The House of Lanyon

by Valerie Anand

  At breakfast on his first morning at home, Richard was silent and Liza found herself eyeing him nervously, but he seemed preoccupied rather than angry. After the meal, he went out with Peter to ride around the farm. Peter came back ahead of him and walked into the parlour where Liza was weaving. His mouth was tight. Liza glanced at him and stopped her shuttle. “Peter? What is it?”

  “My father,” said Peter, “ought by rights to be lying in bed with a wondrous hangover. Instead, he’s out on the land finding fault with every decision I’ve taken while he’s been away—my God, I’ve made Allerbrook prosperous and not a word of real thanks has he uttered! I tell him our coffers are full and all he says is bloody good news, boy, given you provide somebody to leave it to! Sometimes I think that if he calls me boy again, I’ll…I’ll…burst! And now he’s having revelations!”

  “Revelations? Whatever do you mean?”

  Peter rolled his eyes heavenward and cast himself into a settle. “I left him outside that old cottage—the empty one he thought of giving to us at one time. He has plans for it now. The sight of it has inspired him. After what he saw during the fighting, especially at Towton, he no longer wants to see all the Sweetwaters dead, and anyway, two of them already are! But that doesn’t mean he likes them. He’s pleased that Walter’s given us permission to grow wheat on Quillet and fence it round so that he can’t ride across it, but why, Father wants to know, should we need his permission or have to be grateful because he won’t be trampling it down anymore? Walter, he says, has just as much conceit of himself as his father and brother—he just shows it differently. And as for what happened at my grandfather’s funeral, and to Father’s friend, poor Deb Archer—you know about her?”

  “Yes, you told me long ago.”

  “Well, for her, he’ll never forgive any of them. Trampling our wheat was nothing by comparison.”

  “They can’t have meant any harm to Mistress Archer,” said Liza. “That was just misfortune.”

  “He says it doesn’t matter, that it was their fault and that’s that and he’s going to get the better of them for it. Not by killing them, no, not now. He’s thought of another way. We’re going to prove ourselves as good as they are. We’re going to rise in the world. He said aloud, the day they rode across the wheat field, that one day they’d take off their caps when they saw us coming! He’s been brooding over ways and means ever since, apparently, and now he’s made up his mind. The first step, he tells me, is to build ourselves a fine house. Folk judge a man by the house he lives in.”

  “But we can’t afford—”

  “No, we can’t afford to do it all at once, he says, but we can make a start, and to begin with, that old cottage is built of very good stone. It was looking at that cottage that gave him the idea. He wants to knock it down and use the stone, along with some more that he’ll have to buy—saying thank you chokes him but I think he’s a little bit grateful to us for tending our finances so well—and build a new wing for the farmhouse.”

  “But we don’t need a new wing!” Liza protested.

  “You try telling him that. It’ll contain a hall, a proper dining hall like the one the Sweetwaters have. And one day he’ll build on more rooms so that the hall will be part of the splendid new house he’s inventing inside his head. He’s as excited as a child going to a fair for the first time. Walter Sweetwater’s going to hate this, he says, but we’re not asking permission, and though the Sweetwaters ride across our land as if they owned it—”

  “They do own it,” said Liza reasonably.

  “—they don’t come right to the house or ride into the farmyard and with luck, the wing’ll be finished and ready before they realise it’s there. It’ll cost the earth. We’ll be begging alms from the parish by then, if you ask me,” said Peter bitterly.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  HOUSEWARMING

  “Beginning to look like something, that is,” Richard Lanyon, feet astride and hands on hips, said to Peter as they surveyed the new wing of the farmhouse. One day, as he had told his disapproving son, he hoped it would form part of a much bigger house, but this would do as a first step and as far as it went, it pleased him.

  His satisfaction wasn’t total, because Liza never these days bulged around the middle and was never sick at a pig killing. Nagging her was useless—he’d grasped that, and he couldn’t help liking her, but his disappointment was still there. Betsy said it was the will of God. Richard would have liked a few words with God.

