The House of Lanyon

by Valerie Anand

  Meanwhile, a number of things had happened.

  The depredations of the deer at the first wheat harvest were nearly disastrous. They sold every last ounce of what was salvaged but made a loss, and even Liza understood why Richard had been so angry at being denied fences. Shortly after that, however, Walter Sweetwater told Peter that he could plant wheat in Quillet and fence the field, provided he didn’t put up any other new fences. The results were highly satisfactory.

  “We’re making money from the wheat now,” Liza said. “Walter Sweetwater’s not all bad.”

  “No,” Peter agreed. “I suppose not. The new bridge is useful, I must say.”

  Another innovation for which Walter Sweetwater was responsible was a packhorse bridge he had had constructed over one of the streams to the northeast of Allerbrook. The stream in question was deep, and the ford which had been its previous crossing place was unreliable. The area was so apt to flooding that packhorse trains from the Sweetwater manor usually took the long plod down the combe when they wanted to take their wool to Dunster, always the best market, if not the nearest.

  The new bridge was built of stone and looked very like the one at Dunster, being long and narrow but high sided, to protect the packs when the river was in spate, and solid enough underfoot to reassure the most jittery pony. It made the journey to Dunster much shorter. Every time Liza saw it she recalled the Dunster bridge and knew a secret heartache, for it reminded her of the time she and Christopher had met there by chance and had their first tiff.

  “I grant you,” Peter said, “that there are things on the credit side of Walter Sweetwater’s account.” Then they both laughed, because Liza had learned double-entry accounting from her father, and introduced it at Allerbrook, which had impressed Peter considerably.

  “Just as well your father-in-law’s away,” Margaret had said during the visit to pick up the wool. “Now you and Peter can settle down without him pokin’ his nose in.”

  Liza knew very well what her mother meant, but it was a long time before she had any fresh hopes of a child. Peter at least refrained from nagging, for which she was grateful, and he tried to be considerate about the amount of work she had to do. She knew that although to her the outdoor work of Allerbrook was hard, the Lanyons—Richard included—expected less of their womenfolk in that way than most of their neighbours did. Everyone helped with the harvest, but Lanyon women weren’t expected to do the winnowing, which meant standing on an upland field in the wind, no matter how chilly it was, and tossing grain into the air. Nor did the Allerbrook women carry manure to the fields on their backs as Tilly and Martha Lowe, Anna Hannacombe and Lou Rixon did, but loaded the smelly stuff in panniers and took them out on the backs of the oxen.

  Not that Lou Rixon would be carrying any more manure out to the fields, for she had left the district, taking her children and her aged mother with her. She had been in despair when she heard of Harry’s death, having already found that she could not manage the farm with the two elderly hands who were left. She had, however, been offered a chance to marry a widowed farmer on the other side of the moor who had somehow avoided having his helpers taken away to the war, and she seized the opportunity.

  “I’ve been thinking about the Rixons’ farm,” Peter said to Liza after Lou’s departure. “I reckon we should take the place on and pay the rent to Walter Sweetwater.”

  “But we can’t look after Allerbrook and Rixons, as well!”

  “We won’t,” said Peter, grinning. “We sublet it and make it pay its own rent. The Rixons ran sheep and Lou’s selling the flock. Your father knows every family on the moor that runs sheep. Somewhere there’ll be a young couple wanting a place and willing to buy the flock and work like demons to see that it pays. And so it will.”

  “But why shouldn’t this young couple of yours just pay rent to Walter Sweetwater? You’ll have to, and if you’re to make a profit, you’ll need to charge them higher, won’t you?”

  “I might let them have Three-Corner Mead in the bargain. It’s our smallest field and we never use it much, but it marches with Rixons. We can do without it and they can pay extra for it. It won’t be a big profit, but it’ll be one just the same.”

  At lambing time a year after Richard went away, the weather was unkind and some of the ewes had trouble. Peter had bought a new ram with a magnificent fleece but, unfortunately, a magnificent set of horns as well and a massive skull to support them. Some of his lambs were too big in the head to give their mothers an easy time.

