular to the members of its London Area Branch.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PART ONE:FOUNDATIONS 1458
CHAPTER ONE:QUIET AND DIGNIFIED
CHAPTER TWO:SHAPING THE FUTURE
CHAPTER THREE:THE BUSINESS OF MARRIAGE
CHAPTER FOUR:ONE MAGICAL SUMMER
CHAPTER FIVE:UNTIMELY AUTUMN
CHAPTER SIX:THE LOCKES OF LYNMOUTH
CHAPTER SEVEN:FLIGHT
CHAPTER EIGHT:HUNTERS AND QUARRY
CHAPTER NINE:REARRANGING THE FUTURE
CHAPTER TEN:CLOUD BLOWING IN
CHAPTER ELEVEN:NEW BEGINNING
PART TWO:BUILDINGS AND BATTLES 1458–1472
CHAPTER TWELVE:DEMISE OF A PIG
CHAPTER THIRTEEN:THE HOWL OF THE SHE-WOLF
CHAPTER FOURTEEN:HOPE AND FEAR
CHAPTER FIFTEEN:DEAD DRUNK ON A HALF-STARVED HORSE
CHAPTER SIXTEEN:HOUSEWARMING
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:ONE COMES, ONE GOES
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:DREAMS ARE SECRET
CHAPTER NINETEEN:A GOOD SENSE OF SMELL
CHAPTER TWENTY:ESTRANGEMENT
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE:REBELLION
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:SHE-WOLF AND CUB
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE:OUT OF THE PAST
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR:LOVE AND DEATH
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE:A MATTER OF A DOWRY
PART THREE:STORM DAMAGE 1480–1486
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX:BOULDER
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN:THE RISING HOUSE OF LANYON
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT:WHIRLIGIG
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE:HEATHER, GORSE AND HENRY TUDOR
CHAPTER THIRTY:THE RED DRAGON
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE:FRIENDS UPON A BRIDGE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO:COMING HOME
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE:FOES UPON A BRIDGE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR:FALLING APART
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE:A SENSE OF ABSENCE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX:EXTRAORDINARY CHANGES
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN:PROPOSAL
PART FOUR:RECONSTRUCTION 1487–1504
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT:SETTLED IN LIFE
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE:TAVERN TALK
CHAPTER FORTY:KICKING A PEBBLE
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE:A DUTY TO LIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO:TOKEN
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am most grateful to the many people who have helped me as I did the research for this book. My thanks go in particular to Dolores Clew and Father Garrett for information on the medieval church, and to Michael Grantham (Rector of St. George’s in Dunster), Laurie Hambrook (Churchwarden of St. George’s), Mrs. Joan Jordan (local historian) and Dr. Robert Dunning (County Editor) for information on west country families and fifteenth-century Dunster.
the HOUSE of LANYON
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
QUIET AND DIGNIFIED
Allerbrook House is a manor house with charm. Three attractive gables look out from its slate roof, echoed by the smaller, matching gable over its porch, and two wings, with a secluded courtyard between them, stretch back toward the moorland hillside which shelters the house from northeast winds. In front the land drops away gently, but to the right the slope plunges steeply into the wooded, green-shadowed combe where the Allerbrook River purls over its pebbly bed, flowing down from its moorland source toward the village of Clicket in the valley.
Allerbrook is far from being a great house such as Chatsworth or Hatfield, but its charm apart, it has unusual features of its own, such as a mysterious stained glass window in its chapel—no one is sure of its significance—and the Tudor roses, which nowadays are painted red-and-white as when they were first made, which are carved into the hall panelling and the window seats.
The place is a rarity, standing as it does out on Exmoor, between the towns of Withypool and Dulverton. There is no other house of its type on the moor. It is also unique because of its origins. The truth—as its creator Richard Lanyon once admitted—is that it probably wouldn’t be there at all, if one autumn day in 1458 Sir Humphrey Sweetwater and his twin sons, Reginald and Walter, had not ridden out to hunt a stag and had a most distressing encounter with a funeral.
There was no manor house there when, in the fourteenth century, the Lanyons came from Cornwall and took over Allerbrook farm. Then, the only dwelling was a farmhouse, so ancient even at that time that no one knew how long it had stood there.
Sturdily built of pinkish-grey local stone and roofed with shaggy thatch, it looked more like a natural outcrop than a construction. Around it spread a haphazard collection of fields and pastures, and its farmyard was encircled by a clutter of barns, byres, stables and assorted sheds. Inside, the main rooms were the kitchen and the big all-purpose living room. There was an impressive oak front door, but it was never used except for wedding and funeral processions and the hinges were regrettably rusty. It was a workaday place.
On a fine late September evening, though, with a golden haze softening the heathery heights of the moors and gilding the Bristol Channel to the north, there was a mellowness. That mellowness seemed even to have entered the soul of the man whose life was now drawing to a close in one of the upper bedchambers.
This was remarkable, because George Lanyon’s sixty-one years of life had scarcely been serene. He had been an aggressive child, apt to bully his two older sisters and his younger brother, for as long as they were there to bully. The Lanyons had never, for some reason, been good at raising healthy families. All George’s siblings had ailed and died before they were twenty. Only George flourished, as though he possessed all the vitality that should have been shared equally among the four of them.
As an adult, he had quarrelled with his parents, dominated his wife, Alice, and shouted at his fragile younger son, Stephen, until the boy died of lung-rot at the age of eleven. The grieving Alice, in her one solitary fit of rebellion, accused him of driving Stephen into his grave, and she herself faded out of life the following year.
Only Richard, his elder son, had been strong enough to survive and at times to stand up to him or, if necessary, stand by him. George also quarrelled with their landlord, Sir Humphrey Sweetwater, when he raised their rent. George had refused to see that this was dangerous.
“The Sweetwaters won’t throw us off our land. They know we look after it. They were glad enough to have us take it on when Granddad Petroc came here, looking for a place, back in the days of the plague when everyone who’d lived here before was dead.”
“That was then. This is now, and I don’t trust them,” said Richard. He was well aware that the Sweetwaters, although only minor gentry, were on social if not intimate terms with Thomas Courtenay, Earl of Devon, which was a double-edged blade. On the one hand, they considered themselves so far above their tenants that they could scarcely even see them. But on the other hand, if the said tenants tilled the land badly or wrangled over a rise in the rent, they were as capable of throwing the offenders out as they were capable of drowning unwanted kittens. You never knew. Richard loathed the Sweetwaters as much as George, but he was also wary.
The quarrel passed over. George gave in and paid the increase, and the Sweetwaters continued to regard the Lanyon family with disdain. Quietly the Lanyons began to prosper, though Richard considered that they could have done better still if only his father hadn’t in so many ways been so pigheaded.
But now…
Extraordinary, Richard thought as he stood looking down at his father’s sunken face and half-shut eyes. Extraordinary. All his life he had fought this man, argued with him and usually given in to him. And now, would you believe it, George was making a good Christian end.
Betsy and Kat, the two middle-aged sisters who cooked and cleaned and looked after the dairy and were so alike in their fair plumpness that people often mixed them up, were on their knees on the other side of the bed, praying quietly. At the foot stood Father Bernard, the elderly parish priest. “He’s safe enough,” Father Bernard said with some acidity. He knew George well. “He’s had the last rites. Luckily you fetched me while he was still conscious. Lucky you had that horse of yours, too, whatever your father thought!”
Richard Lanyon grinned, fleetingly. Father Bernard lived down in Clicket village, in a cottage beside St. Anne’s, the elegant little church built of pale Caen stone imported from France for the purpose by some pious bygone Sweetwater.
There was a long, sloping mile of Allerbrook combe between the farm and the priest, but George had asked for Father Bernard with pleading in his eyes and begged his son to hurry, and Richard had been able to do so, because he had a good horse at his command. George always said he had lost only three battles in his lifetime. One was the squabble over the rent. Another, a very long-running one, was the way Richard, once widowed, kept on refusing to remarry and make another attempt to raise a family. The third was over Richard’s purchase of Splash.
“Why can’t you ride a local pony like everyone else?” George raged when Richard went off to a horse fair miles away and came back leading a two-year-old colt with a most remarkable dappled coat. The dapples were dark iron-grey and much bigger than dapples usually were, overlapping and running into each other so that he looked as though someone had splashed liquid iron all over him. “The ponies round here can carry a grown man all day and never tire or put their feet in bogs by mistake. What did you spend good money on that for?” Master Lanyon senior demanded.
“He’s well made. I’m going to break him for riding and call him Splash,” said Richard.
“I give you your cut from any profits we make,” George bellowed at his unrepentant son, “but I don’t expect you to throw it away on something as ought to be in a freak show!”
But Splash, with his long legs and his undoubted dash of Arab blood, had proved his worth. He was as clever as any moorland pony at avoiding bogs and he could outdistance every horse in the parish and beyond, including the bloodstock owned by the Sweetwaters. He had got Richard down to the village and to the priest’s house so quickly that by the time Richard was hammering on Father Bernard’s door, the dust he had kicked up as he tore out of the farmyard still hung in the air.
“Get up behind me,” Richard said when the priest opened the door. “Don’t stop to saddle your mare. It’s my father. We think he’s going.”
And Splash, head lowered and nostrils wide, brought them both back up the combe nearly as fast as he had carried Richard down it, and before he drifted into his last dream, George Lanyon received the sacrament and was shriven of his sins and given, thereby, his passport into paradise.
“I couldn’t have done it without Splash,” Richard said, and glanced at his father, wondering if George could hear and secretly hoping so.
But if he did, he made no sign and when Peter, Richard’s nineteen-year-old son, came quietly into the room asking whether the patient was better, Richard could only shake his head.
“Keep your voice down now, Master Peter.” Betsy, the older of the two sisters, looked up from her prayers. “Don’t ’ee be disturbing ’un. Your granddad’s made his peace and he’s startin’ on his journey.”
Peter nervously came closer to the bed. As a child, he had seen two small brothers die, and at the age of eleven he had been taken to his parents’ bedchamber to say farewell to his mother, Joan, and the girl-child who never breathed, and every time he had been stricken with a sense of dreadful mystery, and with pity.
The pity this time was made worse by the change in his grandfather. Petroc, the Cornishman who was George’s own grandfather, had died before George was born, but his description had been handed down. He had been short and dark, a very typical Cornishman. He had, however, married a local girl, said to be big and brown haired and clear skinned. The combination had produced good-looking descendants, dark of hair and eye like Petroc, but with tall strong bodies and excellent facial bones. In life, George had been not only loud voiced and argumentative; he had also been unusually handsome.
Now his good looks had faded with his vitality. He had been getting thinner for months, and complaining of pains inside, though no one knew what ailed him, but the final collapse, into this shrunken husk, had come suddenly, taking them all by surprise. To Peter it seemed that the man on the bed was melting before their eyes.
George himself had been drifting in a misty world where nothing had substance. He could hear voices nearby, but could make no sense of what they said. His body no longer seemed to matter. For a change, nothing was hurting. He was comfortable. He was content to surrender to whatever or wherever lay before him. But in him, life had always been a powerful force. Like a candle flame just before it gutters out, it flared once more. For a few moments the mist withdrew and the voices made sense again and his eyes opened, to focus, frowningly, on the faces around him.
Father Bernard. Sharp-tongued old wretch. But he’d provided the last rites. No need to fear hell now. With difficulty he turned his head, and there was young Peter, his only surviving grandson, looking miserable. Why did the Lanyons never produce big healthy families? As for Richard…
Wayward boy. Been widowed for years; should have married again long ago. Should have listened to his father. I kept telling him. Obstinate, that’s what he is. Big ideas. Always thinks he knows better than me. Always wanting to try new things out.
Oh, well. Richard would soon be able to please himself. His father wouldn’t be able to stop him. Didn’t even want to, not now. Too tired…
Weakly he turned his head the other way, and saw the white-capped heads of Betsy and Kat. Beyond them was the window. It was shut, its leaded panes with their squares of thick, greenish glass denying him a view of the world outside. He’d had the windows glazed long ago, at more expense than he liked, but he’d always detested the fact that Sweetwater House was the only dwelling for miles that could have daylight without draughts. Yet even with glazing, the daylight was partly obscured and the view scarcely visible. “Open…window,” he said thickly. “Now. Quick.”
Betsy got up at once. Kat murmured a protest, but Betsy said, “No cold wind’s a’goin’ to hurt ’un now, silly. We’d be doing this anyway, soon.” She clicked the window latch and flung the casement back, letting cool air stream into the room.
She meant that, once he was gone, someone would open the window anyway, because people always did, to let the departing soul go free. George knew that quite well. He wanted to see where he was going.
The window gave him a glimpse of Slade, the barley field, all stubble now, because the summer had been good and they’d got all the corn in and threshed, as well. The names of his fields told themselves over in his head: Long Meadow, Slade, Quillet, Three Corner Mead…
He had been proud of them, all the more so because they were really his. He knew that in many places fields were communal, with each farmer cultivating just a strip, or perhaps more than one, but compelled to plant the same crop as everyone else and changing strips each year. Here in the southwest, it was different. Here, a man’s fields were his own.
Beyond the farmland was a dark green line, the trees of Allerbrook combe, and in the distance strode the skyline of the moorland’s highest ridge, swimming in lemon light. There were strange mounds on the hilltops of Exmoor, said to be the graves of pagan people who had lived here long, long ago. He’d like to be buried in a mound on high ground, but he’d have to be content with a grave in the churchyard of St. Anne’s. He wouldn’t even be able to hear the sound of the Allerbrook…well, no, he wouldn’t be able to hear anything, near or far, but…
He was growing confused and things were fading again. But how lovely was the light on those moors. He’d never attended to it in life. Been too damn busy trying to control that awkward son of his. Now he wanted to float away into that glorious sky, to dissolve into it, to be part of it….
His eyes closed. The voices around him became irrelevant once more and then were gone. Father Bernard, gentle now, spoke a final prayer and Richard, also gently, kissed his father’s brow and drew up the sheet.
“It was a good passing,” he said.
The priest nodded. “Yes, it was. I will make arrangements for the burial. Will you decide when the best day would be, and let me know?”
“Of course,” Richard said. “I shall have much to do.”
And organising the funeral would be only part of that. To Richard—and though he didn’t speak of it aloud, he didn’t conceal it from himself, either—the golden light of the descending sun was a sign of golden opportunity. He would give his father a respectful farewell, as a good son should. But his mental list of the people he would invite included some with whom he particularly wanted to talk, and the sooner the better. He had plans, and now, at last, he was free to put them into action.
But certainly the funeral itself would, he trusted, be long remembered as an example of well-organised, quiet dignity.
In the event, George Lanyon’s funeral was unquestionably memorable and parts of it even dignified. But from that day onward, the conflict between Richard Lanyon and the Sweetwater family was more than a simple matter of dislike. That was the day when what had been merely dislike and resentment escalated into a feud.
CHAPTER TWO
SHAPING THE FUTURE
In the village of Dunster, a dozen or so miles away on the coast of the Bristol Channel, Liza Weaver, suitably grave of face, stood among other members of the extensive Weaver family and bade farewell to her father, Nicholas, the head of the house, and her mother, Margaret, as they set off on the long ride to Allerbrook for the funeral of George Lanyon.
She was a strongly built girl with warm brown eyes and hair that matched, although at the moment it was hidden under a neat white cap. Her big, florid father said cheerfully, “I’m sorry about George, and his family will miss him, but we’ll likely bring back some good fresh bacon from the farm. It’s an ill wind, as they say,” and he leaned down from his saddle to kiss his eldest daughter. “Be a good wench. Help your little sister and—” he dropped his voice “—don’t mind Aunt Cecy’s tongue. She means no harm.” He straightened up in his saddle, took off his hat and waved it to them all. “See you all soon!” he cried. Margaret smiled and turned her sturdy pony to follow him as he set off.
So there they went, thought Liza. Off to the funeral of George Lanyon. The two families were mostly linked by business, but there had been some social contacts, too. She had been to Allerbrook now and then—to Christmas and Easter gatherings as a rule—and she had met George. She had also found him rather alarming. She felt dutifully sorry for anyone who was ill, or had died, but she was young and the passing of Master Lanyon did not mean so very much to her.
On the other hand, the departure of her parents did mean something, of which they had no inkling. She had since childhood had a habit sometimes of going for walks on her own. Here in Dunster where everyone knew everyone else, it was safe enough and no one had ever stopped her, unless there was so much to do that she couldn’t be spared. Aunt Cecy would probably say that with Nicholas and Margaret absent, there’d be too much to do just now, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to give Aunt Cecy the slip after dinner.
And in the dell beyond the mill, where bluebells had been out the first time they met there, back in the springtime, a young man called Christopher would be waiting.
Autumn had declared itself. On the moors the bracken was bronzing and the higher hillcrests were veiled in cloud. It had rained overnight and there were puddles in the farmyard at Allerbrook. In the kitchen Betsy and Kat were busy by daybreak, preparing the food which must be served to the guests. When Richard came downstairs, the stockpot was already bubbling and there were chickens on the spit. The poultry population of Allerbrook had gone down considerably in George’s honour.
Out in the byre Betsy’s husband, Higg, was milking the cows while Kat’s husband, Roger, fetched water from the well for the benefit of the kitchen and the plough oxen in their stalls. It should have been the other way around, since Higg was as broad chested as any ox while Roger was skinny and stoop backed from a lifetime of carrying full buckets and laden sacks. He carried buckets so lopsidedly that they usually slopped, but the cows, perversely, responded better to Higg.
Upstairs, guests who had had a long way to come and had arrived the previous day were still abed, but Peter was up ahead of his father and snatching a quick breakfast of small ale and bread smeared with honey. Richard sat down next to him. “Sleep all right? It’ll be a long day.”
“I didn’t sleep much, no. It’s strange without Granddad. Nothing’s ever going to be the same again, is it?” Peter said.
Richard was silent, because to him, the fact that nothing was ever going to be the same again was a matter for rejoicing, but it would be quite improper to say so.
Under George’s rule, life at Allerbrook had been the same for far too long. There were so many things that Richard would have liked to try, new ideas which he had seen put into practice on other farms, but his father was set against innovations.
It was always Take it from me—I know best. No, I don’t want to try another breed of sheep. Ours do well on the moorland grazing, so what do you want to go making experiments for? No, what’s the point of renting more valley grazing? Got enough, haven’t we? Nonsense, I never heard of anyone growing wheat on Exmoor, even if Quillet field does face south and the soil’s deep.
There were going to be changes now, and that was nothing to grieve about. He glanced at Peter again, and saw that the boy was hurrying his meal. “Take your time,” he said. “Our guests’ll be a while yet. Ned Crowham’s never been one for early rising, I’ve noticed.”
For a short time, Peter had been to school in the east of the county and Ned had been one of his fellow pupils. They had become friends, although they had little in common. A complete contrast to the Lanyons to look at, Ned was short, plump, pink skinned and fair as a newly hatched chick. He was also the son of a man as wealthy as Sir Humphrey, owner of several Somerset farms and a manor house twenty miles away, toward the town of Bridgwater. At home, young Ned was indulged. He had spent nights at Allerbrook before and shown himself to be a terrible layabed.
“And the Weavers didn’t get here till after dark last night,” Richard added. “Mistress Margaret was tired. It’s only twelve miles from Dunster as the crow flies, but it’s a heck of a lot more as a pony plods and she’s not young. It was good of her to come. I hoped Nicholas Weaver would, for I’ve business with him, but I’m touched that his wife came, too.”
“We’ll have a crowd here soon,” Peter said, swallowing his final mouthful. “Just as well Master Nicholas didn’t bring his whole family! Poor Granddad used to envy the Weavers, didn’t he, because of their big families? Father, why did you never marry again after my mother died? I’ve often wondered.” Richard frowned and Peter hastily added, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say anything I shouldn’t.”
“I’m not offended, boy. I was just wondering what the answer was, that’s all. I tell you,” said Richard, man-to-man, “about three-quarters of the reason was that your granddad wanted me to marry again so badly! He kept on and on and the more he kept on, the less I felt like obliging him. So time went on, and it never happened. You’ll gain! You won’t have to share with others when you inherit the tenancy.”
Another reason, although he was fond enough of Peter not to say this to him, was that he hadn’t been very happy in marriage. Joan had been a good woman; that he wouldn’t deny. Too good, perhaps, too gentle. He sometimes glimpsed the same gentleness in Peter and didn’t like it. Peter was a Lanyon in looks but he had his mother’s temperament, and that wasn’t fitting for a man. It had even been irritating in a woman! He’d have liked Joan better if she’d spoken up more, the way Margaret Weaver sometimes argued with Nicholas: good-naturedly—there was no spite in it—but clearly, and often with very sensible things to say.
Joan was timid, scared of him and scared of George. She always had a bad time in childbirth and she was terrified of that, too. The fact that her last pregnancy had killed her had left Richard feeling guilt stricken. For some years now he had had a comfortable arrangement with a widow down in Clicket, a woman who’d buried two husbands and never borne a child. She did him good and he had done her no harm. He never discussed her with his family, though they all knew about Deb Archer.