  Peter found no satisfaction in the building work at all. “This new wing, it’s got hold of him like a disease,” he had complained to Liza, back in the early days of the work. “And according to him, this is just the start. And it’s all because he wants to make a show in front of the Sweetwaters. Even if Walter Sweetwater does ride round with his nose in the air as though he were a lord of creation, what of it? He’s less trouble than his father was!”

  To Richard, that made no difference. Walter had been in that hunting party which had disturbed George’s funeral and led to Deb Archer’s death, and if Deb had lived, dear Deb, who had meant more to him than he knew until she was gone, perhaps he himself would not have become entangled with Marion and doomed to a lifetime of guilt. Only, that was not something that could be told to anyone. Ever.

  “Well,” Liza had said, “we’ll have to help your father, whatever he does, to keep him happy. Life’s easier that way.”

  She and Peter had been out in the yard during that conversation, watching while Richard prowled around the site, making sure that the masons were following their instructions properly. She had spoken distractedly, because something about that late October, the feel of the autumn weather, the look of the drifting clouds and the way their shadows moved across the hillsides had reminded her unexpectedly of the day she and Christopher had tried to run away together.

  She had had no idea what kind of life lay ahead for the two of them, but she had believed that it would be a life with Christopher, and not with Peter and Allerbrook. But here she was, and it looked as though she always would be, but somehow or other, to her surprise, she wasn’t miserable. Christopher’s memory was always there, but the commonplace happiness of day-to-day living had come to lie over it, like a warm coverlet over tired limbs. She sometimes thought that it wasn’t so much a matter of missing Christopher as missing her own longing for him. She didn’t long for him much now. It felt like disloyalty, but it was true. She had too many other things to do, for one thing.

  And one of the things she had to do was keep her father-in-law in a good temper as far as she could. Her husband, and for this she was grateful, had not blamed her for failing to produce the much-wanted family, but she knew very well that it was always in Richard’s mind, a provocation ready to break out into temper at any moment.

  She would be wise to be as helpful as possible over this unnecessary new wing. Anything, as long as it kept Richard Lanyon sweet.

  As time went on, she discovered that she actually had a knack for good ideas. Richard admitted as much, and thanked her for them quite graciously. There was plenty of time to discuss her suggestions and put them into effect, because building the new wing took much longer than anyone expected. It was five years from the beginning to the day when Richard planted himself in front of it, put his fists on his hips and said that it looked like something now.

  After studying the ground, Richard had settled that the new building should extend from the old farmhouse at right angles, along the side of the farmyard closest to the hill above. The farmyard sloped a little, and the new wing should stand at the higher, drier end. There was ample room, as the ground flattened out just there, extending back some way before the hill soared up again. The new wing, being a little higher than the rest of the house, was linked to it inside by a short flight of steps. It contained a single high-roofed hall, over thirty feet long, which as far as Richard could reckon from memory was longer than the one inside Sweetwater House.

  The stone from the demolished co
ttage was pinkish-grey like that of the farmhouse, which was as well, for Richard had decreed that the new wing and the old house must match. This, however, concerned more than just the colour of the stone. In George Lanyon’s time the door to the dairy had been widened, revealing that the farmhouse walls were actually double, the space between being filled in with rubble. Richard could remember looking at it.

  The new wing must be exactly the same, he said, which meant that after the hired workmen had dug out the foundations, rubble and extra stone had to be bought and fetched over the moor from a quarry six miles away.

  Wheeled vehicles were of so little use on the moor that no one bothered with them as a rule. Stone could hardly be moved any other way, but it was half a century at least since any new building had been done locally and Richard’s ox-drawn waggons therefore aroused great interest, not to say hilarity.