  Liza, taking part in this year’s lambing, found that she had some instinctive skill. Her fingers were sensitive to the shapes and movements of lambs which had got themselves into awkward positions, or tangled up with their twins, inside the ewes. She could very often free a little leg that was caught up with one from another lamb, or feel a tiny hind hoof which had come forward too soon and guide it gently back so that the lamb could slide safely into the world.

  But halfway through that lambing season she was overtaken with sickness, just as she had been at the pig killing, and messy as lambing could be, the reason was nothing to do with that. Once more, Betsy was asking questions and passing the answers to Peter, who said, “No more getting up in the night for you, my girl. We’ll see to the ewes without you.”

  This time let it be a success. Liza was never sure what she thought about God, and had been less sure still since He’d taken Christopher away from her. It did not seem right to her that strong young men should give all the urges of nature away to this invisible deity, or what the said deity wanted with the said discarded urges when He’d got them.

  “You didn’t time this too well,” Betsy said, poking up the brazier that heated Liza’s bedchamber, making sure that the window was fast and trying to cheer Liza along with jovial talk. “Nearly Christmas, and who’s to make the marchpane fancies, with you abed like this? And what weather! Just look at it out there!”

  “Well, who can choose these things?” said Liza between gasps. The thick window glass didn’t reveal much of the world outside, but she knew well enough what it looked like: smooth-backed hills covered in snow, with only the tops of banks and bushes showing here and there, and a sky the colour of lead. Beneath it, the white covering was as bleak as a shroud. Nearer at hand, rows of icicles hung from the eaves of the outhouses and the water trough was frozen like stone. More snow was on the way.

  “If it’s a boy,” said Betsy, “you’d best call ’un Jack, for Jack Frost.”

  “If it’s a girl, we’d better call her Jill, then,” said Liza, and then cried out as another pain seized hold of her. “Maybe he or she’s in a hurry!” she panted hopefully when the spasm had passed.

  The child was not in a hurry. It was the evening of the next day when Liza’s exhausted and anguished body surrendered its burden at last. “Just in time,” Betsy muttered to Kat as she lifted the little thing away from the bed. “The mistress couldn’t have stood much more.”

  “Is it breathing?” asked Kat. “Which is it?”

  “A boy,” said Betsy sombrely. “And he’s not.”

  They did their best with warm towels and massage, but it was no use. Jack Lanyon had been dead before he left the womb.

  “But he was formed, a proper boy child.” Peter tried to hide his disappointment, and indeed, it wasn’t so hard, because only a monster would have denied pity to such white-faced misery. “You went your full time with this one. The next one’ll live. You’ll see.”

  Liza, speechless, just nodded. There would be a next time; of course there would. A man like Peter couldn’t live like a monk. There would be another time and then another and then another…

  Or would there? Next time she might well die! She tried to stop them, but the tears squeezed themselves out of the corners of her eyes and ran down her temples onto her pillow. Peter looked at her in consternation. “Liza? Are you in pain?”

  “No. Not much, not now.”

  “What is it, then? Liza, you mustn’t grieve like this.
There’ll be another time.” Liza shook her head from side to side and the tears came faster. Peter, frightened, strode to the door and shouted for Kat and Betsy.

  They pounded up the stairs and arrived breathless. “What is it? Is the mistress worse?”

  “She’s upset. I can’t comfort her. She’ll make herself more ill than she is now!”

  Betsy went to the bedside. “Now, what be all this, then? These things be the will of God, and there are more babes born than ever live to grow up—we all know that. Hush, now. Hush.”

  “I’m so tired,” Liza sobbed. “I wish I could go home.”

  “She’s wandering in her mind!” Peter burst out. “She is at home. You’re here in Allerbrook, Liza. This is your home!”

  Liza, speechless once again, closed her eyes but the tears went on oozing from under her eyelids.

  “You’d best leave her now, Master Peter. Worn right out, she is. You’re feelin’ let down, but she’s been let down more than you have, let me tell ’ee. If she don’t feel this is her home, it’s because she’s got no living child here. Where she rears her family, that’s the place a woman calls home. She needs her children. But like I said last time, she needs a rest first and it’s for ’ee to see she gets it. Longer than last time. You know what I mean!”