“I don’t think you’ll be inheriting yet awhile,” he said jovially to Peter. “I’ve a good few years in me yet, I hope. Do you want to see your grandfather again, for a last goodbye?”
George was in his coffin on the table in the big living room. After the funeral, the room would come back into use, with a white cloth over the table and the best pewter dishes brought down off the sideboard, but until then, the room was only for George.
Peter shook his head. “No. I…I’d rather not. I saw him yesterday but he doesn’t look like himself anymore, does he?” He shivered. “I can’t believe that what’s in that box ever walked or talked…or shouted!”
“You’re getting morbid, boy. Well, maybe before long I’ll turn your mind in a happier direction. You just wait and see.”
In another hour Father Bernard had ridden in on his mare, and shortly after that, Tilly and Gilbert Lowe arrived from the farm on the other side of the combe, accompanied by Martha, the plain and downtrodden daughter who was virtually their servant. The Lowes were followed by the Rixons and Hannacombes from the other two farms on the Sweetwater estate, and then a number of folk from Clicket village straggled in, all soberly dressed, some on foot, some on ponies, to pay their last respects and escort George down to the churchyard and his final place of rest.
Among them came Mistress Deborah Archer, forty-nine now but still buxom and brown haired. Richard kissed her without embarrassment and Father Bernard greeted her politely. Like nearly everyone in the parish, he knew of the arrangement but accepted it without comment, just as he accepted the fact that neither Richard nor Deborah ever mentioned it in his confessional. He had had a lapse or two of his own. It was even possible that Geoffrey Baker, steward to the Sweetwaters, was his son. No one knew for certain.
The Sweetwaters didn’t come and no one expected them, though some of their employees arrived, including their shepherd Edward Searle, along with his son Toby. Edward Searle was a local personality. Tall, gaunt, dignified as a king and able to tell every one of his sheep apart, he was one of the few in the district whose baptismal names had never, unless they were already short enough, been chopped into nicknames. In a world where Elizabeth usually became Liza or Betsy and most Edwards became Ned or Ed, Master Searle remained Edward and no one would have dreamed of shortening it.
The other exceptions included the Sweetwaters themselves, Richard Lanyon (who refused to answer to Dick or Dickon and had long since squelched any attempts to make him) and Geoffrey Baker, who arrived on a roan mare and gave his master’s apologies with great civility though Richard knew, and Baker knew he knew, that Sir Humphrey Sweetwater hadn’t actually sent any apologies at all.
Sir Humphrey, said Baker solemnly, had guests, connections of Thomas Courtenay, the Earl of Devon. The Sweetwaters had promised to show them some sport today. They were all going hunting.
“Sir Humphrey’s showing off, as usual,” Richard growled to Peter.
Friendship with the Courtenays had brought one very marked benefit to the Sweetwaters, since Sir Thomas was the warden of Exmoor Forest. Clicket was outside the forest boundary, but only just. All deer belonged to the crown and no one hunted them except by royal permission, but a Sweetwater had distinguished himself so valiantly at the Battle of Crécy that he and his descendants had been granted the right to hunt deer on their own land.
Normally, they would not have been allowed to pursue them into the forest, which was inconvenient because the deer, oblivious of human boundaries, very often fled that way. Sir Thomas, however, had used his own considerable powers and granted permission for the Sweetwater hounds to follow quarry across the boundary. Sir Humphrey never missed a chance of demonstrating his privilege to his guests.
By ten o’clock all was ready at the farmhouse. The Clicket carpenter, who had made the coffin and brought it up the combe strapped to the back of a packhorse, had solemnly nailed it shut while Father Bernard recited a prayer. The Lanyon dogs—Peter’s long-legged, grey-blue lurcher Blue, Silky the black sheepdog bitch who had belonged to George, and Silky’s black-and-white son Ruff, who was Richard’s special companion—knew that they were not invited on this outing and lay down by the fire. How much animals sensed, no one could guess, but Silky had been pining since George died.
The six bearers, Richard, Peter, Higg, Roger, Nicholas Weaver and Geoffrey Baker, lifted the coffin onto their shoulders. They would be replaced halfway by a second team of volunteers, since the mile-long Allerbrook combe which must be traversed to reach Clicket was a long way to carry their burden, but to put a laden coffin on a pack pony would be risky. Ponies could stumble, or take fright. Nicholas, whose hair and beard were halfway between sandy and grey and who had grown hefty with the years, grunted as he took the weight, and cheeky Ned Crowham, who was one of the relief bearers—he had been got out of bed only just in time to join the procession—said that at least Nicholas’s pony could now have a rest.
“True enough,” Nicholas said amiably. “My pony’s stout, but I reckon the poor brute still sags in the middle when I get astride him. That’s why Margaret’s got her own nag. Not fair to any animal to put me on him and then add someone else.”
Father Bernard smiled, but Margaret said seriously, “Oh, Nicholas. We shouldn’t make jokes, surely.”
Richard, however, easing his shoulder under the weight of the coffin, said, “Oh, my father liked a laugh as much as any man and he wouldn’t grudge it to us now. Are we all ready? Then let’s start.”
The bearers carried George ceremonially through the front door—the hinges, as usual, had had to be oiled to make sure it would open—and took the downhill path into the combe. They trod with care. The sun was out now, but the ground was soft from last night’s rain.
The voice of the Allerbrook came up to them as they went. It was a swift, brown-tinged peat stream which rose in a bog at the top of the long, smooth moorland ridge above and the rain had swollen it. Some feet above the water, the track turned to parallel the river’s course down to Clicket. The trees met overhead and the light on the path was a confusing mixture of greenish shade and dazzling interruptions where the sun shone through. There was no other track to the village. The combe was thickly grown with trees and tangled undergrowth and on the far side, the few paths did not lead to Clicket. The track was wide but in places it was also steep, and in any case the coffin lurched somewhat because Higg and Roger were among the first team of bearers at their own insistence, and Higg’s broad shoulders were four inches higher than Roger’s bent ones.
Father Bernard led the way on his mare. The bearers followed him and the crowd formed a rough and ready procession on foot behind the coffin. They talked among themselves as they went, for funerals were not such rare events, after all. Death was part of life. Father Bernard, in church on Sundays, often spoke of the next world and told them to be ready for it.
Halfway down, a steep path descended the slope to the right, met the track, crossed it and continued down to a ford. Water was draining down the path from the side of the combe and the crossing was extremely muddy. “Carefully now!” Father Bernard called over his shoulder, and steadied his mare as one of her hooves skidded. “The rain’s made this a proper quagmire. Mind you don’t slip.”
“Keep in step!” said Nicholas. “And take it steadily.”
Somewhere on the other side of the combe they heard a hunting horn and the voices of hounds, but, being concerned with their uncertain footing, no one paid much heed to it. The horn sounded again, nearer. And then, out of the trees on the other side of the river, came the stag.
There were two ways of hunting deer. If the purpose was simply venison, the hunt could drive the quarry into a ring of archers who would mow them down like corn. But if the huntsmen wanted sport and the pleasure of the chase and maybe a fresh pair of fine antlers to decorate a hall, then they would look for a grown stag and bring him to bay after a chase. Sir Humphrey preferred the chase. The hall in his manor house bristled with antlers and he employed not only a huntsman to care for his hounds but also a harbourer to keep track of likely stags and lead the hunt to them on request.
The harbourer had found them a fine beast this time. The animal which burst out of the woods, splashed headlong across the stream and came up to the crossways like a four-footed hurricane was in full breeding array. He had twelve points to his crown, six each side, tipped white as if with pearl. His nostrils flared red with the effort of running and his eyes were rolling. The horrified bearers were passing the top of the slippery path down to the river when he hurtled up toward them, fleeing in such panic from the hounds on his trail that he was not aware of them until the last moment.
Then he swerved, with a huge sideways leap, sprang past the nose of Father Bernard’s startled mare, which reared in alarm, and was gone, into the trees and on up the hill, and at the same moment the hounds, brown and black and patch-coated, giving tongue like wolves, poured out of the woods opposite, and hard behind them came Sir Humphrey’s huntsman and then Sir Humphrey himself and his twin sons, Reginald and Walter, on their big horses, closely followed by three riders who were presumably their guests, all hallooing nearly loud enough to drown the hounds and the horn.
Hounds and horses crashed through the ford, water spraying up around them. They scrambled for footholds on the path and tore upward. The cortege had stopped where it was as if paralysed, everyone having unanimously decided to keep still and let the uproar flow around them as it would around a line of trees. Most of the hounds veered as the stag had done, but three of them took the shortest route and went straight under the coffin and between the legs of the bearers. One collided with Richard’s ankles and another bounced off Nicholas Weaver’s shins. Both Richard and Nicholas lurched and their burden shifted.
The lurches were small and the shift in the weight was minor, but feet slipped on the perilous ground and the uneven weight of the tilting coffin made them slip still more. There were shouts of alarm. The riders, coming hard after the hounds, swerved their mounts around the head of the cortege, but one of them came too close. His horse saw the coffin, shied to avoid it and kicked out, catching Higg’s hip.
Higg, knocked sideways, held on but stumbled, and the tilt of the coffin became dangerous. Then Richard, who was one of the foremost bearers, lost his footing altogether and sat down, still holding on but pulling the front of the coffin down farther still. The tilt became a slide toward the ground, tearing the other bearers’ hands and breaking their hold. There were more cries of alarm. Margaret Weaver and Betsy called aloud on God, and people crossed themselves. Kat and Deborah screamed.
In a shaft of sunlight through the leaves, the funeral party had a fleeting glimpse of tall horses, reins with ornate dagged edges, spurred boots, richly coloured saddlecloths and tunics, bearded faces, one with a hunting horn held to its lips, velvet cloaks and exotic headgear, twisted liripipes bouncing on their owners’ shoulders, and then they were gone, leaping over the path and crashing up the hillside.
As they went, the coffin slithered right out of the bearers’ grasp, came down slowly but inexorably onto the path to the ford and then, gliding on the mud churned by the hunt, set off on its own, straight toward the river.
Father Bernard was off his horse on the instant. He threw himself after the coffin, clutching at it as he landed facedown in the mud, but its weight dragged it out of his grasp. Others scrambled frantically down through the trees to help. Deborah Archer, exclaiming with horror, got there first, tearing her dark skirts on the underbrush. She flung herself on top of the coffin as it went into the water and somehow succeeded in hooking one foot around the trunk of an alder at the brink. Held by her weight, the coffin sank where it was, and grounded in the shallow water of the ford, Deb lying on its lid and spluttering with her face in the stream and her skirts floating to each side of her.
Roger, rushing after her, waded into the water to get to the other end of the coffin and push it back toward land. Other helping hands were there. They picked Father Bernard up, lifted Deb and grabbed the coffin, dragging it ashore and hoisting it up again.
Richard, white-faced, had got to his feet and reached them in time to help with carrying his father’s casket back up the slope to the shocked procession on the path. “It’s all right. It hasn’t broken open. Deb saved it. If the water had moved it off the shallows…”
It could have done. The Allerbrook had a strong current and downstream of the ford it became quite deep. No one wanted to imagine what could have happened next.
“Father Bernard, you’re covered in mud!” Richard looked at the priest in distress. “You must brush it off. You must call at your house and put on something clean before the service. Can you find Roger here some dry things, too? He’s drenched to the knees. And Deb, oh Deb, I can’t be more grateful, but you’re wet through and shivering. Here!” He pulled off his cloak and threw it around her. “That’ll keep some warmth in. You can hardly strip your wet things off just here, so go home, Deb, run, to keep some heat in you, and put on dry things. We’ll wait for you in the churchyard. But you must get dry or you’ll take a chill. Go on—now!”
“I’m past the age for running and it’s over half a mile!” said Deb through chattering teeth as she wrung out her skirts and clutched the cloak to her. “But I’ll get home fast-like and see ’ee in the churchyard.” Holding her wet gown clear of the ground, she scurried off and Richard turned his attention to Betsy’s husband, Higg, who was flexing his right wrist and rubbing his hip, a pained expression on his seamed brown face. “What’s the matter, Higg? You’ve hurt yourself?”
“One of their damned hosses well-nigh kicked me off my feet and then my wrist went when I was tryin’ to keep a’hold of the coffin,” Higg said. “Hip don’t matter—that’s just a bruise—but it feels like my wrist’s been twisted half off. Don’t think I can go on as bearer. T’wouldn’t be safe, and we’ve had trouble enough for one day.”
“It’s time for the relief bearers, anyhow,” Richard said, and raised his voice to call the volunteers forward: Ned Crowham, the Searles, Gilbert Lowe, Sim Hannacombe and Harry Rixon. Far away in the distance the hunting horn spoke again and the baying of the hounds once more drifted through the trees.
“Bloody Sweetwaters,” said Richard through his teeth. “I hope they all fall off their damned horses and break their necks and I hope the hounds bring that stag to bay and it gores every single one of them to death!”
“It went well enough in the end,” Nicholas Weaver said to Richard later that day as they stood together, partaking of the generous food and the excellent cider that was Kat’s speciality, and yet very conscious of the space in the household, the empty niche in the air which once had been filled by George. “That accident could have been much worse!”
“I daresay,” said Richard. “But I’ll never forgive the Sweetwaters. Never!”
“Likely enough they hardly realised what had happened,” said Nicholas. “It was all so fast. By the time they’d seen us, it was too late.”
“They had time enough! Had to get across the ford, didn’t they? And all of us up there on the path. Couldn’t miss us!”
“Ah, well. The light under the trees is always dim and we were all in dark clothes. Can’t come to a funeral in festive red and tawny!”
“You’re a good-natured soul, Nicholas,” Richard said. “I’m not so even tempered as you. The Sweetwaters behave as if this were still the days of serfs and villeins and we were nothing but animals with no human feelings. Before I’m done, I swear I’ll teach them different. I’d like to kill every last man of them. It would be a pleasure to see every Sweetwater head on a chopping block.”
“You’re so fierce!” said Nicholas, and adroitly turned the subject. “Well, there’s talk of war these days. Plenty of people will get chopped up if that happens!”
A good many of the gathering were talking about the accident to the coffin, some of them with amusement, some with anxiety for the health of Mistress Archer, who had been soaked to the skin and had had to go a good half mile like that in order to get home and dry herself. For others, however, talking about the Sweetwaters and their connections had led to conversation about the wider world in general. Here in this quiet corner of the southwest, the power struggles of kings and lords didn’t often impinge, but it had been known to happen, and for years the news had been disturbing. King Henry VI was said to be ailing in his mind, and his relative, Richard, Duke of York, who like the king was a descendant of Edward III, had been made regent for a while, but it was an uneasy state of affairs.
“Ambitious, that’s what I hear. He didn’t much care for it when the king got better. Could lead to trouble…”
“Some say all that’s a tale put about by the queen. She don’t like him. They say he’s sworn his loyalty but she don’t believe it. I’ve heard no good of her. When I were in Lynmouth and there were a ship in from London way, the men aboard said folk in the eastern parts are calling her Queen She-Wolf, ever since her French friends burned Sandwich port last year. Bloodthirsty, they say she is.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that.” Ned Crowham was unwontedly grave. “We had a queen over a century ago, a French-born one, that used to be called the She-Wolf of France. They must have named this one after her and it’s hardly a compliment. You could be right. I can see war coming.”
“Pray God and the saints it don’t come near us or call any of us away. If the Sweetwaters go to war…”
Nicholas had heard things, too. “If war does come,” he said to Richard, “then the Luttrells in Dunster Castle will go, for sure, and they’ll take some of the young fellows in my family. We’re their tenants.”
“And I’m a Sweetwater tenant! The last thing I want to do is die nobly fighting at their orders!” Richard said angrily. “Oh, well, it hasn’t happened yet. My friend, there’s something else I want to discuss.” He took Nicholas’s elbow and steered him into a quieter corner. “I’ve something in mind that could do both of us a bit of good. You might think a funeral’s no place for fixing up a marriage, but nothing’ll bring my father back and this talk of war’s unsettling. I’d sooner think of things that can be settled by you and me, here and now, and might give all our thoughts a happier turn. Your eldest daughter’s still not betrothed. I’ve been thinking…”
The Sweetwaters lived at the eastern end of the village on a knoll, in a house with a battlemented lookout tower. The Allerbrook, running close by on its way to join the River Barle, provided the house with a half moat in front, and there was a good ford for the packhorse trains carrying wool to market, and a set of stepping stones maintained by the Sweetwaters for the convenience of travellers in and out of the village.
Richard envied the house and approved of the stepping stones, but his father had been sour. “They put all the village rents up when they put in the stones,” George had said. “Lucky they didn’t put the farm rents up again and all!”
In the great hall Reginald Sweetwater, the elder by twenty minutes of Sir Humphrey’s twin sons, helped his father off with his boots while Walter did the same office for their guests, and Geoffrey Baker, who had returned to his duties immediately after the funeral, came in with two young pages and served mulled wine. He did not let the women servants wait on all-male gatherings. Sir Humphrey and Reginald were both widowers, and Walter’s wife, Mary, preferred to remain in her solar with her young daughter when male guests visited without their own wives.
“That was a good run,” said Thomas Carew, one of the guests—and an illustrious one, since his mother had been a Courtenay. “You’ll have a fine new set of antlers for your wall, Sir Humphrey.” He looked appreciatively around at the remarkable collection already there. “Twelve pointer, wasn’t he? Not bad. They hardly ever go over fourteen points in England.”
“That one did.” Sir Humphrey, a heavily built man, stretched a large pair of feet toward the warmth of the hearth and pointed to the impressive trophy just above it. “My grandfather killed him. Eighteen points. Almost unheard of for this part of the world.”
“It was a sixteen pointer that chased a friend of mine up a tree one September,” said Thomas.
“Damned lucky to find a tree on these moors,” said Walter Sweetwater.
“It was on the edge of Cloutsham vale, over beyond Dunkery hill. Plenty of tree cover there. Up there two hours he was, with the old stag parading around and going for the tree with his antlers every now and again. It was in the rut. Stag must have thought he was a rival. Do you reckon a male deer can tell male and female humans from each other?”
The conversation went on an excursion around remarkable hunting stories and anecdotes about animal sagacity, and an argument between Walter and his father about the intelligence of sheep, Walter maintaining that according to the Sweetwater shepherd, Edward Searle, they weren’t as stupid as most people believed, and Sir Humphrey complaining that Walter spent too much time in the company of the shepherd and should concentrate on practicing his swordplay instead. “Edward Searle may look like a prophet out of the Old Testament and stalk about among his sheep with his head in the air as though he were royalty, but he’s only a shepherd and ought to remember it, and so ought you,” said Sir Humphrey, who was himself slightly intimidated by Edward Searle, though he would have died before he admitted as much.
Thomas’s young son, whose mind seemed to have been elsewhere all this time, suddenly asked, “Who were those people we almost crashed into after we crossed the river? I could hardly see them in that bad light under the trees. What were they doing there?”
“George Lanyon of Allerbrook’s funeral party,” said Reginald contemptuously. “Our steward, Baker, attended it.” He looked around, but the steward had withdrawn and was out of hearing. Reginald laughed. “He said they dropped the coffin and it almost went into the river. But they got it up and it was all right. There was no harm done.”
“George Lanyon’s no loss. Maybe deer know men from women, but George Lanyon never knew gentle from simple,” said Sir Humphrey. His eyes, which were grey and always inclined to be cold, became positively icy at the thought of the departed George. “Had the presumption to argue when his rent went up, as if rents don’t have to go up now and then—it’s the course of nature. Let’s hope the son—what’s his name…?”
“Richard Lanyon, Grandfather.” Walter’s eleven-year-old son, Baldwin, was also in the company.
“That’s it. Richard. Bigheaded peasant who won’t let anyone call him Dickon. We can hope he’s less bloody-minded than George, but I doubt it. There’s something about him. He doesn’t like taking his cap off to me. He’ll very likely be even worse than his father was. Ah, here’s Baker back again. More mulled wine, Baker.”
When he brought the wine, Geoffrey said, “I’ve ordered a fresh basket of firewood to be brought in. The weather’s turning colder. It feels as if winter’s on its way early.”
“That ought to cool the talk of war,” Thomas said. “No fun campaigning in snow and mud. Wonder if it’ll come to fighting?”
“That’s anyone’s guess,” Sir Humphrey said. “What makes me laugh is the way they use roses as their badges! A red rose for the House of Lancaster, a white rose for the House of York! As though they were carrying ladies’ favours at a tournament! Pretty-pretty nonsense.”
“Their ambitions aren’t nonsense, though,” said Reginald. “They’re fighting over the crown.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE BUSINESS OF MARRIAGE
Nicholas and Margaret Weaver’s home in the coastal village of Dunster had a characteristic smell, a mixture of oiliness and mustiness with a hint of the farmyard. It was the smell of sheep fleece, and it pervaded the whole house, even the bedchambers. Which was natural, for wool was their world.