  It was summer at the time, but the waggons still managed to get bogged down in muddy patches and wedged in narrow sunken tracks. On steep uphill stretches, loads had to be brought up piecemeal, which was slow, and one waggon lost a wheel while crossing the ford two hundred yards below Walter Sweetwater’s packhorse bridge, the bridge itself being too narrow for any kind of cart. The vehicle had to be unloaded and hauled onto the bank and a wheelwright fetched from Taunton to repair it. After that the stone had to be loaded once again. It meant two days’ delay and the farmer who accommodated the oxen in a field meanwhile cheerfully charged for the grass they ate as though (complained Richard) it had been best-quality oats. “As if I haven’t had expense enough, buying stone and hiring the waggons and extra oxen, the loads being so heavy,” he grumbled.

  “Aye, the stone’s heavy,” Peter growled to Liza. “Which is more than you can say for our coffers nowadays!”

  Once the shell of the building was in place, the next stage involved oak timbers for the roof beams, and slates for the roof itself. “Won’t thatch do?” said Peter, but Richard would have none of it. “Good modern slate, that’s what I want, boy!” he declared. “And planks for the floor. A thatched roof and floors of cobbles and earth are good enough for the old house, but not for this.”

  Work stopped once the walls, roof and floor were in place, because at that point the money ran out altogether. The next stage had to wait for a year, while the Lanyon coffers were replenished.

  It was Liza (if only she functioned as well below the belt as she did above the neck, Richard thought but had the consideration not to say) who pointed out that if they were to eat meals in the new hall, then the kitchen ought to be next to it. Was food to be carried from the existing one at the other end of the old house, either through the rooms or across the farmyard when dinner was to be eaten?

  “We shall just end up doing all our eating in the kitchen,” she said.

  “We do that now,” Peter pointed out.

  “But I don’t want us to go on doing it,” Richard snapped. “I want us to eat in the hall. Liza, what’s in your mind?”

  “Well, we won’t just eat in the hall, surely, Father-in-law? Won’t it be our place for living, whenever we’re indoors? Like the big living room is now? We’ll want to use it, enjoy it, won’t we?”

  “Yes, of course. Go on.”

  “Our cider press room is at the end of the house that joins the new wing. It’s at the front. Why not turn it into a dairy, and make most of the present main living room into a kitchen and larder? The rest of the main room and the present dairy can all be knocked into one and if you agree, I can put my spinning wheel and loom in there and my accounts table and make a really good workroom of it. Then the parlour can be a proper parlour again. In case any ladies ever come to call! Any house of standing should have a good parlour, but I’ve fairly ruined ours, with my baskets of wool and my ledgers and all the rest.”

  “Where’s the cider press to go, then?”

  “Where the old kitchen is now. The new hall will still only need two doors—one into the farmhouse, and now it can lead straight into the new kitchen, and one into the farmyard.”

  “It’s going to mean more trouble and more expense,” said Peter.

  “It’s a good idea, though,” said Richard, and went ahead with it.

  It did indeed mean trouble and expense, and on top of all that, Richard insisted on glazing for the windows. This meant another delay while yet more funds were gathered. The glazing was made in Taunton and delivered with each window entire, wrapped in fleeces and roped on pack ponies, which could use packhorse bridges. But there were still places where streams had to be forded, and fords could mean trouble for ponies as well as waggons. Early in one journey a pony lost its footing while crossing a stream and fell. That was the end of one whole window. It had to be made again and transported again.

  Peter, this time, said outright to his father that if only Richard didn’t dislike the Sweetwaters so much, the new wing need never have been built and think of all the money they’d have saved. Richard retorted that he was just sorry that the new king hadn’t thrown Walter Sweetwater off his land.

  Walter was still on his land because he was a sprat compared to the Luttrells, who were much bigger fish. Sir Humphrey’s title had not been hereditary and Walter had never been knighted. He was still only plain Master Sweetwater, a fact that in itself made him unimportant in royal eyes.

