“She won’t need anything while she’s here with us.” Peter had noticed that disparaging glance and his tone was stiff.
“I’m sure of it. That was just a few words of goodwill. And now perhaps we can talk business. That’s what I came for, mainly. My workshop and the Weavers’ workshop and your sheep are linked together, after all, like a chain. I’ve been thinking. Now, I’ve always tried not to overcharge my customers. I’m not a greedy man,” said Master Dyer. Peter’s eyes roamed over Herbert’s stomach, but its owner, oblivious to this cynical scrutiny, swept on.
“As it happens, though I get a good weight of cloth and yarn through my workshop, I could handle more. To tell the truth, business has dropped a little in the last few months. If the amount of cloth from the Weavers’ place could be increased, I might be able to offer them a discount and still come out on the right side myself. I’ve had a word with them on the matter and we reckoned that since it’s my scheme, I ought to be the one to come and see you and talk to you about fleeces. They said they could manage extra work, but you can’t weave extra cloth without extra wool. Now, you supply a regular quantity of wool to the Weavers at a competitive price. If that quantity could be increased…”
Richard frowned. “I think we need to take a good hard look at what it all means when it turns into money.”
“I’ve got some estimates here.” Dyer produced a roll of parchment from inside his doublet. “I worked out my costs and prices before I came. You were bound to want them. We’re all men of business.”
“Very well.” Richard nodded. “Come this way. Come along, Peter. And you, too, Liza.”
“But this is business,” said Dyer, disconcerted. “It’ll hardly interest a lady.”
“Liza is better with figures than either of us,” said Richard unconcernedly. “And handier with the abacus. This way.”
Some time later, when business had been discussed at length and Peter and Liza had gone out to the lambing pen, Richard called Betsy to bring some cider, and then sat down to drink it in private with his guest.
“I think our deal should work well,” Herbert said, “if you can withstand the delay in income at the very beginning. Normally, you’d have sold those extra fleeces for their full value. But there should be a better profit for you when the finished cloth is sold—profits for all of us. I’m glad to see that you’re prosperous, I must say. You have a good family life, too, I notice. Your son and his wife seem well suited. I’ve had trouble with my son Simon, though it’s over now.”
“Indeed?” Richard said, refilling Herbert’s tankard.
“God’s teeth, yes. I’ve got him married now to a good wench, but before he was wed, he was always getting wild notions about impossible girls. There was a Gypsy lass, going about with her wandering folk, hawking silly gewgaws and playing a tambourine, and then there was a milkmaid over at Withypool, pretty enough but not a penny piece to go with her…no one knows the struggle I had to bring him to his senses.”
“Young men are like that,” said Richard. “Peter had wild ideas, too, at one time—fell in love with a fisher girl at Lynmouth. Marion Locke, her name was.” It still happened. From time to time he found himself impelled to speak of Marion, as though she were an itching scab he felt he had to pick. “I went to see her family,” he said in offhand fashion. “I had a look at her. She was pretty, in her way. Extraordinary hair, she had. Close up, it was like gold wire but from a distance like a pale mist.”
He managed to laugh. “It isn’t only young men who have wild fancies. I wasn’t going to let Peter throw himself away on her, not with Liza there, ready to marry him, but do you know, I had a notion for a while of marrying her myself. She ran off with someone else before I could do anything about it, though. Peter and I were both well out of that, I think.”
“He didn’t want me there,” Liza remarked later, when Master Dyer had taken his leave and the Lanyons were gathering in the hall before supper. “He didn’t like talking to me about my accounts, or watching me use the abacus. I think he couldn’t really believe that I understood figures!”
“Well, most women don’t understand them,” said Richard, willing to be amused, and wondering, within himself, why, now and then, he still had this frightening need to speak of Marion. Why in the world had he, this time, actually admitted that he had once thought of marrying her? Saying that, he had stepped dangerously close to the edge of a cliff. The trouble with cider was that it mellowed a man and loosened his tongue.
“I can’t really like Master Dyer,” said Liza, “though no doubt my mother does. I hope she’ll be happy. I didn’t say so at the time,” she added, “but some of his figures puzzled me. I learned a lot about these things from my father. He said once that I was better at figures than anyone else in the family except himself, and he’s gone now. I think Master Dyer could have shown those estimates to my folk in Dunster and they might not have seen how odd they were. But some of the prices he was assuming for dyes and mordants…”
“Mordants?” said Peter. “I saw those listed on his estimates, but what are they?”
“Things to stop the dye from running. Yarns and cloths are soaked in mordants before being dyed. The amount he expects to pay for them struck me as low, and his estimates for what our cloths and yarns will fetch seemed rather high. They vary each year and if you’re trying to work out profits in advance, it’s best to be careful.” Liza frowned. “There have been a few stories about Dyer, you know. My father never complained, but…”
“What stories would those be?” said Richard sharply, forgetting all about Marion Locke.