Rents from sheep farmers accounted for much of the wealth of the Luttrell family, who lived in the castle overlooking the village. The spinning of yarn and the weaving of cloth were the main trades of the village, and the monks of Cleeve Abbey, a few miles to the east, close to a village called Washford, were industrious shepherds who brought their fleeces regularly to Dunster and did so much business there that they had a fulling mill at the western end of the village and a house of their own in North Street. The abbots of Cleeve spent nearly as much time in Dunster as they did in their monastery.
The Weaver family, who had taken their surname from their trade generations ago, were as prolific as the Lanyons were not. Nicholas, who had had some schooling and knew many well-travelled merchants, said that he had heard of people in far-off places who lived in communities known as tribes, which had usually grown from an original large family. His own cheerful, noisy, crowded family, he was wont to say, was almost a tribe.
It was a fair summing-up. They all knew how they were related to each other and they all, more or less, lived together, although sheer necessity had obliged them, eventually, to spread first of all into the house next door when the tenancy chanced to fall vacant, and later to rent the house opposite, as well.
By that time Nicholas’s cousin Laurence and his richly fertile wife, Elena, had a family of formidable dimensions and it was their branch of the tribe that moved across the road, where they took to carding and yarn spinning as distinct from the actual weaving. At one time, like many other families, the Weavers had bought yarn from other cottagers, who made their living by spinning. Until it occurred to Laurence that they had hands enough to do both jobs, whereupon he set his side of the family to creating yarn. Only the fulling and dyeing had to be contracted out. Otherwise, the family bought raw fleeces and did the rest themselves.
Under Nicholas’s roof, only Margaret now spun yarn. She had a knack for creating a thin, strong woollen thread which she sold, undyed, on market days, a small but useful addition to the household coffers.
Renting the third house was a wise move from every point of view. The various cousins, uncles and aunts who had been squeezed in with Nicholas and Margaret could now occupy the next-door premises. Meanwhile, as time went on, Laurence and Elena brought their family to ten, plus a daughter-in-law and three grandchildren. As yet, the youngsters were too small to be useful, but they would soon be big enough to learn to spin. They would also take up space. Laurence eased the congestion as best he could by building a workroom on to the back of his house. Nicholas likewise constructed a weaving shed to the rear of his. These additions made little difference, though. The Weavers remained much as they always had been: amiably argumentative—and crowded.
With so many mouths to feed and three rents to be paid, their prosperity had to be carefully nurtured. They grew vegetables and reared poultry in the long back gardens of the three houses and Nicholas now rented a meadow on a hillside at the seaward end of the village, where he kept not only his three ponies but also two cows. He had built a byre-cum-stable there as shelter for the animals and somewhere to store tack and winter fodder. Margaret was good at dairy work as well as spinning thread, and they had cheese and cream for everyone.
It was also a family custom to marry their daughters off early, taking their youthful appetites for food into other people’s households. Sometimes even surplus boys were exported. Nicholas and Margaret had two young sons and one of them, eventually, might have to leave home. “A good rose bush needs regular pruning” was the way Nicholas put it.
And the next one to be pruned, thought their daughter Liza, is going to be me.
From the moment her parents arrived home from George Lanyon’s funeral, she had sensed that something was in the air, though at first it wasn’t clear what the something was. The return of Nicholas and Margaret chanced to coincide with a busy time. New orders for cloth had come in, and there had been a problem at the Cleeve Abbey fulling mill, which the Dunster weavers used as well as the monks, to get their cloth cleaned with water and fuller’s earth before dyeing. A thunderstorm on the moors had sent quantities of peat down the Avill River and polluted the water supply. “It’s always happening. Nature wants us to dye all our cloth dark brown,” Nicholas grumbled. “We’ll have to send it somewhere else till the river clears. Can’t go delaying orders from new customers. That’s bad business.”
But concerned though the family had been with these matters, there had been something else on their minds. Twice Liza had walked into a room to find her parents talking to other family members, and the conversation had stopped short the moment she appeared. And she had noticed her parents glancing at her, pleasantly enough, but thoughtfully, too, as though they were wondering…
Wondering what? Liza could guess the answer to that. Indeed, she had been through all this before and was fairly sure that she recognised the symptoms. They had a marriage in mind for her and were asking themselves whether she would be pleased with it or not.
She had been expecting something like this. After all, she was the eldest daughter. She was twenty-three now and should have been wedded long ago. Three of her younger sisters were married and the little one, Jane, the infant of the family, was single only because she was as yet only seven years old. Liza had stayed unmarried so far because first one thing and then another had interfered with her parents’ plans. They had arranged a very good match for her when she was sixteen, but the young man inconsiderately died of a fever before the wedding day. Another proposal came in quite soon, but the prospective bridegroom, though well-off and good-natured enough, was nearly fifty. Liza objected and neither Nicholas nor Margaret were easy about the matter, either. The argument—put forward by Aunt Cecy, one of the older family members—that she would probably become a wealthy widow before long and could then please herself, failed to convince either Liza or her parents and the negotiations died away.
There had been others, too—a suitor who changed his mind and another whose parents changed it for him because they had found a better prospect. Time had gone on.
“And now,” said Margaret indignantly when at last the business problems had been overcome and the family had gathered together—without Liza—for a full-scale discussion of the proposal which she and Nicholas had brought back from Allerbrook, “and now there’s gossip. Folk have such vile minds.”
She broke off to cough, because during the summer they did not light the fire in the big main room and now, when autumn had set in and they needed warmth, the chimney was smoking. She had pulled her spinning wheel out of the way of possible smuts, but was still using it, important though this gathering was. The steady whirr formed a background to the business in hand.
“Liza’s a good wench,” she said when the coughing fit was over. “And we’ve said naught to her about these hints we’ve heard, that she’s been meetin’ a man in secret, because hints is all it is, and we reckon they come from jealous old women with clatterin’ tongues and naught better to do than make up nasty stories about young girls who still have pretty faces and all their teeth! But it’s time we got her settled—that’s true enough. She’s got a right to depend on us for that.”
I knew it. Flat on the planks of the floor overhead, with one ear pressed to a chink between two boards, Liza felt her stomach clench in fright. Earlier that day she had heard her name mentioned in a conversation among her elders and had without hesitation done some deliberate eavesdropping. She had guessed right, it seemed. Her marriage was being planned and it seemed that her future was to be discussed this morning, in her absence. Slipping away from duties in the kitchen, she had gone to her chamber just above the main living room, and then, having taken the precaution of bolting herself in, flattened herself to the floor to eavesdrop for the second time that day.
It wasn’t the sort of behaviour her parents would have approved of in any of their daughters; in fact, they would have been appalled. But then, they would be even more appalled if they knew about Christopher, Liza thought, and by the sound of it, they had heard something. She could guess the source of the rumour, as well. That wretched woman who had the cottage down by the packhorse bridge. She had seen Liza and Christopher together and must, after all, have recognised them.
Lying flat, her left cheekbone in danger of being grazed by the floor, Liza felt tears pricking behind her eyes. She tried to blink them away. She had known this was coming. She had known that, sooner or later, arrangements would be made for her and all her dreams would be destroyed. She had thought she was prepared. But now…
Oh, dear God. Oh, Christopher, my dear love. I can’t bear it.
A few feet away, below Liza, Aunt Cecy was staring coldly at Margaret, who stared back in an equally chilly manner. They all addressed Cecy as Aunt, but she was actually the wife of Nicholas’s oldest cousin, Dick Weaver, who was the son of Great-Uncle Will, the most ancient member of the tribe. Her virtue was as rigid as her backbone, and her backbone resembled a broom handle. Her mouth and body were overthin, and alone among the women of the family she had had trouble giving birth. Her two daughters had been born, with great difficulty, eight years apart, with several disasters intervening. They had both been married off at the age of fourteen and had seemed glad to leave home.
“If that girl b’ain’t wed soon,” Aunt Cecy said now, “her pretty face’ll get lines and her teeth’ll start going. Margaret, do you have to keep on with that everlasting spinning when we’re talkin’ over summat as solemn as this, and what in heaven’s name is wrong with that there chimney?”
“I think birds must have nested in it since the spring-cleaning. We’ll have to clear it. The men’d better lop a branch off that birch tree in the garden to push down it. As for spinnin’, I like keepin’ my hands busy,” said Margaret. “I can spin and talk, and listen.”
Aunt Cecy snorted. Laurence, who had come across the cobbled road with Elena and others of his family, threading their way past the permanent market stalls which occupied the middle of the street, said reasonably, “Never mind the tales. Nicholas here says he’s had an offer. If it’s a good one, where’s the problem?” He was very like Nicholas, with the same hearty voice and the same robust outlook on life. “Even if she has had…let’s be charitable and say a friend—in secret—what of it? Who didn’t, when they were young? All that’ll be over. Who is it you’ve got in mind?”
“Peter Lanyon,” said Nicholas. “Grandson of George, whose burial Margaret and I have just been to.”
“Liza’s older than Peter, isn’t she?” Elena said. “Does it matter, do you think?”
“Er…” said their daughter-in-law, and her husband, Laurie, a younger version of Laurence, grinned. Laurence burst out laughing and so did several of Nicholas’s cousins.
“Our Katy here’s two years older than young Laurie and who cares? Didn’t stop them having twin sons inside of a year!” Laurence said.
“Liza ought to be married,” Nicholas said. “And I’ve called you all in here to discuss this proposal from the Lanyons. Peter’ll do as far as I’m concerned. He’s good-looking and good-natured, and Richard’s offered me a deal. He got me in a corner at his dad’s funeral and put it to me. I’ve a good dowry put by for Liza, but he’s suggested something more. He wants to be cut in to our business. We’ve always bought about half his wool clip—he sells the other half when the agents come round from the big merchants. Now he says we can have the wool for a discount if he can have a regular cut off the profits when we sell the finished cloth and yarn. He asked a lot of questions and we went into another room and he clicked a few beads round his abacus, arriving at a figure. I reckon he’s judged his offer finely. He’ll come out on the right side more often than not. In effect, we’ll pay more for his wool, not less, only not all at once, but…”
“Looks as if he’s takin’ advantage.” Great-Uncle Will didn’t like to walk far, so he spent his days sitting about. At the moment he was in a bad temper because the smoking fire had driven him from the settle by the hearth, where he liked to sit on chilly days, driving him back to his summer seat by the window. His voice was sharp. “We want to get Liza off our hands. He’ll oblige if he’s paid!”
“Quite. We’ll have to look on his cut from our profits as part of Liza’s dowry,” said Nicholas. “Getting the wool cheap won’t offset it, most years anyway. But he also pointed out that once we’re all one family and one business, there are things we can do to help each other. Put opportunities each other’s way—things like introductions to new customers, or brokering marriages. Word to each other of anything useful like new breeds of sheep. He’s thinking to buy a ram from some strain or other with better fleeces. If he does, we’ll gain from that after a while. Meanwhile, we’ll have got Liza settled and she’ll be eating his provender, not ours.”
“You must admit the man’s got ideas,” said Laurence, and Dick Weaver nodded in agreement. “What of the girl herself?” he asked. “Has this been mentioned to her?”
“Why should it be?” demanded Aunt Cecy. “She’d be well advised to do as she’s told.”
“Not yet,” said Margaret. “But she won’t be difficult. When was she ever? She’s a good girl, is Liza, whatever silly gossip may say.”
“She’d better not be difficult. If ’ee don’t get that wench married,” said Great-Uncle Will, “she could get into trouble and then what’ll ’ee do? Get her shovelled into a nunnery while you rear her love child? I’ve heard that there gossip, too, and if there’s truth in it, the fellow can’t wed her anyhow. In orders, he is. That’s what the clacking tongues are saying.”
The entire family, as if they were puppets whose strings were held by a single master hand, swung around to look at him.
“I’ve not heard this!” Nicholas said. “You know who this fellow is that Liza’s supposed to be meeting? Well, who is he and how did you find out so much?”
“Gossip!” said Margaret, interrupting forcefully and snagging her thread in her annoyance. “Liza’s a sensible girl, I tell ’ee!”
“She knows all the ins and outs of the business,” said Nicholas. “I grant you that. She’s handy with a loom and an abacus, as well. She understands figures the way I do and the way that the rest of you, frankly, don’t! But she gets dreamy sometimes. Don’t know where she gets that from. And now folk are asking why’s she still single and is there some dark reason? Sounds to me as if there maybe is and the whispers have something behind them after all! Well, Uncle Will? What have you heard?”
“I sit here by this window on warm days and folk stop to talk to me,” said Will. “I didn’t want to repeat the talk. Not sure I should, even now. These things often fade out if you leave them be. Don’t matter if she’s had a kiss in the moonlight or a cuddle in a cornfield, as long as she don’t argue now.” The fire belched again, swirling smoke right across the room, and he choked, waving a wrinkled hand before his face. “Devil take this smoke!”
There were exclamations of protest from all around. “That won’t do, Great Uncle!” said Nicholas bluntly. “If you know a name, then tell us. Who does gossip say the man is?”
“Young fellow working up at the castle, studying with the Luttrells’ chaplain, that’s who,” said Great-Uncle Will. “I don’t know his name, but I know the one they mean—he’s stopped by to talk to me himself. Redheaded young fellow. In minor orders yetawhile, but he’ll be a full priest one of these days. So he b’ain’t husband material for Liza or any other girl. You get her fixed up with Peter Lanyon, and quick.”
“I can hardly believe it.” Margaret had stopped her spinning wheel.
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.
“I hope he did no serious damage,” he said. “He belongs to Mistress Luttrell—he’s her lapdog—but he’s forever running off into the woods. I think he thinks he’s a deerhound! Can you hand him over the fence to me?”
Liza went to do so and his eyes widened. “Don’t I know you? Aren’t you Liza Weaver? We met two days ago at the fair.”
“Yes, yes, I am. And you’re Christopher.” At the fair they had stood and walked side by side. This was the first time she had stood face-to-face with him and really studied him. He had a snub nose and a square jaw with a hint of pugnacity in it, the effect both tough and boyish and remarkably attractive. His red-gold eyebrows were shapely above his smiling eyes, and once more she noticed how beautiful and unusual their colour was. That amber shade was quite different from the soft velvet-brown of her own eyes, as she had sometimes seen them when looking in her mother’s silver mirror. There were a few gold flecks in the amber, and his skin, too, was dusted with golden freckles. There was a slightly denser freckling on his chin, adding an endearing touch of comedy to his face.
The hands that reached to take the struggling dog from her, though, were beautiful, strong without being coarse, the backs lightly furred with red-gold hairs, the bones clearly defined beneath the skin, the fingers and palms in perfect proportion. She found it hard not to keep gazing at them.
On his side, he was having his first clear view of her. He took in fewer details, but the little he did absorb was enough—the deep colour of the beechnut hair showing in front of the coif, the candid brown eyes, the good skin. She was tall for a girl, and within the plain dark everyday gown her body had a sturdy strength. Not that either of them felt they were studying a stranger. It was more as though they were reminding themselves of something they had known since before they were born but had unaccountably forgotten.
“The bluebells are still out in your garden,” he said. His hands were now full of dog, but he nodded to the little splash of blue next to the herb plot. “There are wonderful bluebells in a dell on the other side of the castle. You can get there by the path past the mill. A few yards on, there’s another little path that leads aside, leftward, to the dell. Do you know the place? Anyone can go there.”
“Yes. Yes, I know it. But how do you come to know it?” Liza asked curiously. “I thought…I mean, you have your work.”
“I came across it a week ago—chasing Wagtail again! He’s always getting out, and whoever sees him slipping off usually goes after him—page, squire, man-at-arms, maid or cook or groom! Not the chaplain or Mistress Luttrell herself, though. They keep their dignity. I found Wagtail among the bluebells and I’ve been back since to see them before they fade. Father Meadowes—the chaplain, that is—gives me a passage from the Scriptures to meditate on each day, and three times I’ve done my meditating while walking about in the dell after dinner. At about two of the clock.”
He shouldn’t be saying these things. Liza knew it and so did Christopher. He shouldn’t, either, have lain sleepless last night, while the girl he had met at the fair danced through his mind, glowing with light and warmth so that all thoughts of priesthood and his vocation had melted like morning mist before a summer sunrise. Now the words he ought not to say had come out, apparently by themselves.
“I walk out to take the air sometimes, too,” said Liza. She smiled. “There’s a leaf in your hair. Did you know?”
“Wagtail’s fault. He tore straight off through the woods below the castle and I went straight after him. But it’s hard going if you don’t take a stick or, better still, a wood-axe along with you,” said Christopher, grinning, and because he was still holding the dog, he leaned forward across the fence and let her remove the leaf from his tonsure. It was the first time they’d ever touched. It made her inside turn somersaults again.
“I must go,” he said, and she watched him walk away across the meadow. He was almost a priest and her parents wouldn’t like this at all, but it made no difference. Something had begun that would not be halted. At the thought of seeing him again, her spirit became as light as thistledown, dancing in the wind. Around her, the scent of the herbs, the green of the meadow, the azure of the bluebells, the distant sparkle of the sea all seemed enhanced, brighter, stronger, as though her senses had been half-asleep all her life and now were fully awake at last. She felt about as sensible as a hare in March, or an autumn leaf in a high wind.
She would see him again. She must.
In the afternoon she slipped away, through the village, along the path that led to the dell, and found him there and they walked together.
Three days later, although the bluebells were no longer at their best, they met there again and this time they kissed. Then they sat down on a fallen log and stared at each other in consternation.
“I’m going to be a priest. Well, I already am, in a junior way. I’ve been a subdeacon and six months ago I was ordained deacon. Becoming a full priest is the next step, the final one. If I…if I abandon my vocation now, my father won’t take me back. He has other sons to settle. He’s a merchant in Bristol, successful but not rich.”
“I see. Well, you told me to begin with that you were going to be a priest. But…” Liza’s voice died away in bewilderment, mainly at herself.
Christopher thrust his fingers through his tonsure. “Liza, my father and mother are both steady, reliable people. They expect their children to be steady and reliable, too, and I thought I was! And then—we met at the fair, and you smiled at me and all my good sense has flown away like a flock of swallows at the end of summer! You make me feel as though my feet have left the ground and my head’s among the stars. I don’t understand myself!”
He stopped running his fingers through his hair and reached out to take her hands. “What I do understand is that my world has turned upside down. Liza, as I said, I’m already in the priesthood. To get myself released from this would be horribly difficult. I’d have to go to my bishop and he’d probably say I was committed for life. I’ve heard of men who’ve bought their way out, but I have little money. I suppose I could borrow some. I know I could make my way in the world, given time, but it would be very hard at first and perhaps I’d be in debt. Would you wait for me? Would they let you wait?”
“I don’t think so. They want to get me married, and they’d say that a priest can’t marry and that’s the end of it.”
Liza knew her family. They were good-natured as a rule, though liable to shout loudly in times of crisis—if, for instance, a pot should be spilled in the kitchen or a piece of weaving be damaged or if Aunt Cecy discovered a spider in her bedchamber—but with no real ill feeling behind the uproar. Nevertheless, for all their seemingly easygoing ways, they took their work seriously; nothing slipshod was ever let past. And they expected their private life to be properly conducted, expected that parents would arrange their children’s future careers and marriages and that the children would concur. The arrangements would be made with affection and consideration, but made, just the same, and with a very keen regard for respectability. What Liza was doing now would not be tolerated. She would be seen as a wanton who had tried to seduce a priest from his vocation. Her mother in particular would be horrified. Margaret prided herself on holding up her head among the neighbours.
“No, I see. I’d say the same, in their place. Liza, what has happened to us?”
“It’s as if…this were meant to be. I was reared to be steady, sensible, like you. My father talks to me about cloth-making because sometimes I ask questions about it and he says he likes to see his daughter being interested in practical things and her family’s business.”
If you’re taking the trouble to learn about my business, you’ll do the same about your husband’s business when you marry, whether he’s in the weaving trade or no. I’d sooner see you with an abacus than mooning at the moon. Nicholas had said such things to her several times.
“He’s taught me to keep accounts, with Arabic figures, and an abacus,” Liza said. “I’ve always tried to be what he and my mother wanted of me. I think my parents are like yours in many ways. But now…my head’s among the stars as well.”
They looked at each other helplessly, two earnest young creatures who had suddenly found that common sense wasn’t enough.
“Except that it can’t come to anything. Dear heart. Oh, Liza, what have I done to you, letting you love me, letting myself love you? It really is like that, isn’t it? I mean—love?”
To Liza’s distress, there were tears in his eyes. “Yes. I don’t see how I can ever marry anyone else, but they’ll make me!”
“Oh, my poor Liza! Oh!” He cried it out in anguish. “Why can’t a priest be a man as well and live as other men do? Why are we condemned to this…to rejecting human love, to being so alone? It’s cruel! And there’s nothing, nothing I can do about it, for you or for me!”
“Hold me,” said Liza.