  Before the king’s clerks had worked their way far enough down their list of possible victims to reach Walter Sweetwater, Walter had reached the royal secretariat with a respectful message of submission, willingness to uphold the house of York henceforth, with his sword if need be, and the offer of a healthy fine in return for being left where he was.

  King Edward was not particularly anxious to snatch a manor of Clicket’s modest proportions. He accepted the fealty and the fine. Walter was left hard up and cursing, but still in possession of his property, and he even managed to negotiate a marriage for Baldwin, which would bring four farms, scattered around Devon, into Sweetwater hands.

  After the fiasco with the glass, however, the Lanyons were hard up, too. There was another wait, another shearing and another payment from the Weaver profits before any furniture or panelling could be installed. Panelling was essential, Richard said, and so was a big new table with benches to go around it, plus a high-backed chair for him to use at the head of the table, and so, too, were three lidded chests-cum-settles, with lift-up seats and storage beneath, to go into the window nooks. The Lanyon coffers just barely succeeded in paying the Clicket carpenter.

  “Well now,” said Richard, turning to his son and daughter-in-law, when at last, after five stop-and-go years, the work was finished. “What about a housewarming?”

  “Do we invite the Sweetwaters?” Liza asked, but Richard shook his head.

  “Not yet! Not just for this. One day…but that’s far ahead. This time,” said Richard, “just our friends. There’s a long way to go before we bid the Sweetwaters to dine.”

  “Richard Lanyon’s invited us to a feast,” Margaret said. “Because of this new hall he’s added to the farmhouse. Will you feel up to going?”

  “I’d like to,” said Nicholas. “Only…”

  His decline had started, Margaret thought, at the time of Liza’s marriage, though the death of five family members during the recent fighting had assuredly made things worse. He had mourned especially for Laurie, of whom he had been very fond, literally mingling his tears with those of Laurie’s wife, Katy, because when she heard of her husband’s death, she had cried in his arms.

  But Katy had left the household now, having married a saddler who had a workshop in West Street, at the other end of Dunster. He was a widower, much older than herself. His own children were grown and gone and as he hadn’t wanted to take on her two boys, though he didn’t mind her little daughter, the boys were still with the Weavers, learning to work looms. They were welcome, since so many pairs of hands had been lost, but Katy’s departure had been another blow to Nicholas, who had had a tenderness for her.

  But Liza�
��s behaviour had begun the damage, of that Margaret had no doubt. “I feel betrayed,” he said to her, not once but frequently. “If she’d fallen for a proper fellow, with a proper future, I’d have listened to what she wanted, but to lose her head over a half-fledged priest—and then to bolt with him! I never would have believed it of her, never, and what I had to do to her, it went to my heart, Margaret.”

  He had worried about it, wrinkled his brow over it, stayed awake at nights over it. Margaret tried to distract him by pointing out how well the business was doing, which it was. Despite the dividends that had to be paid out to the Lanyons, the union between the families was working. The Lanyon fleeces were so good these days that they were set aside for the manufacture of a particularly light, warm cloth, much of which was dyed red and yellow, because Master Herbert Dyer, whose competitive rates had so pleased Nicholas, specialised in those shades.

  Herbert Dyer seemed to be a restless man, since he had come to Dunster from Taunton and then moved on to the village of Washford. Nicholas was not the only one to wonder why, and a member of the local Dyers’ Guild, which watched over standards of work in Dunster, had been heard to say that he’d heard a thing or two from the Dyers’ Guild in Taunton. “It’s been hinted that he cut prices for favoured customers by charging others too much and that all his work wasn’t good. Could be that a few folk in Dunster have started noticing things,” he said. “We’ve had no formal complaints, but I’ve a feeling we might have started enquiring if he’d stayed. Well, he’s someone else’s problem now.”

  Nicholas, however, had no complaint of him and he was a large, genial soul who visited the Weavers quite often and made cheerful conversation. Margaret, who liked him, was grateful for it. After one of his visits, Nicholas always seemed more like his old self.