  “We’re doing very well indeed,” said Liza. She was sitting at the parlour table with a small abacus in front of her. On the table were several tally sticks and also a writing set consisting of ink, paper, quill and sander. Her father had not only taught her to keep accounts by double entry (which the Lanyons had never heard of until she joined them, but which Nicholas had said was invented by Venetian merchants, long ago), he had also taught her the modern Arabic figures, which had begun to seep out of the east in the days of the crusaders and were now making rapid headway. Peter still recorded weights of fleeces and pounds of cabbages and bushels of grain by cutting notches in tally sticks, but Liza would translate them into figures on paper and have them totted up on the abacus the very same day.

  “The wheat’s promising again,” she said, “and the bit of extra rent that comes in from Three Corner Mead is very useful, and the wool we kept for ordinary sales to merchants’ buyers has brought in more than it normally does. I wish our new ram didn’t have such a heavy skull. That’s lost us two lambs. But I fancy that when we get our share from the cloth making, it’ll be a healthy one this year. If only the weather holds for the harvest.”

  July had brought hot weather. The window was open on a vista of ripening grain, peacefully grazing cows and blue-hazed hills, but the room was stuffy, all the more so because it was slightly cluttered. Liza had acquired a bigger loom and put it in the corner of the parlour, and beside it was a basket of carded wool and her spinning wheel. She spun and wove whenever she got the chance and the Lanyons had both yarn and cloth to sell at Dunster market.

  Wool and hot weather didn’t mix, however. The mere presence of wool in quantity seemed to create heat. Liza herself was wearing a thin undyed linen gown and had thrown her crimson overdress aside. She had woven the crimson material herself, from yarn so fine it was more like silk than wool, but it was still too hot in weather like this. Even the linen gown had a damp and crumpled air. She rubbed a hand over her wet forehead, failed to notice the ink on her fingers and left a dark smear across her brow.

  Peter, who had just come in with some extra figures for her to include, from the sale of surplus hay, burst out laughing. “You look so funny! You have ink in your eyebrows!”

  “Have I?” Liza rubbed again and made things worse. Peter laughed again and looked at the discarded overdress, which Liza had tossed over the back of a settle.

  “Why were you wearing your best overdress in order to do the accounts?”

  “Because it isn’t my best any longer,” said Liza. “I washed it, very gently, after the Easter party Anna Hannacombe gave, because there was a gravy stain on it, and now it’s gone streaky. The dye didn’t hold as it should. See?” She reached out to pick it up and Peter saw that in places its colour had faded to pale red with pinkish streaks.

  “That’s a pity. Who did the dyeing for you?”

  “Herbert Dyer of Washford, Father’s usual dyemaster. He used to be in Dunster, but he moved to Washford a year ago. He does a lot of work for the monks of Cleeve and says he likes to be near them, though in his last letter Father says he can’t understand why because the Cleeve monks send their wool to Dunster for weaving and fulling anyway! Herbert Dyer does good work as a rule. I must have been unlucky. Father still uses him, though nowadays it means taking cloth and yarn to Washford. I’m making another overdress for best and I’ll have it dyed green. This will do for everyday when it isn’t too hot to wear it! How much did we get for the hay?”

  She picked up her quill again, added in the amount that Peter gave her and studied her totals. “I think that when your father comes back, the amount of money in our coffer will please him.”

  “If he comes back at all,” said Peter. “Where is he? There’s been no news of him or anyone else from round here, for months. They should all be home by now. If any of them are still alive. I’ve heard,” he added, “that Walter Sweetwater is ailing with worry over his father and his twin.”

  “News must come in the end,” she said. “Surely it must. Someone will let us all know what’s happened. Won’t they?”

  “Who’s to say? We’re a long way from the heart of things here. I’ve heard of men going off to war in times past, and no more was ever heard of them, and no word ever came back.” He stopped, gazing past Liza as though into some imagined scene. She looked at him enquiringly.