On the way home, aglow from the feel of his arms around her and the feel of his body as her arms closed around him, she came face-to-face with a small, wan woman whom she recognised as Alison Webber, the wife of the unfortunate Bart. Bart was at least forty, but Alison was his second wife and she was still very young; indeed, not yet married a year. She had been a rosy girl with bright eyes like a squirrel, but now she went about like a shadow, and Liza, troubled at the sight of her, paused to say good-day. Whereupon Alison’s haunted eyes blazed at her.
“You wish me good-day? Your mother’s the cruel-lest woman in all Dunster. Won’t speak to me in the street, as if it was all my fault, and it isn’t! Your parents should have dined with us yesterday and they cried off. And what the Weavers do, others do! If she’d put out a hand to us, it ’ud be different. She’s pushed us into hell and she’s done it a’purpose and I’ve no word to say to you. Just this!” said Alison furiously, and spat at Liza’s feet before pushing past and going on her way.
No, thought Liza miserably, all the glow gone, no, there was no future for her and Christopher. Margaret would never forgive her if she knew. Never.
But all through the summer she and Christopher went on with their stolen meetings, most of them in the dell. One, by chance, was on the stone bridge which had been built across the Avill River for the benefit of packhorses carrying wool to and from Dunster market. On the bridge, shadowed by the trees that bordered the river, they hugged each other and then stood to talk and look at the water, and Liza saw someone in the garden of a nearby cottage looking at them. Alarmed, she dragged Christopher off the bridge without explaining why, which annoyed him because he thought he’d seen a trout and was about to point it out.
“A trout!” Liza gasped. “The woman who lives in that cottage has the sharpest nose and the longest ears in Dunster! If she recognised us…!”
“Never mind her nose or her ears. Unless she’s got the eyes of an owl as well, she couldn’t possibly have recognised us in the shade of the trees! Acting guilty like that, you’ve probably drawn her attention. She’ll think about us now and start wondering who we were!”
“Oh!” Liza burst out, stamping her foot. “How I hate this secrecy!”
“Good thing we’re off the bridge. You might damage it, stamping like that,” said Christopher, and as he pulled her into his arms, there, once again, was that tough grin which had turned her insides to water at the fair.
They had other small squabbles later. Liza never told him of the feeling of guilt toward her family, which often kept her awake at night; nor did he tell her of his own wakeful nights, when he wondered what he was about, how it happened that the studies, the prospect of full priesthood, which had once, to him, been the meat and bread, the sweet water and glowing wine of the spirit, were now nothing but yesterday’s cold pottage.
But sometimes their secret misery, forced to dwell side by side with this extraordinary thing which had come upon them and bound them together and could not be altered, seemed to turn them into flint and tinder and sparks of anger were struck, though only to be extinguished moments later by Liza’s tears and Christopher’s kisses and that sudden, enchanting grin as his temper faded.
They never went further than kisses, though. Their stolen embraces woke a deep hunger in them, but the common sense to which they had been bred, and the knowledge, too, that they would be breaking Christopher’s solemn, priestly promise of celibacy, protected them.
“I think sometimes that we quarrel because I want you so much but I know I mustn’t,” Christopher said once, after one of their brief arguments.
Cautious caresses were all they would ever have of one another and they knew it. They would have this one magical summer, but never would the enchantment reach its natural conclusion, and the summer would soon be gone. As it now was. From what Liza had heard that morning, the woman with the sharp nose and ears apparently did have owl’s eyes, as well. Talk had started somehow and almost certainly with her. Very likely she knew them both quite well by sight. Their secret was almost out. Only her family’s kindly trust in her had kept them skeptical, but it wouldn’t last.
Now, standing by the plague cross on the Alcombe road, they recognised that their time was done.
“They are arranging my marriage,” said Liza. “And they’ve heard talk. We dare not ever meet again. It’s over, Christopher.”
“Oh, dear God. Don’t say that!” He closed his fingers around her upper arms so tightly that she protested and he eased his grip, but his face had gone hard. “It can’t be…so suddenly, so soon!”
“But we knew it was coming,” said Liza miserably. “We’ve always known. I can’t defy them and if I did—even if we ran off together—I shouldn’t take you from your vocation. I know that. Only, I don’t know how to bear losing you. I just don’t know how to bear it.”
“Nor do I!”
He drew her into the shelter of some trees, out of sight of the track, and pushed her coif back so that he could kiss her thick brown hair, and then for a long time they stood there, clasping each other so tightly that they could almost have been one entity, as they longed to be.
Parting was so painful that they did not know how to do it. Liza, gazing into his face as though she were trying to memorise it, had a sudden inspiration and pulled a patterned silver ring from the middle finger of her right hand. “Christopher! Take this! It’s loose on my thickest finger, but it might fit one of yours. Please take it and wear it. I want you to have it!”
“But…how did you come by it? If someone gave it to you as a gift, should you give it away?”
“It belonged to my grandmother. When she died, Mother gave it to me. But it’s always been loose, as I said. I can say I’ve lost it. Mother will scold because she’ll think I was careless, but nothing more. Take it, Christopher, please.”
He did so, trying it on his left little finger and finding that it fit quite well. Then, at last, after one final and furious kiss, they let each other go. Christopher, looking over his shoulder all the time, went to reclaim his pony, and Liza, putting her hair back under its coif, found her hands trembling. She saw him mount and waved to him, but then couldn’t bear it anymore. She turned away, brushing a hand across her eyes, and started back across the field.
The women were still there, gleaning, nearer to the path now, and they looked at her curiously. One of them—Liza recognised her as Bridget, the wife of another weaver—said, “Are you all right, m’dear? You look a bit mazed and sad-like.”
That was when she realised she was crying. She wiped her knuckles across her eyes. “It’s nothing.” They went on staring at her and she told them one small part of the truth. “I think I’m going to be married but I don’t know him very well and…”
“Ah, that’ll come right soon enough,” Bridget said kindly. “Don’t ’ee worry, now. Nicholas’ll not agree to anything but what’s good for thee. Don’t ’ee fret a moment longer. You’ll be as happy as a lark, and think of all they pretty babes that’ll come!”
“Of course,” said Liza, now determinedly smiling. “Of course I know you’re right.”
Whatever happened she mustn’t have red eyes when she reached home. With a frightened jolt she realised she had been away without explanation for quite a long time, and that her parents knew there was gossip about her.
She must find an excuse for her absence. She could say she had wanted to go for a walk and when passing through the lobby had overheard her father talking about marrying her to Peter Lanyon. That she hadn’t meant to listen but had accidentally heard that much. So she had walked to St. George’s church to pray for happiness in her future, and then walked back across the stubble field. Yes, that would do, and if Bridget should ever mention seeing her, it would fit in.
CHAPTER FIVE
UNTIMELY AUTUMN
With an effort that felt like pulling her heart out of her body, Liza arranged another smile on her face as she approached her home, only to realise, on reaching it, that she needn’t have troubled. Her family was in the middle of one of its noisy crises. Dirk, the younger of the two menservants in the Weaver establishment, was up astride the roof ridge along with her cousin Laurie, doing something to a chimney, and she could hear shouting within the house while she was still several yards away.
As she stepped inside, the smell of soot assailed her nostrils and the shouting resolved itself into confused cries of annoyance from women in the main room, and a furious bellowing from the back regions, which she recognised as the voice of one of the older cousins, Ed, declaring that soot was blowing into the fleece store and would somebody shut that accursed door before the whole lot had to be washed a second time!
She walked into the living quarters and her mother and one of the maidservants, both liberally smeared with dirt, turned from the business of sweeping up a shocking mess of soot and disintegrated bird’s nest, which had apparently come down the chimney and mingled with the revolting remains of a fire over which someone had tossed a pail of water. Above it, the filthy and battered remains of what had once been a thin tree branch waved and waggled, presumably because Laurie and Dirk on the roof were agitating it. “What in the world…?” said Liza.
“The chimney were blocked,” said Margaret. “Where’ve you been?”
“I just went out to take the air. I went to St. George’s and—”
“You and your walks.” But Great-Uncle Will had advised them not to challenge Liza, and Margaret, distracted by domestic upheaval, didn’t at that moment want to. “Find a broom and help us out. Fine old muddle this is, I must say. Spring-cleaning in October. I never did hear the like.”
No need after all for excuses or lies. She’d got away with it. Thanking the saints for her good luck, Liza made haste to be useful. Later in the day, when order had been restored and dinner eaten, her parents called her to their room, and she felt alarmed, but their faces were kind. They simply wanted to talk about her marriage. Nothing less, but nothing more, either. If her absence in the morning had aroused any doubts, they evidently didn’t mean to mention them—unless Liza herself was foolish enough to be difficult. She knew her kinfolk very well indeed.
“The whole family has discussed it now,” her father said, coming to the end of his explanation. “We’ve agreed it’s a good thing for you. Peter Lanyon is young and healthy. The business side is not ideal, but it may work out well. Anyway, we intend to say yes.”
“I understand,” said Liza nervously. Since she had not had to invent an excuse for her absence in the morning, she had taken care, throughout the interview, to look as though the notion of Peter Lanyon as her bridegroom were a complete surprise. She added, “It’s a big thing for me.”
“Naturally. Have you any objection?” Nicholas asked. Her parents were both watching her sharply. Well, she’d better allay their suspicions before they voiced them. She dared do nothing else.
“No, Father. I…I’m sure it’s a good thing.” She must, must be the sensible Liza her family wanted her to be. She shuddered to think of the storm of wrath the truth would arouse, and besides, Christopher might suffer. She made herself smile again. Would she have to spend the rest of her life forcing the corners of her mouth upward when all she wanted to do was cry and cry?
Well, if so, so be it. She had no alternative.
Christopher, on his way to Alcombe, felt like crying, too, but except for that one uncharacteristic fit of emotion during their first meeting in the dell, he was not in the habit of shedding tears. He must face it. He had lost Liza for good and what had been between them must remain a secret for all eternity. They had known it would be like this one day. It felt worse than he had expected, that was all. It was like an illness, but he supposed he would recover someday. And so, of course, would Liza. At the thought of Liza forgetting him, he did find tears attempting to get into his eyes, but with a highly unclerical oath he repressed them and rode on.
At that very moment, at Allerbrook farm, another unsanctioned love affair was disturbing the air. It had been secret until now, and its emergence into the light had thrown Richard Lanyon into a dramatic fit of temper.
“Marion Locke? Who in God’s name is Marion Locke? I’ve never heard of her! You’re going to marry Liza Weaver—it’s all settled! Who’s this Marion Locke? Where did you find her? There’s no Locke family round here!”
Richard Lanyon stopped, mainly because he had run out of breath. He stood glowering in the middle of the room, the same room in which George’s coffin had lain awaiting its funeral. He had shouted so loudly that the pewter on the sideboard rang faintly as if trying to echo him.
“She lives on the coast. In Lynmouth, Father. I met her at the Revel there, in June.”
“Lynmouth? That’s as far as Dunster, the other way. I remember you went to the Revel. Well, half of Somerset and Devon go to it—young folk have to enjoy themselves. I’ve no quarrel with that, and if you’ve had a loving summer with some lass there, I’ve no quarrel with that either. Young men have their adventures. I did, in my time. But that’s one thing and marriage is another. How have you managed to visit her since? Oh!” Richard glared at his son. “Now I recall. Two weeks back, we drove the moor for our bullocks and somehow or other you got yourself lost in a mist, you that’s known the moor all your life. Came home hours late, after the cattle were all in the shippon, and said you’d mistaken the Lyn for the head of the Barle and thought you were going southeast instead of north. I thought your brains had gone begging, and all the time…”
Peter stood his ground. “Yes, I saw her then. Other times were when I said I’d ride out to see how the foals or the calves were doing. It came in useful that we’re allowed to run stock on the moor. I’ve seen her twice a month since we first met. Marion visits relations—a grandmother and an aunt—in Lynton, at the top of the cliff, on the first and third Tuesdays of each month. We arranged it so I’d meet her in Lynton whenever I could.”
“Who is she?” Richard spoke more calmly and with some curiosity. After all, if this unknown Marion Locke were a more profitable purchase than Liza Weaver, it might be worth indulging the boy. Nicholas would be upset, but maybe he could suggest someone else for Liza who would suit her parents better than Peter. He raised an enquiring eyebrow. Peter immediately dashed his father’s hopes by replying, “The Lockes are fisherfolk. They run a boat—the Starfish—out of Lynmouth harbour. They—”
“Her father’s a fisherman?”
“Yes, that’s right. He—”
“Are you out of your mind, boy?” roared Richard. “When did fisherfolk and farming folk ever marry one another? Fisher girls can’t make ham and bacon and chitterlings out of a slaughtered pig, or brew cider, or milk a cow, and our girls can’t mend nets and gut mackerel!”
“Are those the things that matter?” Peter shouted back. “Marion’s lovely. She’s sweet. We love each other and—”
“When you’re living day to day then, yes, they do matter, boy, believe me, they do! When a girl can’t do the things you take for granted, that’ll soon see the end of your loving summer! The autumn leaves’ll fall fast enough then, take my word for it!”
“Liza Weaver’s not been farm reared, either!”
“She can bake and do dairy work. She’ll soon pick up the rest. And she’ll bring a pile of silver and a cut into the Weaver profits along with her. What sort of dowry has this Marion got, I’d like to know? Well? Tell me!”
“I never asked. Not much, perhaps, but—”
“I’ll tell you how much! Nothing! Fisherfolk never have a penny to spare. They put all their money into their boats. Marion Locke, indeed! You can forget this Marion, right away. I’ll—”
“Father, she’s beautiful. And we’re promised to each other.” Peter raised his chin. “We’re betrothed and—”
“Oh no, you’re bloody well not!” shouted Richard. “Not unless I say so and you needn’t go trying to get Father Bernard on your side, either! I won’t have it and that’s that. I’ll see this girl’s father and see what he has to say about it, and I’ll be very surprised if he doesn’t agree with every word I say. Who is he? What’s his name?”
“He’s well respected in Lynmouth. He’s Master Jenkin Locke and he lives by the harbour in the cottage with the birds made out of twisted thatch along the ridge of his roof. He made them himself. The Starfish is one of the finest boats—”
“Be quiet! Just forget about Marion Locke, as from now! And…what is it?” Hearing a sound at the door, Richard swung around and found a timid-looking young girl there with bare feet, a shawl wrapped around her and a lot of straw-coloured hair trailing from under a coif that was badly askew. “Who the devil are you?”
“I’m…I’m sorry, sir. But the mistress sent me—Mistress Deborah. I’m Allie, sir, her maid….”
“Allie! Oh, of course! But what brings you…is something wrong? With Mistress Deborah!” Suddenly he was taut and alert, his eyes fixed on Allie, Peter’s vagaries for the moment quite forgotten.
“Yes, sir, dreadful wrong!” Allie was near tears. “She’s so ill, sir. I’ve called the priest. She took a chill the day after the…the funeral, sir, when she fell in the river, for all you give her your cloak, and she’s worse and she’s sent me to fetch you, sir. She wants to see you….”
Richard turned at once to his son. “Go and saddle Splash for me, while I get my cloak. Allie, is anyone with your mistress now—any other woman?”
“Yes, sir, our neighbour. But she’ll not be able to stay long. She has children and—”
“She won’t have to stay long. I’ll take you down to the village with me on my horse.”
“But sir, I’ve never been on a horse.”
“You’ll get up behind me and hold tight and we’ll be there in a trice. She’ll need you. Go with Peter and wait for me. Go on!”
CHAPTER SIX
THE LOCKES OF LYNMOUTH
“I swore I’d never forgive the Sweetwaters for crashing into my father’s cortege,” said Richard Lanyon grimly. “Now there’s something else I’ll never forgive them for, in this world or the next. They as good as killed Deb Archer, that’s what! If Humphrey Sweetwater ever meets me in a lonely place, he’ll wish he hadn’t!”
“Master Lanyon, I don’t like to hear you talking like that.” Father Bernard had conducted Deb’s burial service with dignity, tacitly accepting Richard’s presence as natural without making any reference to the reason for it. In the priest’s eyes, however, this outburst went too far. It had also been too loud. In the group of mourners now moving out of the churchyard, heads had turned and brows had been lifted. Father Bernard put a hand on Richard’s arm to halt him. “It’s not wise to raise your voice so much,” he said. “What if the Sweetwaters hear of it?”
“Maybe it’ll stir their consciences!” Richard was unrepentant. “Poor, poor Deb. Never harmed a living thing and everyone who knew her was the happier for it.” He was going to miss her more than he had dreamed possible. She had been friend as well as mistress—someone to talk to and laugh with as well as to sleep with. “And now I’ve watched her being put in the ground, all because of the bloody Sweetwaters!” Richard thundered.
“I’m sorry, too, Father.” Peter, who had been walking with them, had stopped beside Richard. “Everyone is.”
“Her little maid, Allie, said she was chilled when she came home all wet that day,” Richard said. “But she still went out again after she’d changed, so as to come to my father’s burial. Sun was out, but there was a sharpish wind. Allie told me she fell ill next day. Looked like a bad cold at first, but two days after that she started coughing and in two more days, she was in delirium and Allie was sending for the priest and for me, and she died that night, with me holding her. All because the Sweetwaters…!”
Fury choked him. Shaking off Father Bernard’s hand, he jerked his head at Peter to follow, and strode out of the churchyard, not turning toward Deb’s cottage where the other neighbours were going for the funeral repast, but turning the other way instead, evidently making straight for home.
“He’s grieving,” said Peter awkwardly to the priest.
“Yes, I know. You’d better go with him. Look after him.”
“If I can,” said Peter, and set off in his father’s wake.
Kat and Betsy had a meal ready in the farmhouse. Richard ate it in a stormy silence, which Peter decided not to break. Afterward, when the two women had left for their own cottages, father and son repaired to the big main room where a good fire had been lit. Some saddlery in need of cleaning lay on the floor, to provide occupation for the evening. They lit candles, since it was October and darkness was closing down already. With only the two of them in the house, it had an echoing, empty feel.
“It’s time we had more folk about this place, more helping hands and a mistress for our home.” Richard broke his silence at last. He picked up a bridle and put some oil on a cleaning cloth, but fixed his eyes on Peter, in no kindly fashion. “Now I’ve something to say to you. What with Deb dying, I’ve not spoken to you again about Liza Weaver, but nothing’s changed. You’ll marry Liza and I’ll hear no more talk of this girl Marion. Understand?”
Peter, in the act of reaching for a saddle, put it down again and drew a sharp breath. “I’m sorry, Father, I truly am, but…”
“Look here, boy!” Richard glared at him and his voice became aggressive. “I want to make something of this family, to wipe the lofty looks off those damned Sweetwater faces, even if we can’t chop their heads off their shoulders. Last century, before my time, let alone yours, there was a big rising in the southeast of England. It got put down, but it left its mark. Higg and Roger would have been villeins then, with no right to leave Allerbrook and go somewhere else, but they’re free men now and they can go if they want to. The rising was because—”
“I thought it was the plague that set men free,” said Peter. “So many folk died that villeins were left without masters and no one could stop them going where they liked—and asking wages when they found masters who had no one to work the land and weren’t in any position to argue.”
“The plague and the rising together made the difference, so I’ve heard,” said Richard. He moderated his tone, trying to be patient. “The one made the other stronger. But the rising was about people like us getting bone weary of having people like the Sweetwaters lord it over us. When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? That’s what the rebels used to chant. What makes the Sweetwaters think they’re so wonderful? My father sent me to school, though he could have used my hands on the land by then, because he wanted me to have a chance in life and not speak so broad that no one could understand me that wasn’t born in the west country. Later I sent you, too—and paid through the nose for it!”
“Yes, Father, I know, and I’m grateful, but—”
“No buts, if it’s all the same to you. We can read and write, just about; we can talk proper English and understand the Paternoster in Latin; we can add up our accounts and we know a bit of history. What have the Sweetwaters got that we haven’t? Land and money, that’s all. Well, that’s what I’m after, and seeing my only son hitch himself up with a fisher girl ain’t going to help. Liza Weaver’s another matter. We could gain a lot from that, could start saving. I’m relying on you making a good marriage to give us a leg up in the world. You can just forget Marion!”
“But, Father…” Peter, too, was now trying to be calm and patient. “We’ve said the words that make it a contract.”
“Without witnesses, and her a maiden in her father’s house? Those words were never said, my boy, and that’s that.”
“But they were said, and they’re binding.”
“I see. You’ll challenge me, will you? The young stag’s lowering his antlers at the herd leader, is he?” Richard abandoned patience, rose to his feet, laying aside his own work, and unbuckled his belt. Peter also stood up. He was taller than his father and though not as broad, he had in him the coiled-spring vitality of youth. The two of them faced each other.
“Father Bernard told me to look after you,” said Peter seriously. “So I wouldn’t want to hurt you, but if you try that, I might. I’ll fight. I mean it.”
“My God!” Richard stared at him. The candlelight was shining on Peter’s face. “You’ve had her, haven’t you? There’s nothing turns a boy into a man the way that does. She’s let you…and you still want to marry her?”
Peter was silent, remembering. September, it had been; not the day of the heavy mist, which had been a brief and chilly meeting, but the time before, which was in warm, sunny weather. They had met as usual close to Lynton, the village at the top of the cliff, and wandered into the nearby valley, with its curious rock outcrops. He had left his pony to graze while he and Marion took a goat path up the hillside, through the bracken, untroubled by the flies which in summer would have surrounded them in clouds.
On a patch of grass, hidden from the path below by a convenient rock, they sat down to talk and caress. They had done as much before, but this time it went further. Marion made no protest and soon he was past the point of no return, far adrift on the dreamy seas of desire and at the same time full of energy and the urgent need for pleasure.
The memory of it, of Marion, of her curves and warmth and moistness, her murmurs and little cries of excitement, her arms around him like friendly ropes, the rustle of a stray bracken frond under his left knee, the scent of warm grass and Marion’s hair, which she had surely washed with herbs, and then the splendour of his coming, were beyond putting into words and, in any case, they were not for anyone else to share.
“Yes,” he said now. “I want to marry her. I intend to.”
“We’ll see about that,” said Richard. “I’m going to Lynmouth tomorrow, to find the Lockes. I’ll see what they have to say! And now I’m going to bed and you can damned well finish cleaning the saddlery. And you can tell that priest that I don’t need looking after!”
His father, thought Peter bitterly as Richard stalked out of the room, was turning out as big a bully as George Lanyon had ever been.
The sky the next day was dull but dry and Richard left Allerbrook at dawn, a nosebag for Splash on his shoulder. He rode down the combe, through Clicket and then out over the moor, following the ancient tracks made by the vanished people who had buried their chieftains in hilltop barrows and had raised the strange standing stones one saw here and there amid the heather.
The tracks led across the high moor and brought him at last to the East Lyn River—which his besotted son could not conceivably have mistaken for the Barle, since the high ridge known as the Chains lay between them. He rode downhill beside the tumbling stream, on a steep path through bracken and trees, came to a fork, took the branch that bypassed Lynton village at the top of the cliffs and went on down to its sister village, Lynmouth, at the foot.
Here there was a harbour, with a quay and a square stone building with a smoking vent, where herring were dried. The tide was in and so were a couple of big ships and a fleet of small boats, which were being unloaded. Both men and women were bringing netting and baskets of fish onto the quay, and buyers were already clustering around them. Close by stood the thick-walled thatched cottages of the fisherfolk.
He looked for a roof decorated with birds made of twisted straw, and found it at once. It was one of the larger cottages, which suggested that the Locke family was comparatively prosperous. But still nowhere near as well-off as he was, he thought grimly. This was not the place to find a new mistress for Allerbrook farm, even if the girl Peter had in mind was respectable, which he doubted.
There was a hitching post beside the cottage. He secured Splash, loosened the girth and ran up the stirrups, gave the horse his nosebag and went purposefully to knock at the door of the cottage. It was ajar and opened when he rapped, but he paused politely, waiting for someone to come. The door opened straight into a living room and kitchen combined; he could see a trivet and pot, set over a fire, and a woman stirring the pot. Another woman was standing over a whitewood table close to a window, no doubt for the sake of the light, and gutting fish with a ferocious-looking knife. A third, broom in hand, was now advancing to ask him his business. He knew at once that this was Marion.
Peter had said she was beautiful, but it was the wrong word. Inside his head Richard struggled to find the right one and found himself thinking luscious, like the pears and plums which grew beside the southernmost wall of Sweetwater House. It was sheltered there, with good soil, and the fruit was always so full of juice that it seemed about to burst through the skin.
Village boys were employed as bird scarers and when the fruit was ready to harvest, they were paid with a basketful each. Richard himself, as a lad, had sometimes helped to frighten off the starlings, and been paid with pears and plums, the taste of which he had never forgotten.
This girl called them to mind. Her working gown was a dull brown garment, but within it, her shape was so rich and full that he had hard work not to stare rudely. He saw, too, that her hair, which was not concealed by any cap or coif, was extraordinary. It wasn’t so much curly as wiry and it was an astonishing pale gold in colour. She had pulled it back and knotted it behind her head, but much of it was too short for that and stood out around her head in a primrose cloud. It was clean hair, too. She looked after it.
Beneath it, her face was round, but there were strong bones within that seeming softness and she had long, sloe-blue eyes, full and heavy with knowledge and an unspoken promise to impart it.
And she was aware of him, of his dark good looks, and young as she was—sixteen, seventeen?—she knew something about men. He couldn’t blame Peter for falling for this. But all the same…good God, Peter was welcome to his wild oats. No one in their senses grudged a young man that. But marriage—that was different.
“Are you Marion Locke?” It came out harshly, as though he were angry with her.
“Yes, that I be.” Her accent was thick. Her looks might be remarkable but he doubted if she knew A from B.
“My name is Richard Lanyon. I believe you know my son, Peter. Is your father at home?”
“Aye. Down on the quay, he be. You want to talk to ’un?”
“I certainly do…ah!”
The woman who had been stirring the pot had put her spoon aside and come toward them. “What is it, Marion?”
“Gentleman axin’ for dad. Name of Lanyon.” Marion smiled beguilingly, as though she imagined he was here to settle the marriage arrangements. You’re wrong, my wench, said Richard to himself.
“Then go and fetch ’un,” said the woman. “He’m unloading the boat. You can take over from ’un. And ax the gentleman in!”
“I’ll want to come back with ’un,” said Marion querulously, standing aside to let Richard enter. “With Dad, I mean. I’ve met the gentleman’s son and it’ll be about me.”
“All the more reason for you to keep out of it. Send your father back here and you stop down there and get that there boat emptied. Go on!”
Marion clearly didn’t want to go, and pouted. Her mother stared at her fixedly, however, and after a moment she left.
“I don’t want to offend anyone, least of all a man and wife in their own home.” Richard, sitting by the fire with his hat on his knees, was conscious of being on someone else’s territory. Not that it was much of a territory. It seemed to consist of this main room, half the size of the one at Allerbrook, an upper half-floor, reached by a ladder, where he could see some pallet beds, and a small back room, partly visible through a half-open door. In there, he could see a workbench with what looked like some half-made garment thrown over it.
A wise arrangement, no doubt, if one wanted to keep bits of thread out of the cooking and bits of fish out of the stitchery. Dried fish hung from the beams above his head, and there were scales and innards all over the table. His farmhouse was plain, but it had a decent oak front door and two spare bedchambers and even a parlour. They weren’t used much, but they were there. This place was squalid. It also reeked of fish. The smell was far stronger and much more disagreeable than the woolly odours of Nicholas Weaver’s home.
Manners, however, were manners. “I’m here on an awkward errand,” he said, “but likely enough, you’ll feel the same way as I do. You’ll be Master Locke, I think?” He addressed the elder of the two men who had come up from the quay shortly after Marion had left. The younger one had the same pale, wiry hair as Marion. The hair probably came from the father, if the older man were he, though his mop was turning grey. “And you—” he looked at the woman who had been tending the pot “—are Mistress Locke?”
“That’s right,” the older man said. “That’s my wife, Mary, and this here’s my son Art and this is my daughter-in-law Sue.” Sue was the one who had been gutting fish. She had left her work and joined the rest of them on seats by the fire. She had a smiling pink face, and by the look of her, was expecting a baby in a few months’ time.
“And the wench who came to fetch us,” said Master Locke senior, “is my daughter Marion. I’ve a notion it’s her you want to talk about. She said it could be. She said she knows your son.”
Art said glumly, “Here we go again.”
“She does know him,” said Richard, plunging straight to the point, “and it’s difficult. But I’m Richard Lanyon from Allerbrook farm, far over the moor. I rear sheep and grow corn and sell wool. It’s a different life from yours. My boy Peter met your Marion at last summer’s Revel and he says they’ve agreed to marry but…there’s no use going all round the moor about it. I’ve other plans for Peter. Besides, I don’t think he’s right for your girl, or she for him. What do you think?”
“I suppose the lad claims they’ve betrothed themselves?” said Master Locke. He didn’t sound surprised.
“More or less, yes.”
“That’ll be the third time,” said Marion’s mother crossly. “All the lads go after her, she’s got such a pretty face.” Richard heard this understatement with amazement. Did these people, who lived together as a family, never actually look at each other? Pretty? A girl as striking as Marion? You might as well say the sea was wet.
“Aye, she’ll promise anything to anyone and go further, very likely,” Art said. “Reckon she did go further last year, with that young sailor off that ship from Norway that had some foreign name. Fjord-Elk, that’s it. Dunno what it means. She’s in port again now. I wouldn’t be surprised if Marion isn’t on the lookout for that young fellow now this minute.”
“You don’t need to worry,” Master Locke assured Richard. “She needs to be married and soon will be, but to someone like ourselves. There’s a likely boy in Porlock, along the coast. Too many folk round here are cousins of ours and the priest won’t have that. You did right to come and warn us, but nothing’s going to come of this. Two silly young people get together and say things, but we don’t need to take no notice. I say nothing about your son, but Marion’s always saying things to young men, mostly the wrong ones. Will you take a dish of stew and a drop of ale with us?”
“I’ll take our share down to Marion,” said Art, “and we’ll eat and drink together and I’ll tell her I’m tired of her foolishness.”
“It’s natural, at her age. She’s barely seventeen,” his father said tolerantly. “We’re an easy-natured lot,” he said. “We don’t watch each other. Marion’s daft and the boys round here turn her head with their sweet talk, but I’ll see it don’t come to anything.”
“She b’ain’t in the family way yet,” Mistress Locke said. “That I do know. And she’d better not be, till she’m wed.”
“He meets her in Lynton when she goes visiting there, so my son says,” Richard said cautiously, concealing his relief at learning that Peter had at least not got his sweetheart into trouble. He had wondered, but it was a difficult question to ask.
“Aye.” Marion’s father nodded. “My mother-in-law and my wife’s sister that’s crippled with the joint evil live up there—they’ve got a cottage and a bit of land at the far end, just outside that valley with the funny-looking rocks in it. Maybe you know it…?”
“Yes, I went there once,” said Richard. It had been long ago, when he was young and had gone to the Revel, just as Peter had done in the summer. He’d taken a girl into the Valley of the Rocks, as many people called it. “I know where you mean,” he said.
“Marion takes fish to my mother and sister twice a month and brings back eggs and goat cheese for us. They keep hens and pasture a few goats in the valley—there’s others do the same—and their maidservant does the milking and makes the cheese,” said Mary Locke. “I wouldn’t like to stop Marion’s visits. They’d be hurt if she didn’t go regular, as they’re fond of her, and they like the fresh fish. And we’d miss the eggs and cheese. I’ve no time to go up there, mostly, and Sue here can’t just now. But don’t fret. It’ll lead nowhere. It don’t do for fisherfolk and farming folk to marry. We don’t understand each other’s lives. That pot of stew’s about ready. It’s not fish.” She grinned, displaying gaps in her teeth but a wealth of good nature. “Last time Marion went, she bring down a nice plump chicken as well, all plucked and drawn ready. Chicken stew, this is. Sue, get the ale.”
Richard reached home to find that Peter’s friend Ned Crowham had ridden in and that as usual, Kat and Betsy, impressed by his velvet doublet and silk shirt and the polish on his boots, had put him in the parlour, lit a fire especially for him and plied him with mutton pie and the best cider.
“Good day, sir,” said Ned civilly as Richard walked in. “I thought you might be out driving ponies off the moor or something of that kind at this time of year, but I took a chance and I found Peter here, though he’s had to go out to the fields now. Kat and Bet said I must eat before I set out for home again.” He chuckled. “As though I hadn’t flesh enough already! They said you’d gone to Lynmouth.”
“Yes. You’d nearly guessed right about the ponies, though. We’ll be bringing them in tomorrow. We fetched the cattle two weeks back.” Richard helped himself to cider.
“I heard from Betsy that congratulations were in order and that Peter’s going to marry Liza Weaver. I told him it was a good match.”
“Did you, now? And what did he say?”
“He thanked me. What else would he do?”
“Hah! Well, if he’s out on the land, he won’t overhear anything.” Richard planted himself on a settle and unburdened his soul. “You’re his friend and I fancy you’re no fool. I wish you’d try and talk sense into him. Liza’s the right girl for him, but he doesn’t think so. I’ve been to Lynmouth today to see the family of a girl—a fisher girl, would you believe it?—that he’s got himself mixed up with. They agree with me that it won’t do, but how the boy could be such a wantwit…!”
“Mixed up with? You don’t mean…?”
“No, she’s not breeding, though I’ve a feeling that that’s just luck!”
“No wonder he was so quiet when I congratulated him,” Ned remarked. “But I doubt if I can talk to him, you know, sir. I don’t think he’d listen to me. I’m fond of him, but…”
“He’s got an obstinate streak. You needn’t tell me! You youngsters!”
“You’re not so old yourself, Master Lanyon,” said Ned with a smile. “Will you think me impertinent if I ask if you’ve ever thought to marry again yourself?”
“Not impertinent, though not your business either. I’ve been content enough single.” Ned knew nothing of Deb Archer and Richard saw no need to tell him. “What brought you here today?” he asked.
“Why, to ask both you and Peter to my own wedding. My family have found me a lovely girl, from east Somerset, near where Peter and I went to school. We’re to marry in the new year. If Peter and Liza are married by then, he must bring her, too.”
The Luttrells heard Mass each day in the castle, said by Father Meadowes, but on Sundays they and their household came down into the village and joined their tenants in worship at the fine church which Dunster shared with the Benedictine monks of St. George’s Priory. It was an uneasy partnership, with frequent arguments about who could use the church when, and who was to pay for what, but the Luttrells—mainly by dint of donations to the priory and regular dinner invitations to the prior—did something to keep relations smooth between the villagers and the monks.
To the villagers, they were familiar figures: fair, bearded, broad-built James Luttrell, putting on weight in his thirties; his wife, Elizabeth, who had been born a Courtenay, no longer a young girl but still good-looking because of her well-tended complexion and the graceful way she managed her voluminous, trailing skirts and the veiling of her elaborate headdress; their well-dressed young son, Hugh; their household of servants and retainers, and the castle chaplain, always known as Father Meadowes because he did not like the custom of addressing priests by their first names, along with his assistant, Christopher Clerk.
All the week, Liza had said to herself, On Sunday Christopher will be in church. On Sunday I shall see him.
She was seeing him now. The Luttrell family had benches near the front while the rest of the congregation stood behind them, but Christopher had placed himself to one side, and was able to glance over his left shoulder and scan the body of the church without it being too noticeable. He caught her eye and let a smile flicker across his face. Liza smiled, too, when her parents weren’t looking.
Afterward, when the service was over, everyone trooped out as usual through the round-arched west door built by the Normans who had founded the priory, and gathered in sociable clusters among the graves, exchanging news and dinner invitations with neighbours. The Luttrells were accosted by the prior, who wished to complain that some unknown person, presumably from the castle, had carved a pattern into one of the benches and he wanted the miscreant brought to justice.
Mistress Elizabeth shook her head gravely, although the fact that she had her little brown-and-white dog under her arm, and he was struggling to get loose, somewhat spoiled the effect. Father Meadowes had also stopped to listen to the prior’s complaint but Christopher, who had been walking respectfully in the rear, moved unobtrusively aside and stood looking up, as if studying a gargoyle on the church roof.
Her own family had fallen into conversation with a group of neighbours. Liza, grown cunning through desperation, drifted gently away as if to approach a group of chattering girls, all acquaintances of hers, but passed them and used them as a shield as she came to Christopher’s side and paused, also looking upward.
“That gargoyle,” said Christopher, pointing, “is supposed to be the face of the prior who was here when the church was being partly rebuilt, not so long ago. So Father Meadowes says. It isn’t very flattering, is it?”
“No, it isn’t. I should think the stonemason hated the prior.”
“I think that, too, but Father Meadowes doesn’t know any more. Liza, I can’t bear it. I can’t go on to become a priest. I’ve made some enquiries, discreetly. It’s unlikely that I can get legally free of the church but I can still run away from it. Will you run away, too, and come with me?”
At any moment the group of girls might move away and her family would see her talking to a young man. Christopher, pointing up at the roof, was apparently instructing her on history or architecture, but that would be a poor protection if the whispers her parents had heard had hinted at the identity of her illicit suitor. But she couldn’t answer him quickly, not over a thing like this. She must say, “Christopher, I need time to think.” She must be sensible….
Christopher…
The sensible thing to do was to say, No, we mustn’t. It’s wrong. The church would hunt us down. My family would never forgive me. I’m sorry, but I can’t.
Unfortunately—or fortunately, and only time would tell which estimate was the right one—she had lost the fight to be sensible. Liza-in-Love and Liza-the-Sensible had striven one with another all through the summer, and Liza-in-Love had won. She and Christopher belonged together. They had met as though they had been moving toward each other since the beginning of time and there was nothing to be done about it. And yet—to leave her family, to abandon her good name for an unknown future with a man she could never lawfully marry…that was as terrifying as jumping off a cliff. Even though she would be hand in hand with Christopher.
She stared at him, poised equidistant between two opposites and unable to speak.
“We could make for London,” he said. “I’ll have to shave this tonsure off on the way—and keep a cap on wherever I go till my hair grows again. I do have some money, if not much. I’ve been saving my pay all summer…half planning. We’ll get to London. London’s very big. We’ll be lost in all the crowd. We might even marry eventually, though not yet because they’ll be looking out for us. The church has a very long arm. We’ll have to find a small church to attend on Sundays and stand modestly at the back. We’ll take new names and for the time being we’ll just say we’re married. Or we might go to France. I speak French well. Sweetheart, don’t be afraid. I’ll make my way. I understand merchanting. I was brought up in the midst of it. I’ll find a merchant somewhere who needs a clerk. Believe me, I will make a life for us!”
There it was again, that vigorous grin. “It’ll be just lodgings at first, but one day we’ll rent a little house. Here or in France, we’ll manage. There’ll be children. Just an ordinary, everyday life, but we’ll be together. If that’s what you want.”
“It’s all I can imagine wanting,” said Liza. And closed her eyes for a moment, so as not to see the rocks at the foot of the cliff, and jumped. “Yes,” she said in a low voice. “I’ll come. But Christopher…even if we can’t marry, can’t we at least take vows?”
He glanced around. The girls were still chattering together; beyond them, the prior was still monopolising the Luttrells and Father Meadowes, and Liza’s family was still deep in conversation with their friends. Rapidly, in a low voice, he said, “I, Christopher Clerk, promise before God that I take thee, Liza Weaver, as my wedded wife.”
Also rapidly and in an undertone, Liza said, “And I, Liza Weaver, promise before God that I take thee, Christopher Clerk, as my wedded husband. There!”
“It’s not valid,” said Christopher. “Not in the eyes of the church. But it’s valid for me, my love. When and where can we meet? I’m often free for a while after dinner, just as I always was, though I do more study now, so the best time would be later than it used to be. About three of the clock would be right, I think.”
“Won’t we need horses?”
“Horses!” For a moment he looked appalled. “Horses—of course! My wits are going, I think. Well, one thing I daren’t do is steal horses from the Luttrells. Can you get hold of any horses?”
“My father has three ponies. We all use them. They’re family animals…as much mine as anyone’s. I don’t think they’ll come after us for horse theft! But Christopher, they suspect something—they watch me these days. Yesterday they wouldn’t let me go out for a walk alone. I can go into the garden, though!” She was thinking aloud. “I could get away over the meadow at the back. That’s easy for you to reach, too. You mean we’d set off at once?”
“Yes.”
“We could meet and go straight to the paddock. Tomorrow?”
“No, Tuesday. Mondays I do some study with the chaplain after dinner and if I don’t appear, he’ll look for me. We need a head start if we’re to get away safely. But Tuesday, yes, unless it’s pouring with rain. If it is, then the first day when it’s not. If Tuesday is dry—then that’s the day.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
FLIGHT
Ned stayed overnight but didn’t broach the matter of Peter’s love affair. Richard did not discuss his visit to Lynmouth, either, and Peter, though he knew well enough where his father had been, asked no questions. The next day Ned left. Peter still asked no questions. Richard, grimly, knew what the boy was up to. He was just going to blank Liza Weaver out of his mind and pretend she didn’t exist. Well, that ploy wasn’t going to succeed. Even if Liza had never been born, Marion Locke was an impossibly unsuitable bride for Peter Lanyon. It was time to talk to the boy again.
This, however, was the day when they and their neighbours went to fetch the ponies in from the moor, to check their condition, separate the foals from their mothers and choose the ones to be sold. It meant rising early and snatching breakfast on one’s feet, with no time for family wrangles. Afterward they would dine with the Rixons, whose farm adjoined theirs farther down the hillside. It would be a late dinner and they’d come home tired, with a dozen chores to do before a hurried supper. There would be no good opportunity in the evening.
However, the matter was so urgent that Richard finally blurted it out when he and Peter were riding close behind the herd as it trotted, all tossing manes and indignant white-ringed eyes, through the narrow lane that led to the Clicket pound. Just then, they were out of earshot of their fellow herdsmen, who were some way behind. Richard seized his chance.