  There was a long silence, though it was friendly enough. Since the loss of poor little Jack, Peter had slept in his father’s old room instead of with Liza and oddly enough, the absence of lovemaking seemed to have brought them closer as friends. She was relieved because she need not watch for signs of pregnancy, to dread the outcome if they appeared or dread, with equal force, Peter looking disappointed when they didn’t. She and Peter talked to each other more easily than they had ever done before.

  “What is it?” Liza asked at last.

  “I’m making a fair success of being master of Allerbrook, I think,” Peter said at length. “Aren’t I?”

  “Yes. You are. That’s very true.” Liza studied him gravely. “Oh, Peter, I don’t want any harm to come to your father and I know you don’t, either, but I rather dread the day he comes back and takes the reins away from you.”

  “So do I,” said Peter glumly. “It’s a dreadful thing to say, but so do I. Better not to think about it, Liza. Better not to talk about it, either.”

  “Then we won’t,” said Liza, and then became alert, cocking her head. “The dogs are barking. Someone must have ridden in…Peter!”

  “What is it?”

  Liza had risen and gone to the window that faced toward the yard. She turned to Peter, her eyes wide. “The day has come, anyway. It’s your father,” she said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  DEAD DRUNK ON A HALF-STARVED HORSE

  Springing up, Peter ran to join her. “He’s still riding Splash! But why is he lurching in the saddle like that? He’s sick or hurt!”

  Together they made for the kitchen and the back door, shouting to Betsy and Kat, who were cleaning the dinner things, to come with them. As they all spilled out into the farmyard, Higg and Roger, who had been in the fields and had recognised Splash from a distance, rushed in to join them.

  Richard was still sitting on Splash, who was standing still, head drooping. Except that his curious dark dapple coat was the same, the horse would have been unrecognisable, so gaunt had he become, with ribs and hips jutting. Richard too was as lean as a pole, burnt brown by wind and sun, and his clothes were patched and dusty. He had gone away with a crossbow slung on his back but must have lost it somewhere, although his father’s helmet hung behind his saddle and he had acquired a sword.

  “Father!” Peter gasped. “
You’re home…but what’s wrong? Are you ill…wounded?”

  “Neither. Jusht worn out,” said Richard in slurred tones. He breathed out as he spoke. Liza and Peter exchanged quick glances and Richard emitted a short laugh. “Yesh, drunk as well. Shtopped at the White Hart in Clicket. Got some shider…cider. Had money. Picked up two sh…swords on the field at Towton. Sold the other. Walter Sweetwater gave me shome money, too. For bringing the news. No one else to do it.”

  They helped him down, and then Higg and Roger, one on each side of Splash’s head as though he might fall down without their guidance, led the horse to the trough to drink while the others took Richard indoors.

  Kat, eyeing his condition with disapproval, shook her head at him when he ordered her to bring cider, and said she’d brew a herb-and-honey posset. “More cider on top of what he’s had already,” she muttered under her breath to Liza, “or even a cup of my elderflower wine, and he’ll drop unconscious. Wouldn’t be surprised if he does that anyhow!”

  “Shorry about this. No way for your father to come home, dead drunk on a half-starved horse,” Richard said as Peter steered him to the parlour settle. “I’ve come from the north. I—we were with the queen. God’sh…God’s elbow, is that what queensh are like? Winning, losing, going here, going there. Up to Shropshire, down to the Midlands, westward to Harlech, back east again to Yorkshire, shouth…south to attack London, back again north…zigzagging round the country like a bluebottle in a panic, and the thingsh she let happen!”

  “Let me get your boots off,” said Peter, kneeling to ease his father’s feet free of their worn footwear, while Liza fetched some slippers and Betsy adjusted cushions behind Richard’s back.

  “I was ashamed, I tell you,” Richard said as the slippers were put on his feet. “Queen She-Wolf and no mistake! Army wanted food—men just took it. Army wanted billets or horshes or wine, men took them. I did, too. Shtole…stole food, drink, fodder. Got to eat. Horse got to eat. I didn’t rape any women, but some did. Anyone argued, he’d get his home and fields burned and a pike through his innards. Granaries emptied, fieldsh burned…no getting away, though. I was an archer with the Sweetwaters and deserters got hanged if they were caught. What’sh this muck?”