His son’s reaction was pure outrage.
“You’re lying!” Peter said fiercely. “Telling me that Marion’s betrothed herself to others beside me! She wouldn’t! She couldn’t! Betrothal’s serious—it’s nearly as binding as marriage, and—”
“I’ve seen the girl and I’ve talked to her father. I don’t blame you for going head over heels for her, boy, but she’s not for marrying. What you’ve got,” said Richard brusquely, “is an attack of sex. We all get it. It’s like having the measles or the chicken pox. If you wed her, the day would come when you’d be sorry. She’s a lightskirt. I tell you—”
“No, I’ll tell you. If when you were betrothed to my mother someone had called her a lightskirt, how would you have felt? What would you have said?”
“No one would have said such a thing, that’s the point, you damned young fool—can’t you see it? Why, your mother’d hardly as much as kiss me until we’d both said I will. Can you say that of Marion?”
“I’m not going to talk about this. I’m betrothed to her and that’s the end of it,” said Peter, and spurred his mount up onto the verge alongside the track, shouting at the herd to hurry them up, his face averted from his father and likely, thought Richard bitterly, to remain that way for a very long time indeed.
It was all the more annoying because the fury emanating from Peter had almost intimidated him, and Richard was not going to tolerate being bullied by his own son. He knew he would be wise not to try physical force to make Peter obey him, but there were other methods. One way or another, Peter, that ill-behaved pup, must be brought to heel.
And he was beginning to see how he might achieve it. Since her death, he had more than once dreamed at night of Deb Archer, but oddly enough, last night she’d turned into Marion halfway through the dream.
Maybe that cheeky, overweight, well-bred friend of Peter’s, Ned Crowham, was right. Maybe he ought to get married again after all.
There’d be no advantage, socially or financially, in marrying Marion Locke, but now that he’d seen her…
Peter hadn’t got her with child, but probably that was because he hadn’t had chances enough. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t have babies once she was a wife. It would be a pleasant change for Allerbrook to have children about the place. His and Marion’s; Peter and Liza’s. Peter’s marriage would be the one to bring the material benefits. And it would show Peter who was master. Oh, yes indeed.
It wouldn’t do to have Peter under the same roof as Marion, of course. No, that would be daft. But there was a good-sized cottage empty just now, over on the other side of Slade meadow, where Betsy’s son and his wife and children had lived before the young fellow took it into his head to go off to the other side of Somerset because he’d heard life was easier there, away from the moors that were so bleak in winter. And off he’d gone, depriving Allerbrook of two pairs of adult hands and several youthful ones. George had been alive then and he hadn’t been pleased. He’d said that all of a sudden he could see the point of villeinage.
Still, the cottage was there, and once Peter was installed in it with Liza, he needn’t come to the farmhouse often. He wouldn’t come at all, except when his father was there; Richard would see to that. Once the boy had settled down and seen what Liza was worth and got some youngsters of his own, and Marion had a few as well, wanting her attention, getting underfoot and thickening her midriff, Peter’s infatuation would die away.
Marion would probably breed well. She looked strong, quite unlike his poor ailing Joan. It was an idea.
It was a most beguiling idea.
“Where’s Liza?” Margaret called to Aunt Cecy as she came down the stairs from her bedchamber. “In the weaving shed? It’s time we were talking of her bride clothes, and I must say I’m surprised that Peter Lanyon hasn’t been over to see her. A girl’s entitled to a bit of courting.”
“Farm folk are different from us,” said Aunt Cecy. She was patching one of Dick’s shirts, though because her eyesight was faulty nowadays, she had Margaret’s small daughter beside her to thread needles. “She’ll have to get used to a lot that’s different, out there on Allerbrook. She’s not in the shed. She went into the garden with a basket—said something about fetching in some mint.”
“I’ll call her,” said Margaret, and hastened out through the rear of the house.
Five minutes later she returned, frowning, and once more went upstairs. Great-Uncle Will, back in his familiar winter seat beside the hearth, remarked, “Looks as if Liza’s not in the garden. Funny.”
“She’ll have slipped off somewhere,” Aunt Cecy said. “She’s always had a fancy for going walking on her own, but Margaret told her she wasn’t to go out by herself anymore.”
“I did indeed,” said Margaret, reappearing on the staircase. “But she’s not in the garden and not upstairs, nor is she in the kitchen or at her loom. I’ve looked. And I’ve just been into her chamber and her toilet things are gone—the brush and comb and the pot of goose grease she uses for her hands. So I opened her chest and I could swear some of her linen’s missing. I don’t like it.”
Aunt Cecy said, “I can’t see so clear as I used to, but I thought I saw her talking to a fellow in the churchyard when we came out of the service on Sunday. He were pointing out something on the church roof. Looked harmless, but…”
“She might have gone across to see Elena for something,” said Margaret uncertainly.
“And she’d take her linen and toilet things for that, would she? Better look for her,” said Great-Uncle Will. “And fast.”
“So she’s not in any of our houses,” said Nicholas, who had been hurriedly fetched from the inn at the other end of the village, where he had been talking to a potential buyer of his cloth. “You’ve made sure, you say, Margaret. And she’s not in any of our gardens and some of her things are gone.” He turned to Will. “Great-Uncle, you said that according to the gossip that’s going about, she’s been meeting a red-haired clerk from the castle. I think I’ve seen him at church with the Luttrells.”
“That’s him. And that’s what’s being said, yes,” said Will.
“The fellow I saw her talking to on Sunday were outside the church and he had his cap on. But he were all in black, like a clerk,” said Aunt Cecy.
“I wish we knew his name,” said Nicholas, “but I think we know enough. I’m going up to the castle. Now.”
“Why is it,” grumbled James Luttrell, standing in his castle hall, wishing he could sit down to a peaceful supper and irritably aware that any such thing was out of the question for the time being, “why is it that trouble is so catching? The whole world’s disturbed these days and it spreads like plague. There’s no good government in the land, with all this squabbling between the king and these upstart cousins of his, Richard of York and his sons. What’s it matter if the king is weak in his mind? He’s been crowned and anointed and that ought to be good enough for any man.”
“But the point is…” began Father Meadowes, normally a stern and self-confident priest but unable to stem James’s irrelevancies.
“No one has any proper sense of their duty anymore. Even priests aren’t staying on the right path, it seems!” Abruptly James abandoned his excursion into national affairs and returned to the real matter in hand. “Are you sure Christopher Clerk has vanished, Father? He hasn’t gone on an errand and forgotten to let you know? Something urgent, perhaps?”
“I regret to say this, but I don’t think so,” said Meadowes. “He went out to meditate in the open air as he often does, but I expected him to return later and there was a matter to do with his studies that I wished to discuss with him. He hasn’t come back, and personal things are missing from his room. There has been village gossip concerning a girl. I took him to task and he assured me there was nothing in it, that he had merely escorted her home when she was accidentally separated from her family at the May fair and exchanged the time of day with her after church once or twice out of courtesy. Villagers do have a talent for making something out of nothing and I believed him then. I warned him to be careful and left it at that. Now, frankly, I wonder. Earlier this year he asked me some odd questions.”
“What sort of questions?” Elizabeth Luttrell asked. She was seated, working at an intricate piece of embroidery while Wagtail snoozed at her feet. “He always seemed so earnest,” she remarked.
“Yes, he did,” Father Meadowes agreed. “But the questions he asked were about leaving the church if a man changed his mind about his vocation. I asked if he were having doubts about his own and he said no. Now I’m wondering!”
“He’s always seemed very quiet and conscientious,” said James. “Too much so, perhaps, for a young man.”
“Yes, I felt that, too, sometimes,” Elizabeth said. “He was—is—so very…very self-contained, yet I sometimes felt that there was a side to him that was hidden.”
The two men looked at her with interest. Elizabeth, usually a quiet woman, had a knack of occasionally making very acute remarks. Sharp as an embroidery needle, her husband sometimes said.
She smiled at them. “All the same,” she added, “need we be anxious so soon? There could have been a misunderstanding…or even an accident.”
She broke off as the gatekeeper’s boy arrived in the hall at a breathless run and barely sketched a bow before exclaiming, “There’s a Master Nicholas Weaver from the village, zurs and mistress! He’s axin’ to see Father Meadowes and he says it’s that urgent—can Father Meadowes see him now, at once. He looks that worried, zurs!”
“Nicholas Weaver?” said James. “I know him. Hardworking man and a hardworking family, that’s him and his. It’s you he wants to see, is it, Father Meadowes? Maybe he’s got something to say about this mystery.”
“Christopher was talking with a girl after the service on Sunday,” murmured Elizabeth. “It looked quite innocent, but…I wonder…”
“The gossip,” said Meadowes ominously, “concerned a daughter of the Weaver family.”
“Fetch Master Weaver along, boy,” said James.
Nicholas came in with a firm tread, which concealed a secret hesitation. He had never been inside the castle before, never hitherto walked up the steep track from Dunster to the gatehouse with the castle walls and their towers and battlements looming ahead of him, and although he was not a man with a poor opinion of himself, he felt intimidated. At the gatehouse the porter had greeted him politely, but with an air of surprise. Villagers, even well-to-do ones like Nicholas Weaver, didn’t often call at the castle and certainly not to insist that they must immediately see men who held such dignified positions as castle chaplain.
Despite his secret misgivings, Nicholas had been resolute and he had been admitted, but now that he was actually inside, he was awed by the scurrying of the numerous servants and by the great, beamed hall, with its huge hearth and the dais where the family dined. Thick rushes underfoot silenced his footfalls, the rosemary sprigs strewn among them gave off their scent wherever one stepped and the walls were hung with tapestries: a huge, dramatic one of Goliath being downed by a gallant little David, and a pretty one with a background of flowers and a lady in the foreground with a unicorn beside her.
The fact that he had been led into the presence not only of Father Meadowes but of the Luttrells as well added further embarrassment. However, he bowed politely, murmured a conventional greeting and looked at the chaplain.
James took control. “This is Father Meadowes,” he said. “At the moment something is making him anxious and we’re wondering if your visit is to do with the same matter. Is your business by any chance connected with one Christopher Clerk, Father Meadowes’s assistant?”
“It may be,” said Nicholas. “If Christopher Clerk has left the castle. Has he?”
“Yes. He’s vanished,” said Meadowes. “He went out after dinner as he often does. I had set him passages of Scripture on which to meditate, and in fine weather like today he likes to do that out of doors. He went off across the pasture that slopes down to the sea. I saw him go. But he hasn’t come back and we can’t find him anywhere.”
“Does he have red hair?”
“Very much so,” said James. “A tonsure like a sunset, as a matter of fact.”
“My girl Liza’s vanished, as well,” said Nicholas. “And so have two of my ponies! I thought to look before I came here. And there’s been talk, about her and a young fellow with a red tonsure, possibly Christopher Clerk. We didn’t want to make a to-do over a bit of flirtation, even with a clerk, especially as we weren’t sure there was anything in it but silly tattle. We always thought Liza had some sense. We told her we’d found her a marriage and she seemed agreeable. We reckoned if there’d been any nonsense, it was just sweet talk and that she’d put it behind her. Now we think otherwise. We’re afraid she’s run away from home and if so, she’d hardly go on her own. Now you say this red-haired clerk…”
“He’s a deacon,” said Meadowes.
“Is he, indeed? Well, you tell me he’s missing. Have they run off together?”
“It’s possible,” said Meadowes slowly.
“So what can be done? I want my girl back. The marriage we’ve arranged is a good one and by that I mean a happy one. I’m a careful father, I hope. I’ve got her welfare at heart and a runaway priest isn’t what’s best for her.”
“And you want to get her back before anything happens and before the young man she’s betrothed to finds out what she’s done,” said Elizabeth helpfully. “Father Meadowes, where might Christopher have taken her? Where does he come from? That might be a guide.”
“Bristol,” said Meadowes. “But his father’s a highly respectable merchant there. He won’t have gone near his father! He studied in Oxford, but—no, I doubt if he’s gone there either. It’s hardly the place for a runaway couple to go to for sanctuary. I’d guess they’d make for a city, but they’d be more likely to choose Exeter or London.”
“Three directions,” said James, thinking aloud. “London by way, to start with, of Taunton or Bridgwater, or south over the moor to Exeter by way of Tiverton. One of those.”
“Bridgwater’s likely,” said Meadowes. “Christopher knows that road well. I’ve several times called on friends there and taken him with me. I doubt he’s ever been to Taunton.”
“I could be quite wrong,” said Nicholas unhappily. “But Liza’s gone, and taken linen and toilet things. There’s been talk of her and a red-haired clerk, and we’d just told Liza about the marriage we’d planned for her. That could have been the spark in the straw. I hope I’m wrong. I want to be, but…”
He looked at James with a question in his face, and James answered it. “I’m sorry for you, Master Weaver, and I doubt very much that you’re wrong. We’ll go after them. Meadowes, are you joining us?”
“Of course. I can still sit a horse for a few hours, despite my grey tonsure,” said the chaplain. “And the boy is my student as well as my assistant. I feel responsible for him. I should have pressed him harder over the rumours about Master Weaver’s girl. I fear I’ve been remiss.”
“The more helpers we have, the better,” James Luttrell said. “Weaver, you and Meadowes can take one of my men and try the Bridgwater road. I’ll send two men by way of Taunton, and myself, I’ll take another two and ride for Exeter. Light’s going, but the sky’s clear and the moon’s nearly full. We’ll fetch them back, never fear. Young folk in love can be the very devil and their own worst enemies, but we’ll see if we can’t save these two from themselves. You can borrow one of my horses.”
He turned to the gatekeeper’s boy, who was still in the hall, listening openmouthed with excitement. “Get to the stable, my lad, and tell them to saddle eight horses. My Bay Arrow, Grey Dunster—he’s hardly been out today—and whatever else is fit and not tired. Then send the garrison sergeant to me and after that, get back to your post. Hurry!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
HUNTERS AND QUARRY
The daylight was going. Grooms held up lanterns while the horses were brought out and saddled. Picking up the smell of urgency from the humans, the horses fidgeted and tossed impatient heads while their girths were tightened. James Luttrell, who seemed to have the entire map of the west country in his head, was giving final instructions, complete with landmarks, to the men who were going by way of Taunton. Nicholas, Father Meadowes and Gareth, the Welsh man-at-arms who was to accompany them on the Bridgwater road were all familiar with their own route.
The mood was that of a hunting party, albeit an unusually unsmiling one. Father Meadowes actually said as much to James Luttrell as they clattered down the slope to the village below. “If we had hounds with us, this would feel like a chase. Except that I’ve never gone hunting after dark before and never had a man as my quarry before, either. It’s a strange feeling.”
At the foot of the slope they turned left, to circle the castle hill on its inland side. The first group to peel off was Luttrell’s. “Good luck!” he called, taking off his hat to wave farewell to the others as he led his party away, bound for Exeter through the town of Tiverton on the south side of the moor. “I just pray somebody catches them before it’s too late!”
Christopher and Liza rode eastward through the fading day. The Channel was dulling into a misty grey and shadows were gathering in the hollows of the inland hills. “You’re safe with me. I hope you know that,” Christopher said suddenly. “Believe me, I haven’t quite abandoned my upbringing! There’s a lot to be said for being steady and reliable, and I mean to be that for you. I shall take the greatest care of you. It was clever of you to think of taking the ponies. We’ll send them back eventually.”
“Yes, of course. I hated taking them, but we needed them so much.” She did feel safe with him. They were doing a crazy thing, a wrong thing in the eyes of the world, but it was a right thing, as well. It was right because Christopher was Christopher and they belonged with one another.
“Will anyone guess where we’ve gone?” she asked. “They’ll be after us as soon as they know.”
“They might guess at London. If they do, they’ll probably think we began by making for Taunton. It’s the more usual road. But I know the Bridgwater one and just because it’s not so usual, I think it’s the safest one for us.”
“I wish it could be different,” said Liza. “I wish we could be married with everyone congratulating us and pleased with us, approving of us and wishing us luck. I feel like a hunted deer. I keep straining my ears to hear the hounds! But all the same, I’m so very glad to be here with you.”
“And I am glad to be with you, sweetheart. I hate the thought of being hunted down, as well. We just mustn’t be caught, that’s all!”
At Allerbrook Peter was not exactly refusing to speak to his father, nor was Richard making it too obvious that he was furious with his son. Neither had any wish to expose their disagreement to the world. Conversation of a sort had taken place around the Rixons’ table, mostly concerned with farming matters. It had been generally agreed that the field known as Quillet might well support a crop of wheat, but ought to be fenced.
“You’ve only got ditches there and wheat’ll invite the deer in as if the Dulverton town crier had gone round calling them,” cheerful Harry Rixon said. “You’ll get they old stags lying down, the idle brutes, squashing great patches of it and snatching every ear of wheat within reach afore they get theirselves up and stroll off to find some nice fresh wheat to squash and gobble.”
“The Sweetwaters won’t like it,” Gil Lowe prophesied glumly. “You’ve mostly used Quillet for pasture, haven’t you? I’ve noticed they put their milking cows there now and then. Are they supposed to?”
“No, but when did that ever stop them?” enquired Richard sourly. “I pay rent on that land. I’ll plant it if I like. Reckon you’re right about the fences, though.”
All that was normal enough, and if few words were actually exchanged between the two Lanyons, it was hardly noticeable, for the crowd was considerable. It included everyone who had helped in the pony drive, farmers and farmhands alike. Roger and Higg were there along with their employers. Higg alone seemed to sense something strange in the air. Higg looked and sounded slow, but he was nowhere near as slow as he seemed and Richard caught a thoughtful glance or two from him. He looked away. He was thinking.
All of a sudden Richard Lanyon was unsure of himself. All very well to decide that after all he ought to marry again and why not Marion, but there were things to consider. For instance, it was quite true that farm life would be strange to her, far stranger than to Liza, for Liza’s father dealt a lot with sheep farmers and she knew farmers’ wives and had some idea of how they lived.
Still, Marion was young enough to learn, and not squeamish. Fisherfolk were never that. Gutting a herring, or gutting a chicken; there wasn’t much difference really, and Betsy could show her the dairy work.
The lack of any respectable dowry was a worse drawback, but that might be offset if she produced sons to help on the farm, and daughters to be married off into useful families. Taking the long view, even a Marion Locke might provide a step or two on the upward ladder.
Yes. He could take Marion to wife and still remake the future in the shape he wanted. And put Peter in his place.
What would be harder would be convincing her parents that the proposal was a good one, especially as he and they had already agreed that such marriages wouldn’t do.
But, by God, he wanted her. He’d desired her from the moment he first set eyes on her. It was sheer desire that had overridden the old way of thinking, the taking it for granted that fisherfolk and farmers didn’t intermarry, the lack of dowry, the embarrassing fact that his own son had probably had her first. The wench was by all the evidence about as steady as a weathercock in a gale, but he didn’t care. He knew now that he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted Deb and about ten thousand times more than he’d ever yearned after Joan. He wanted to get his hands on her, to make her his, to surround and bemuse her so that she could see no other man, think of no other man, but himself.
The proper thing to do was to see her father, but instinct said no. Instinct said win the girl over first. Go hunting and bring her to bay; tame her to his hand and maybe she could help him tame her parents.
Today was a Tuesday, the second in the month. Next Tuesday was the third one, and she’d be going to Lynton to see her grandmother and aunt. Her mother had obligingly mentioned where her relatives lived—close to the mouth of that strange valley where he’d had a youthful romance long ago. He’d find the cottage easily enough. He meant to be open and honest. He’d call and ask to see the girl. Maybe he could coax her to stroll with him, alone, so that he could talk to her, persuade her…
And he’d make damned sure that Peter couldn’t get away that day. Yes. One week from now. That was the thing to do.
It was a hunter’s moon, shining ahead of the pursuers, low as yet, disappearing at times beyond shoulders of land as they came through the Quantock Hills, but when visible, bright enough to light the track in front of the horses, even to glint in the eyes of a fox as it darted across the path. They could see their way.
“Where are we?” Nicholas asked Gareth as they cantered their horses up a gentle hill and drew rein, looking down on the moonlit world. Somewhere in the distance was the fugitive twinkle of candlelit windows in a village. He knew the countryside east of his home, of course, but he had never ridden through the Quantock Hills after dark before.
“Nether Stowey, that is,” said Gareth’s Welsh voice at his side. “They’ll have gone straight through there, I fancy, if they ever came this way. If I had all of us on my heels, I wouldn’t stop till my pony fell over, indeed to goodness I wouldn’t.”
“Liza’d never push a pony too hard,” said Nicholas, and to his own annoyance, found his eyes pricking. He had been proud of his daughter, proud of her glossy brown hair and her smile and her kindness. She was good with the ponies. Yes, and better at catching them than anyone else because they would come to the field gate to meet her! How could she have so misused her gift with them, and done this to her parents?
“We’d better do some pushing on ourselves,” said Father Meadowes. “As fast as the moonlight will let us.”
They pressed on. Presently, as they came into a shallow dip, he checked his horse again, and the others slowed down with him. “What is it?” asked Nicholas.
Father Meadowes pointed ahead, to the top of the little rise in front of them. “See? Against the skyline? Two riders…there, they’ve gone over the crest.” As he spoke, his horse raised its head and whinnied. “If they’re on the Nether Stowey road ahead of us,” Meadowes said, “those two could be them.”
“They’ve been dithering along the way if it’s them,” said Gareth with a chuckle. “I wonder what for?”
“You mind your tongue,” said Nicholas.
Father Meadowes shook his steed up again. “Let’s catch up. Heaven’s been good to us—we can see where we’re going, just about. We can gallop here.”
“What are we to do tonight?” Liza asked. She was strong, but the day had taken its toll, and they weren’t covering the miles as fast as they should. They had taken a wrong track three times, once heading for the shoreline by mistake, and twice in the fading light as they made their way through the Quantocks. Time had been particularly wasted on a steep, pebbly path which turned and twisted and finally tried to take them back westward.
They were on the right road again now, Christopher said reassuringly as they came out of the hills, but she was growing tired and she was very conscious of having left her home and all familiar things behind. This black-and-silver moonlit land was unreal, alien. And she was cold. There was a chill in the air after nightfall in October.
“We’ll have to find somewhere to sleep, but if we can, we should avoid looking for lodgings or rooms at an inn,” said Christopher. “We don’t want to leave a trail behind. Maybe we should have gone another way, across to Devon, to Exeter. We’d have been that much harder to trace. But London will be easier to find than Exeter. I’ve been there before, as a lad, with my father. Exeter would be quite strange to me.”
“But tonight, Christopher?”
“I think we should try to find a barn with hay in it. I’ve got some bread and cheese with me. I managed to take it from the kitchen when no one was looking. We can eat.”
“But can we find a barn in the dark?”
“Oh, yes, I think so. Look, that’s surely a farmhouse over there. See—where the lights are? There’ll be barns there. Let’s walk the ponies. There ought to be a track turning that way.”
“But what if we can’t find a barn?”
“If we can’t find one here, we’ll find one somewhere else—on the far side of Nether Stowey. There are farms beyond it.”
“Is Nether Stowey far?”
“Only a mile or a little more. Take heart, love. I know where we are well enough.”
The search for a barn was unsuccessful. They found a lane to the right and before long they could distinctly smell a farmyard. But the lane seemed to be leading straight into it and if there were barns at a safe distance from the house, they couldn’t be seen because the lane was a sunken way between high banks with brambles on top, which hid anything on the far side. To make things worse, the darkness became intense because the direction they had taken had put the moon behind a hill. They heard sheep bleating, and then, alarmingly, a dog began to bark. Christopher pulled up, reaching a hand to the bridle of Liza’s pony, too.
“No good. If we go any farther we’ll have people coming out to meet us and we’ll have to explain ourselves. Turn round. We’ll have to go back. Sorry.”
“Oh, Christopher!”
“Don’t let’s have a wrangle here,” he said wryly. “Let’s quarrel later when we can enjoy it!”
“All right!” said Liza, and tried to sound as though she were laughing. She was beginning to feel frightened. They were losing so much time, and the pursuit must surely have begun by now.
They went back. Presently they were on the Nether Stowey road again and once more had the help of the moonlight. “Not far now,” said Christopher. “I think I know where we’ll find a barn, once we’re through the village. And the bread and cheese are fresh. Take heart.”
“I’m certainly hungry,” said Liza, determined to be cheerful. “I’ll enjoy our supper.”
Her new, if somewhat forced, cheerfulness had five minutes to live. At the end of that time, as they cantered to the crest of a rise and paused briefly to look ahead, she saw her pony’s ears flick backward, and then behind them, some way off but not nearly far enough to be comfortable, they heard a horse whinny.
“Christopher…!”
“Maybe it isn’t them,” said Christopher.
“It is! I know it is. I don’t know how I know, but I do!”
“All right. Well, let’s be on the safe side and assume it is, anyway,” Christopher said. “Come on! Let’s ride for it! We’ll look for another side lane and try to dodge into it and let them go past. If it is them. Come on!”
It was the best plan he could make. He had kept his voice steady, but he too was now afraid, for her as well as himself. He could endure whatever they did to him for this, but what would happen to Liza? He had done horribly wrong in bringing her away, but what else was there to do, other than let her go forever?
Side by side, alert for a secondary track, they urged the ponies into a gallop, taking advantage of the moonlight. But providence wasn’t with them. There was no break in the banks to either side, no escape from the track, and sturdy though their ponies were, their short strong legs could not match the stride of the Luttrells’ big horses behind them. They heard the hoofbeats catching up, and then a rider swept past them and swung his horse right across the track to block their way. They found themselves looking up into a dark, square face which Liza did not recognise, though Christopher did. “Gareth!” he said.
“Look round,” said Gareth, grinning, and they turned in their saddles to find that Nicholas Weaver and Father Meadowes had pulled up behind them.
Nicholas rode forward. To Liza’s astonishment he didn’t even look at her, but instead made straight for Christopher. “Have you taken her? Is that what slowed you down on the road? Come on! I want to know!”
“We kept missing our way and then turned aside to look for shelter,” said Liza in a high voice. “We’ve taken vows to each other, but we haven’t…Christopher hasn’t…”
“I’m glad to hear it, but no doubt it was just a pleasure postponed,” said Nicholas. He spurred his horse right up to Christopher’s pony and his fist shot out. It landed with immense force on Christopher’s jaw and the younger man reeled sideways, out of his saddle. His pony plunged. Christopher, who had clung on to the reins, scrambled up again, his spare hand pressed to his face.
“Father, don’t!” Liza cried it out in anguish. “Oh, please let us go! Let me go with Christopher! I can’t marry Peter Lanyon. I can’t. I tried, so hard, to make myself willing to marry him, but I can’t do it. It has to be Christopher…and we’ve bound ourselves…oh, why won’t you understand?”
“I understand that you’re talking nonsense and one day you’ll know it, my girl. I’ve come to take you home,” said Nicholas.
CHAPTER NINE
REARRANGING THE FUTURE
“Go to her, Margaret,” Nicholas said. “Bring her downstairs and get her thinking about her bride clothes. She’s got to at some point. Saints in heaven!”
His normal robust heartiness was dimmed. He was sitting by the kitchen hearth while Margaret and Aunt Cecy helped the maids with supper, and he could hear his young sons, Arthur and Tommy, laughing over some game or other in the adjacent living room, but just now these pleasant things could not comfort him. His shoulders were hunched and his face drawn with misery, and the two maids, aware of it, were unusually quiet.
“We never had this sort of trouble with either of our girls,” said Aunt Cecy righteously. “Maybe that was because we walloped them when they needed it instead of bein’ soft, the way you two are.”
“We haven’t been soft this time!” Margaret snapped, and continued obstinately stirring a pan of pottage.
“No, we haven’t!” Nicholas agreed irritably. “But at least we had good reason. Cecy, you used to slap your girls for a bit of careless stitching or a speck of flour dropped on the floor, as if there weren’t worse things! Reckon they were glad to be pushed off when they was barely ripe!”
“Well, really!” said Aunt Cecy. Nicholas ignored her.
“There’s never been anything really truly bad in this house in my time, till now. I never thought our Liza would do this to us! I never thought I’d…I’ve never raised a hand to her, all her life, afore this and to have to take a stick to her…it broke my heart and I’m half afraid it’s broken hers.”
“Then the sooner she’s married and away, the better,” Aunt Cecy said sharply. “We’ll all be happier, her included.”
“I wouldn’t have believed it of her either,” said Margaret, still stirring. “It’s a mercy we got her back in time and that there’s been no more gossip.” She eyed the maids, who had become very busy about the cooking. “And if I hear of you tattling, either of you, you’re out! I mean it.”
“If you ask me, half of this business is Peter Lanyon’s fault,” said Nicholas. “And you’ve said it, too, Margaret. He should have come to see her and done a little wooing! Margaret and I hardly knew each other before we were betrothed, but once it was agreed between the families, I came courting, didn’t I, Margaret? You had your share of stolen kisses. I don’t know what young Peter thinks he’s about, and that’s the truth!”
“Bah! She ought to do as she’s bid, with wooing or without. A few more days in the attic ’ud do her no harm,” said Aunt Cecy. “And Margaret here thinks the same, even if she won’t say so.”
“I don’t care what either of you think!” shouted Nicholas. “I’m her father and I’m the one who’s giving the orders this time! She’s had enough days up there, enough time to study her conscience and get over things, so do as I tell you, leave that damned pan you’re stirring, Margaret, and fetch her down here, and let’s pretend things are normal even if she don’t ever smile at me again. Go on!”
“Oh, very well,” said Margaret, threw down her spoon and went.
When she entered the small room under the thatch, where Liza had been locked in now for six days, she found her daughter, as she had found her every time she went up there to take food in or remove the slop pail, lying on the bed and staring at the wall. “Time to get up,” she said. “Your father says so. He’s heartbroken, let me tell you, over what he had to do to you. To run off like that, and with a priest…well, I always thought I was the one who cared about bein’ respectable, but the state your father’s in—sayin’ he’s heartbroken is hardly sayin’ enough!”
Liza looked at her miserably but said nothing.
“Forget all about this clerk,” Margaret said. “He’s to finish his studies in St. George’s monastery. Your father and I have seen him—went to the castle and all, and he said to us that he was sorry for the grief he’s caused us all. So that’s the end of it.”
“We swore oaths, taking each other as man and wife…” Liza began, but her words sounded empty, even to her.
“Moonshine and you know it!” Margaret snapped. “A man in orders is no more free to swear oaths about marriage than a married man is. Now then. Master Richard Lanyon’s sent us a message by that big hulkin’ fellow of his, Higg. He’s sorry that Peter’s not been over to see you, but there’s been so much to do on the farm. We’ve fixed a weddin’ day in November. So you get off that bed, and put on fresh things and come down to supper. No one’ll say anythin’ to you. No one knows outside the family, or ever will. We’ve not gossiped and the maids daren’t, believe me. Master Luttrell’s promised he’ll order his men not to talk. Everythin’ll be just as usual. You’ll see.”
There was a long pause. Then Liza said, “You don’t understand how it was between Christopher and me. What it was like. What it is like!”
“Maybe not, but there’s something you don’t understand either, my girl.” Margaret’s tone was kinder. She could not, she found, turn against her own daughter as she had turned against the Webbers. “You think you’ll never love Peter, but you wait till you’ve lived with ’un awhile. The day’ll come when he’ll be tired and frettin’ over something and you’ll look at his weary face and your heart’ll ache inside you with sorrow for him, and wantin’ to put it right, whatever it is. Marriage has its own power. Now, you comin’ downstairs?”
“I don’t want to go to Allerbrook,” said Liza dismally. “It’ll never be home.”
“You’ll be surprised. Now, there’s things to talk about—or do you mean to take your vows in old clothes?”
There was a silence. Then Liza sighed and, at last, sat up. She did it because she had to. To get up from this bed meant giving in; it meant yielding herself to the stream of wedding preparations and, ultimately, to Peter Lanyon, but she had known her fate from the moment her father had caught up with her and Christopher outside Nether Stowey. Nicholas hadn’t had to explain; there were things one knew. If she refused to marry, she would either be shut up in this room until she gave in, or else she would be deposited in a nunnery. Those were the customary methods of dealing with wayward daughters. Her face was stiff with unhappiness, but nevertheless, she slid off the bed and stood up.
“All right,” she said.
She didn’t say it gladly or willingly or even submissively. It came out in a flat tone that might have meant anything. But she said it.
The week that Liza had spent in her parents’ attic, Richard Lanyon had spent making his mind up and then unmaking it again.
It was all very well to rearrrange the future inside his head, but what if seventeen-year-old Marion didn’t take to the notion of marrying thirty-eight-year-old Richard Lanyon? Or even if she did, would her parents allow it? And if she did and they did, what if Peter kicked up, refused to marry Liza, and set about wrecking his father’s new marriage?
Well, let him do his worst! Good God, no decent lad ever made eyes at his own stepmother; it was against all the laws of God and man. Peter might rage and scowl and slam doors, but he’d know that Marion was out of reach. He’d come around.
At this point in his inner dialogue, something inside Richard would snap ferocious jaws, like a pike catching a minnow. Peter would damned well have to come around. Peter was going to marry Liza Weaver, and why should he object to her? He’d known the girl most of his life and she was a fine-looking, good-tempered wench. He was lucky to get her and it was to be hoped that he would have the simple good manners not to sulk to her face. Liza was for Peter and Marion was for Richard and that was that.
Whenever he thought of Marion, he felt as though a hot, damp hand had clutched at his innards, both maddening and weakening him. At the idea of approaching her, he became anxious, wondering what to do, what to say to her, how to please her. He was like a youth again, bewildered by those strange creatures, girls.
On the Monday following Richard’s visit to Lynmouth they fetched the sheep in from the moorland grazing, and having done so, counted them, because on these occasions there were nearly always a few missing. Sure enough, the count was half a dozen short. Good, thought Richard. I can make use of that.
That evening, in the farmyard, he took Higg into his confidence.
“Tomorrow I’m sending Peter out to look for the strayed sheep and I want you to go with him and make sure he looks for the sheep and don’t go slipping off anywhere. I’ve had a bit of worry with him. There’s a girl in Lynmouth that he’s being a bit foolish about.”
“Yes, Master Lanyon,” said Higg, and from his tone, Richard gathered that Higg, Roger, Betsy and Kat all knew the situation and were probably discussing it avidly out of his hearing.
“Most young men have their adventures before they get wed,” Richard said offhandedly. “But Peter’s getting married soon and it’s time this stopped. Tuesdays are likely days for him to go dodging off to Lynmouth, so I’m charging you to see he doesn’t. Understand?”
“Ah,” said Higg, grinning, and added a comment for once. “Could work out well. A bride’s best off with a groom as knows what he’s about.”
“I daresay,” said Richard coldly. “Go over Hawkridge way and search there. I’m going the other way, up to the high moor. Between us, we’ll find them, I hope.”
In the morning he gave his orders, watching Peter intently. Peter glowered, opened his mouth as if to protest, but then shut it again as he met his father’s stern eye. He shrugged, and after breakfast went off with Higg as instructed, taking Silky, the sheepdog bitch, with them. “She’s still mournful, missing my father,” Richard said. “The more work she does, the better. Leave Blue to guard the house.”
When Peter and Higg were out of sight, Richard asked Betsy for some bread and cold meat—“I could be out of the house at noon, if the sheep have wandered far.” He then saddled Splash, swung himself astride, called his own dog Ruff and set off westward, to the coast and Lynton.
It was a mild day, the sky a mingling of blue patches and good-natured brown-and-white cloud, carried on a light west wind. The rolling moors, which from a distance looked so smooth that their colours could have been painted on them, were patched pale gold with moor grass and dark where the heather grew. Here and there were the green stains of bogs, and in places there were gleams of bright yellow, for always there was gorse in bloom somewhere.
Splash was fresh and they made good time. Richard found himself almost at the Valley of the Rocks while the morning was still quite young. He drew rein and looked round. That must be the cottage where the grandmother and aunt lived, standing a little back from the road; he could see its thatched roof, just visible above some apple trees. He hesitated. Would Marion be here yet? She would have quite a long walk from home, up the steep path which linked Lynmouth to Lynton, and then through Lynton itself. Should he wait, or go straight to the cottage and knock, or…?
Then he saw her, walking toward him, her basket on her arm. He knew her at once. It was as though during that one brief meeting a week ago he had memorised her, head to footsoles, every line and movement of her. He rode toward her.
“Marion Locke!”
She stopped, looking up at him in surprise, and he saw that she didn’t recognise him and was startled, although, as she looked into his face, he also saw appreciation there. Marion responded to the sight of a handsome man as instinctively as a flower opening in the sun. Ruff ran up to her, wagging his tail, and she stooped to pat him.
“I’m Richard Lanyon,” he said. “Peter Lanyon’s father.”
She’d recognised him now. She straightened up and smiled and he doffed his cap. “You saw me last week, when I called at your parents’ home. I brought you a disappointment, I think. My son is betrothed already, my dear. But I wish to talk to you. Will you ride with me a little way before you go to see your grandmother?”
She got up behind him without the slightest hesitation and neatly enough, despite the basket on her arm, putting her left foot on his and accepting a hand to help her on. For the first time he touched her, and the contact burned him like white fire. More prosaically, a smell of fish arose from the basket and Splash snorted disapprovingly. “Your horse don’t like the scent of herring,” said Marion, laughing. “But they taste all right.”
“Not to him,” said Richard, also amused. “Hold tight!” He put Splash into a trot on purpose, so that she would have to hold on and he would feel her hands grip his waist.
“Where we goin’?” Marion enquired.
“Into the valley. We can get down and stroll awhile and have some private talk, if you will. It’s a pleasant morning.”
Marion laughed again. Bumping and jogging, they made their way along the rough track and into the valley, with Ruff running at Splash’s heels. Once there, Richard drew rein again, dismounted and helped Marion down. He removed Splash’s bridle and hung it on a small tree, eased the girth, hobbled the animal’s forefeet and told Ruff to stay on guard. He offered Marion his arm. “Shall we walk?”
In the priory of St. George’s in Dunster, Christopher Clerk stood in a small monk’s cell, looking about him. He had made it plain that he had no intention of taking vows as a monk, but Father Hugh Meadowes hadn’t cared.
“Take vows as a monk or not—that’s up to you as long as you take vows as a priest. That’s your business in life and you know it. You’ve a vocation, my son. I know one when I see one, and what will your father have to say if you abandon yours? He’s proud of you! You’re not going to let him down and you’re not going to let me down and above all, you’re not going to let God down. You young lunatic! If you hadn’t been willing to swear on a crucifix that you didn’t sleep with the girl, I’d have had to go to the bishop. Do you realise how serious that would have been? Forget her! Forget any oaths you thought you swore. Forget you ever thought you loved her. I doubt it, myself. What sort of a life were you going to drag her into? She’s going to marry someone else, who’ll give her a better future than you ever could!”
“I’d have made my way. I’d have made a life for both of us!”
“And one day your call to the priesthood would have risen up and poisoned it. I know about these things. You’ll finish your studies in the priory and then you’ll stay there and serve the monks and the parishioners. Liza Weaver won’t be among them. She’s leaving the parish. No more argument, my son. I don’t want to repeat what I had to do when you were brought back to the castle, but if I have to, I will.”
His back was still marked from Father Meadowes’s whip. He could only hope that Liza had not been similarly treated. He had not dared to ask, not even when her parents came to see him, to hear him apologise and promise to put Liza from his mind forever. He had had little chance to say anything beyond the apology and the promise. Nicholas had done most of the talking. Some of his remarks had burned more bitterly than Meadowes’s lash. Callow young wantwit. Trying to lead my girl into a life of concealment and poverty. She doesn’t know enough of the world to realise what was ahead. And you say you loved her. Bah!
But all the time, all through that diatribe from Nicholas, and all through Meadowes’s beating, he had prayed inside his head for Liza, hoping that God would let him suffer for them both.
He sat down slowly on the hard, narrow bed. He was thinking about the past. At the beginning it had been his own idea to enter the church. He believed he had been called. Their own parish priest, back in Bristol, had given a homily one Sunday on what a privilege a vocation was; how it was like a summons to a holy army, and how priests and monks followed the banner of Christ just as knights followed the banner of their overlord. The soldiers of Christ fought battles of the spirit, not of the body, and their purpose was to save the souls of their fellow creatures from damnation. There was no nobler calling on earth, said the priest ardently.
Christopher had thought about that homily many times during the following weeks and he had gone to talk to the priest privately, and before very long he had become convinced that he was among those who had been summoned to take Christ for his suzerain. His father had been delighted.
His mother, a practical woman, was less so, and expressed regret that her second son would not marry and have a family. They were willing to help him, she said; he could go as an apprentice to another merchant and could in time become a merchant in his own right, could succeed in the world. But he shook his head and said he must leave the world, in that sense, behind, and his father told her to stop making objections; this was a great honour and he was proud of Christopher.
And he, Christopher, had been proud of himself, sure of himself, had thought of himself as a good soldier of God. And then, as he’d roamed through the fair at Dunster on that spring day, he’d stopped to watch as a dishonest weaver was paraded past for swindling his customers, and realised that the girl standing beside him hated seeing someone put on display like that. She had left the people she was with and walked off alone into the crowd and he had followed, concerned for her in such a gathering, with so many strangers about. She had suspected his intentions and looked sharply around at him, and he had spoken to her, meaning to show kindness, as a priest ought to do, and their eyes had met, and the whole world had changed.
He had known then, in that moment, that his vocation was a horrible mistake, that he was made for the ordinary life of a man, that he was on the wrong path entirely. He’d fought the knowledge off and might have won the fight if Elizabeth Luttrell’s wretched little dog hadn’t run away, and he hadn’t found himself chasing after it and coming face-to-face with Liza Weaver once again. After that, there was no more resisting. His vocation had been nothing but a dream, a youthful ardour trying to find somewhere to put itself and making the wrong choice.
And there was no way back.
He looked around him, at the stone walls of the little cell, at the prie-dieu in the corner, with its embroidered cloth—the only splash of colour in the room. Whatever revelations had struck him when he met Liza, he had ended up here. His vocation might seem unreal to him now, might have faded into nothingness as far as his emotions were concerned, but he was bound to it just the same, a soldier plodding across an arid desert, sworn to the service of his lord whether he liked it or not.
Liza was lost to him and he had been a fool ever to think they could escape together and create any kind of life worth living. She had been rescued from that and from him and probably it was the best thing for her. He understood that now.
What none of them knew, however—though God presumably did—was that what he felt for Liza, and what she felt for him, was real and would remain real all the rest of their lives, even if they never met again. They were sworn to each other, whatever Father Meadowes and the Weavers might say. He said aloud, “I will go on praying for her all my days.”
Yes, he would! And there was nothing anyone could do to interfere with either his private prayers or his memories.
Meanwhile, this priory and this cell were to be his home. Very well. His future had been ruthlessly reorganised and his life sold away. Soldier of God? No, he was a slave, and for life. But his love was unchanged and would remain so until he died.
CHAPTER TEN
CLOUD BLOWING IN
The Valley of the Rocks was a curious place. On the moor and among its surrounding, greener foothills, the water had sculpted the land and was still doing so. Streams ran through nearly every one of the deep, narrow combes that dented the hills as though a giant had repeatedly pressed the side of his hand deep into a collection of vast and well-stuffed cushions. The valley, by contrast, was dry.
It didn’t run down to the sea, but lay parallel to it. Its floor was flat and broad, but on either side, hillsides of bracken and goat-nibbled grass rose steeply to curious crests where grey rock outcrops, weathered into extraordinary shapes, adorned the skylines. Richard knew that the hills to his right were a thin wall between valley and sea, with a drop of hundreds of feet from the hillcrests to the water, most of it sheer cliff with broken rock at its feet.
Ahead, the seaward hillside broke in one place, though even from there, the drop below was still hair-raising. The heights resumed with a tall conical hill topped by an extraordinary mass of rock which looked, from a distance, so like the ruins of an old fortress that most people called it Castle Rock.
There was no one about, except for a goatherd encouraging his flock from one piece of grass to another, up on the slope to the left. He was high up and moving away from them, and showed no sign of having seen them. He certainly wouldn’t disturb them. “Mistress Locke,” said Richard, “as I said, I wish to talk with you. I came here today to find you. I have something to tell you and something to ask you. I hope you will listen.”
“Well, what might all that be about?” asked Marion.
She said it with a smile in her voice, and provocation, too, and when he turned to look at her face, that provocation was in her eyes, as well. The white fire leaped again, shockingly, filling him up. Her hand burned on his arm. He hardly knew how to go on just talking to her. He wanted to throw words and politeness and every last vestige of civilised behaviour away and her clothing with them and his own as well and turn this bleak, lonely valley into a Garden of Eden, with him and Marion as Adam and Eve.
To steady his mind, he quickened the pace, leading her toward the foot of the goat path that wound its way up and around Castle Rock. With a great effort he kept his voice normal as he said, “Mistress Locke, you must understand, even if it disappoints you, that I’ve plans for my son Peter and that there can be no question of a marriage between you. However, I can see very well why he’s lost his heart and his head over you. You are as lovely a wench as I ever saw.”
It was a poor description of her, he thought, nearly as inadequate as when her mother called her pretty. Marion Locke was no conventional beauty. His first impression had been the right one. She was ripe, like a juicy plum. She gave off the very scent of ripeness, of readiness.
“Tell me,” he said, still keeping his voice even with the greatest difficulty, “what if I asked you to think about me instead? I’m a widower these many years and I’d like a wife. Specially, I’d like a wife like you.”
“Oh,” said Marion, and dropped her hand from his arm.
“Why oh?” He caught her hand back and drew her to him. “Come! I’m older than you, but I’m hale enough. You’d get used to farm life, though it’s different from what you know. Marion…”
“But I…no, please,” said Marion, shaking her head and pulling her hand free. She edged away, arousing in him a sudden huntsman’s instinct to give chase.
“Now, don’t shy away from me, sweeting. There’s no need. I just want you to listen to me.” He stepped after her, repossessed himself of her hand and then changed his grasp to her elbow, drawing her back to him, clamping her to his side and walking her steadily on. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m not an enemy. Just listen, my dear.”
Marion didn’t know what to do. The young men she’d flirted with and, well, given way to once or twice—and she knew that she’d taken a risk and been lucky that no harm had come of it—had been easy to manage, even a little shy. She had never felt out of control. She had never encountered anyone like Richard Lanyon before. He was handsome, but he had an aura of danger, something new to her. Besides, this wasn’t decent. She had made love with this man’s son, and here in this very valley, at that. It wasn’t right. Marion’s morals were broad, but not broad enough for that.
But she couldn’t break Richard’s hold and if she did, she knew she couldn’t outdistance him. She could still see the goatherd but he was far away; there was no help there.
They had reached the foot of the path up the Rock. “Let’s climb a little way and see if we can see the coast of Wales,” Richard said, and steered her upward. The path wound, bringing them to the seaward side of the Rock, giving them a view across the Channel and westward down it. He looked down at her, smiling, but then, unable to stop himself, suddenly swung her in front of him, bending forward to kiss her.
His forebear Petroc, the one who had brought the Lanyons to Exmoor, had started life as a Cornish tin miner. That meant a free man, even in the days of villeinage, but it was a hard life of digging and panning, which produced men with muscles like steel ropes.
Petroc had hated it and given it up to breed sheep, though with poor success at first, for Cornish pastures were thin and sheep reared on them grew poor fleeces. However, when the Black Death tore holes in the population and opened, for those who still lived, chances hitherto unimaginable, he had snatched his opportunity and travelled to Somerset, where the grazing, even on the moors, was far better. Here he found success at last with his sheep. But if he had left the harsh days of failure behind him, he hadn’t lost his tin miner’s physique. To those of his descendants who survived, he had handed it down. Richard Lanyon had the thick shoulders and knotted muscles of his ancestors and he scarcely knew his own strength.
Marion, feeling his fingers grip her like pincers of steel, cried out, turning her head away from him. “Master Lanyon, don’t! You’re frightenin’ me!”
Realising that he must have hurt her, he let go. This was no way to go courting. “It’s all right. Don’t be afraid.” Better keep walking; it gave his overheated body something to do. He turned her and guided her onward and up. “Watch your footing—the ground’s rough,” he said, and used that as an excuse to put a heavy arm around her shoulders. “I’d treat you kindly,” he assured her, “and you’d eat well, on the farm. Not so much fish, but much more cream and good meat. The farmworkers’ wives would show you how to do this and that, and…”
“Weather’s changin’,” said Marion.
It was. It was growing colder and the west wind was strengthening. There was no more blue in the sky and the high brown-and-white clouds had given place to low grey ones, flowing in from the far Atlantic. The path had brought them quite high up by now and wisps of cloud were blowing around them, bringing a hint of drizzle. Wales, which had indeed been visible at first though neither of them had paid any attention to it, had vanished.
Marion was shivering, partly with cold, partly with what was now serious alarm. When Richard had come to Lynmouth to see her parents, he’d been just Peter’s father, a farmer in a brown wool jerkin and a hooded cloak, darker than most Somerset men were, and good-looking—she was never unaware of good looks in a man—but all the same, one of her own father’s generation and not, in her mind, a potential lover. But now!
His dark eyes were like Peter’s as far as shape and colour went, but their expression wasn’t the same. Peter’s eyes held an essential kindness, but Richard’s were hot and demanding. He wasn’t offering her love. What he wanted was possession. He wanted to hold and control and enter her, not for her pleasure but only for his own, and he meant to have his way.
Beneath the outer layer of sheer sexiness which enveloped Marion like a rich velvety cloak was a girl who not only had at least some moral sense but a knack of understanding people, too. It had been part of her attraction for young men. She always looked at them as though she knew them quite well already and longed to know them better still.
She said carefully, “You’re kind, Master Lanyon, payin’ court to me like this. But I couldn’t. I mean, I don’t think it ’ud be fitting. My father wouldn’t like it!” The last sentence was an inspiration. It was surely the one thing that might impress this man.
“I’ll talk to your father.” They were nearly up to the rock outcrop on top of the Rock, although they could hardly see it, for the cloud around them was thickening swiftly. “I’ll make him an offer he’ll look at twice, or maybe three times. Marion!” He stopped and swung her to face him once again, grasping her upper arms. “Can’t you see I’ve fallen as deep in love as a man can fall? I’ve fallen further than if I jumped off one of these here cliffs. Don’t let me land on the rocks! Say yes!”
“I can’t! I’m sorry, but I can’t!” Marion was really petrified now. She could not have put into words what she sensed, but if someone had said the words snapping pike to her, she would have said at once, yes, that’s it.
“Why not? Why not?” He hadn’t meant to get angry but the anger rose up in him by itself. He’d never wanted anything or anyone in his life as he wanted this girl. He hadn’t even known one could hunger like this. “What’s wrong with me, eh? What is it about me that’s not good enough for the likes of you?”
“Please! Please don’t. Let me go!”
“No. Say yes. Marion, say yes!”
“Oh, please let me go. I want to go back. My grandmother and my aunt’ll be waiting!” She tried to free herself, and the basket of fish, still dangling from one arm, swung wildly to and fro.
“We’re not going back yet. Not until you say yes. Not even if we have to stay up here all today and all tonight. I’ve got to have you, Marion. You’re a temptress and I can’t say no to you, any more than you can say no to me. Let me prove it!”
“No! Let go!” Marion shouted it at the top of her voice and jerked backward, kicking him on the shin in the process. Richard swore and released her, but remained planted like a wall between her and the downward path. She wanted to get away from him so much that she found herself turning and scrambling on uphill instead. He came after her and caught her up at the foot of the outcrop. It towered above them. There was grass beneath their feet, and a wide place to stand, safe enough close to the outcrop, but perilous at the edge, for here they were immediately above the sea and the grassy space ended at the edge of a cliff.
“I said, let me prove it. Let me show you!” He had hold of her again and when Marion tried once more to shout no! he muffled the sound by crushing her mouth with his. Not that there was anyone who could have heard her, anyway, for the goatherd was now out of both sight and hearing, even if the cloud all around them hadn’t become as dense as a damp grey fleece. “There!” said Richard, lifting his head at last. “Doesn’t that tell you all you need to know? Don’t you know now that you can’t refuse me?”
“No, I don’t!” Marion shrieked, kicking him again. He pulled her hard against him and this time she lowered her head and sank her teeth into his wrist. He swore, and she stamped on his foot. They wrestled, swaying back and forth. The cloud, as much drizzle as vapour, got in their hair and their mouths and confused their vision. For one moment, with the greyness all around them, they couldn’t even see the looming wall of the outcrop. It was only feet away, but they couldn’t have told in which direction. Marion, struggling, kicking, shouting, “No, no, no!” at last broke free and threw herself sideways to avoid his clutching hands.
And then was gone.
It was as sudden, as total, as incredible as that. One moment she had been there, a crazed harpy, fighting him; the next, he was alone on Castle Rock, in a world that seemed to be made of blowing cloud and wetness. But not a silent world, or not immediately, for as she felt herself go over the edge, the rock and grass vanishing from under her feet, Marion screamed.
Till the day he died, he would never forget that scream. Throughout all the years to come, it would echo in his ears. It went on for what seemed an eternity, fading downward but continuing, continuing—and then abruptly ceasing, as though a blade had cut it off.
Seconds ago she had been here, with him, alive and shouting and struggling against him. He couldn’t believe that she was just—gone.
And gone forever, at that. The capricious wind tore a rent in the vapours and he walked, trembling, to the edge to look downward. Stupidly, pointlessly, he shouted her name. “Marion! Marion, Marion!” There was no answer. Between the wisps of cloud blowing past beneath him—how unnatural, to look down upon cloud!—he glimpsed, briefly and horribly, the sea and rocks at the bottom. His head swam. He staggered backward to safety, before that yawning drop could drag him to oblivion, as well. It occurred to him, thinking of that final struggle, that it could have been him just as easily as Marion.
In which case, he would have been dead, as she was. No one could survive that fall. The tide at the cliff foot was rising; he had seen the white foam boiling in over the fallen rocks, which were a peril to ships all along this coast. Marion had fallen into that. The rocks had broken her and the sea had swallowed her up. She had been wiped out of the world, and if he hadn’t actually pushed her, well, he had frightened her into falling. It was a poor distinction.
He slumped down with his back against the outcrop. The cloud closed in again. He still struggled with disbelief, but the silence slowly brought it home. He was, as near as made no difference, a murderer.
No one knew he was here, though. He had not told anyone he was coming here; he was supposed to be out looking for sheep. He had ridden over the moor, taking the shortest way, and not seen a soul on the way. He hadn’t ridden through Lynton, either. And in this weather he wasn’t likely to meet many people on the way back. In fact, he’d be glad of Splash’s homing instinct. People got lost in mists easily, but horses didn’t.
He could go home. He could pretend he had never come near Lynton or this valley. At least there was one thing. He couldn’t marry Marion now, but neither could Peter. He almost felt a sense of relief, as though she had put a spell on him, which was now lifted. Perhaps she had been a witch, and in that case the world was well rid of her.
He repeated this to himself, firmly, several times. Then, careful of his footing in the bad visibility, he started down the winding path around Castle Rock. Down on the floor of the valley it was drizzling, but it was below the cloud itself and he could once more see where he was going. He glanced back once at the Rock. It stood tall, wreathed in the drifting vapours, but with an air of menace, as though it was aware of him and was ill-wishing him. Hurriedly he turned his back and made off to where he had left Splash. Ruff was lying down but got up at his master’s approach, whining with pleasure. Splash, too, seemed glad to see him. He bridled the horse, removed the hobbles, tightened the saddle girth and mounted, to begin the journey home.
It would take time but that was all the better, for his hands had trembled as he bridled his mount. He needed time to recover. Thank God no one had seen him. Thank God no one knew he had ever been here.
The goatherd, a lad of fifteen, had in fact seen Richard and Marion arrive, leave the horse and walk on along the valley to start climbing the Rock. He had noticed that the woman had remarkable hair, and a very attractive, not to say come-hither way of walking, and that they had a dog with them and that their horse was an odd colour, with dark grey dapples all running into each other. He had never seen any of them before as far as he knew. Most of his life was spent in the valley, along with his master’s goats; even Marion had not hitherto crossed his path. Few people ever came into the valley. He wondered what they were doing there, but his business, after all, was to look after the goats.
The horse and dog had gone when, after settling his charges on fresh grass and attending to a cut on the leg of a limping nanny, he came down the hillside to escape the weather and eat his midday bread and cheese in a little shelter he had built for himself. The strangers had presumably come back, collected their animals and left.
A month or so later, local gossip reached him about a Lynmouth girl who had run away from home, but he made no connection between the gossip and the couple he had seen.
Richard’s route home took him high onto the moors and back into the mist. He let Splash take his time and ate his bread and meat in the saddle. As at last he approached Allerbrook, he was both surprised and pleased to come across his own missing sheep, their fleeces spangled with damp, nibbling dismally at the thin autumn grasses and not at all unwilling to be rounded up by Ruff and shepherded home to the better pastures lower down.
Another half hour and he was there, riding in with them, a respectable farmer and shepherd who had gone out on the moor to look for missing stock, found them and brought them back.
Peter came home shortly afterward, complaining that he had not found any sheep. Richard described how he had searched in vain in the mist for hours and then discovered them just after he had given up trying.
All the rest of that day the talk was of nothing but sheep. In the morning, however, Richard remarked to Peter that they ought to ask Nicholas Weaver to bring Liza over for a visit to her future home, and a formal betrothal.
Peter, without answering, swallowed his final mouthful of breakfast and stalked out of the kitchen to go about his day’s work. Richard glared at his son’s retreating back, but for the moment held his tongue. Clearly he would have to think about this.
“The master’s got something on his mind,” Betsy said to Higg three nights later as they settled to sleep on the straw-filled mattress in their cottage. “He’s been goin’ around all grim-faced and hardly hears what’s said to him. He don’t look like he sleeps at night. And it’s plain as the nose on your face that him and Master Peter b’ain’t hardly on speakin’ terms.”
“Not much we can do about it,” said Higg tersely.
“I don’t like the look of things. Peter don’t want this marriage the master’s planned for ’un, and you know what Master Richard is like for getting ’un’s own way. Just like his father, he’s turning out to be. He’ll have his way, mark my words, but whether it’ll be a happy house afterward or not, I wouldn’t like to guess.”
“Let’s worry about that when it happens,” said Higg stolidly.
The fact that Marion no longer existed meant that she couldn’t now marry Peter, but Peter didn’t yet know this. Somehow or other he must be informed, and then coaxed into standing before a priest with Liza Weaver. But how? Richard asked himself, lying awake on his bed.
It was all too true that he was sleeping badly. Hour after hour, every night, slumber eluded him, while he relived that ill-fated walk through the Valley of the Rocks, and when at last he did sleep, he dreamed of it. Night after night, Marion’s last scream echoed for him again. What had it been like for her, throughout that long fall, knowing that she was still herself, healthy and alive, but would in the next few seconds be smashed and dead and that there was no miracle in the world that could save her? Sometimes he dreamed that he was the one who was falling.
She had died because he had tried to force his will on her. It seemed that compelling people to do one’s bidding could be disastrous. How then was he to force his will on Peter? Well, once Peter knew that Marion had disappeared, he might decide to be sensible of his own accord. With luck, he would. But how on earth was he to be told?
No one must suspect that Richard knew more than he should. Only, time was pressing and mustn’t be wasted. The betrothal to Liza ought to happen soon or Nicholas would be raising his eyebrows, and he’d expect the wedding to take place soon after. How much time would Peter need to get over the shock of learning that Marion was gone forever?
He’d killed her…no, she’d died in an unfortunate accident last Tuesday. Bit by bit, a scheme emerged.
On October 27, the following Saturday, as he and Peter went out after a breakfast at which neither had spoken to the other, he said, “Look here, boy, I’m tired of your dismal face round here. So be it. You go to Lynmouth and see Master Locke and ask him for Marion if you’re so determined. I don’t fancy he’ll agree and it’ll be for him to say. But maybe after you’ve talked to him, you’ll see that she’s not for you, and you can stop treating me as if I were a leper.”
“And what if he says yes?”
“Then he says yes. But you’d better bring her here before you handfast yourself to her. She might not like the look of Allerbrook. No betrothal until she’s seen what she’s coming to. Saddle your pony and go.”
Fifteen minutes later Peter was on his way, with a leather flask of spring water and a rabbit pasty for his midday meal, and hope in every line of his retreating back.
He returned in the afternoon, riding slowly. Richard, who had arranged to be close to the farmhouse all day, wandered into the farmyard to meet him as he was unsaddling. “So you’re back. How did it go?”
The face that his son turned to him was the face of grief, bloodless and stricken. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.”
“Can’t believe what?”
“She’s gone! Just gone. The last time she went to take some herrings to her grandmother and her aunt, she never got there! But last year she was seen at times with a sailor from some Norwegian ship or other, and that ship’s been back in Lynmouth harbour lately and Marion was seen talking to the sailor again, on the quay. Seems his ship sailed on the very day that Marion set out and didn’t come back. They reckon she’s gone with him. Her father said she was flighty. He said he’d rather she had married me—at least it would be an honest marriage into an honest family! But it’s too late now. She’s…gone!”
And you don’t know how thoroughly and completely she’s gone, Richard said to himself.
“And even if she ever came back…” Peter said, but couldn’t finish the sentence.
Richard, carefully, said, “I’m sorry. You mightn’t believe me, but I am. You’re taking this hard and I’m truly sorry.” You have no idea how sorry or why, and pray God you never will.
“She never…” Peter began, and then stopped short again.
“Never loved you?” Richard said it quietly, though.
“Can’t have done, can she?”
“You’d best come inside. Did you eat your rabbit pasty?”
Peter took off the bag he had slung onto his back. It still bulged as it had when he rode away. “No.”
“Let’s see what Betsy can find for you. You need a hot meal.”
“You’re talking to me like a mother!” said Peter, half-angrily.
“Well, your mother’s not here, after all. Come on, boy. You fill your belly with good victuals. The world won’t look so dark after that.” He did not mention Liza. There was no need. The right moment would come.
It came three days later. “I suppose,” said Peter, late in the evening, when he and his father, having made sure that the poultry were shut up safely where foxes couldn’t get at them, were lighting candles so as to see their way to bed, “I suppose I may as well marry Liza Weaver. She’s a nice enough wench.”
“Yes. She is. You won’t regret it, my lad,” said his father.
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