He and Peter listened thoughtfully to what Liza had to tell them. “So that’s why you prefer green gowns to red or yellow ones!” said Peter.
“I don’t, really. But in the cloth trade, everyone knows everyone and if I sent cloth to be dyed red or yellow to anyone but Herbert Dyer, and then my family heard of it, they’d wonder why. I didn’t want that, because, as I said, my father never had any complaint. But it looks as though he’s lost a few customers lately. He said business had dropped, didn’t he? And now, of course, my mother’s caught up in it. She’s married to him! But this deal he’s offering to my family, those figures of his—I don’t like them. I don’t believe he ought to be able to afford that discount. I think,” said Liza sternly, “that he’s trying to pull wool over all our eyes!”
Richard laughed. Peter said, “Go on.”
Awkwardly, Liza said, “Look, here at Allerbrook we’ve done well, so far, out of the arrangement you made with my father. We sell fleeces at low prices and then have a percentage paid to us when the cloth’s made and sold. Sometimes we gain and sometimes my family in Dunster gain, but mostly we’re the lucky ones….” She hesitated, and Richard grinned.
“Your father saw it as part of your dowry.”
“Yes, he did,” Liza said. “Anyway, the market’s been good. My family in Dunster haven’t lost much by it. But if Herbert Dyer is up to something, well…I’ve a feeling that we’ll be selling more wool at a discount and relying on good cloth sales to make up for it. And my family may be selling cloth that…I shouldn’t be saying this without proof, but…”
“This is a private conversation,” said Richard. “Speak your mind.”
“What if my family find themselves selling cloth that isn’t all it should be? What will that do to their good name, to their sales in time to come?”
“Just what is it you suspect?” Peter asked.
“I’m not sure,” said Liza slowly. “I could make guesses—but I just think something’s not right. Those figures weren’t right.”
“We’d better be cautious,” Richard agreed. “Especially since that crafty bugger Walter Sweetwater put our rent up!”
Liza smiled. “There’s rabbit pie for supper again. I hope you won’t mind.”
Her father-in-law threw back his head and laughed. “Liza, I’d never go calling you a vixen, but you’re damn near as foxy and cunning as Master Sweetwater is.�
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“We ought to recoup if we can,” said Liza reasonably.
Walter Sweetwater had exacted his toll for the building of the hall. Since the housewarming, the Sweetwaters, when hunting, had three or four times cut a swath through the Lanyon barley and once, after a gale had blown some of the fencing down, even galloped across a corner of the wheat. Richard swore it was intentional. Nor was that all.
“You built the hall at your own expense, as you said,” Walter had said, stepping to Richard’s side one Sunday as they came out of church. “Well, I accept that. You’re entitled to benefit from it. In fact, I think a man with a hall so handsome should have some special rights to match.”
The right he had in mind, it emerged, was permission to kill and eat rabbits on Allerbrook land.
Only, of course, such permission didn’t come free. The rent had gone up ostensibly to cover it, and since rabbits had been on the Allerbrook menu since the fall of man in any case, everyone there was furious. For a time, in order to get their money’s worth, the outraged Lanyons had eaten so much rabbit—stewed, roasted, fried, minced up to be seethed in cream and spread on toasted bread, and of course served in the familiar pies, mixed as usual with onions and mushrooms—that Peter said if they didn’t stop it, they would all grow long furry ears.
After that, their diet returned to something like normal, but not quite. Rabbits still featured oftener than in the past.
After a pause for laughter, and Richard’s agreement that as they hadn’t had rabbit pie now for nearly a week, no one would object to it today, they reverted to the subject of Herbert Dyer. “I’m truly worried about Mother,” Liza said. “I keep thinking of that story that Betsy told, Father-in-law, when you came back from Towton. About Geoffrey Baker’s father or stepfather or whatever he was.”
“No one knows for sure which,” said Richard. “But what’s he got to do with Herbert Dyer?”
“Betsy said he got into trouble for putting chalk in his bread flour. And I remember once in Dunster seeing one of our own neighbours shamed for putting flax threads in his woollen cloth—”
She stopped short, while they all looked at her enquiringly. To her own surprise, the memory of Bart Webber had sprung into her mind with such vividness that for a moment she had been transported back to that day. When she had turned away in distress from the spectacle of Bart, and found Christopher beside her. She had believed herself reconciled. She hadn’t thought that a reminder like this would hurt so much, as though it had opened an old wound.
“What is it?” Peter asked. “What’s the matter, Liza?”
“I hated seeing that happen, to a neighbour, to someone we knew!” Well, so she had; it was true enough. “And it caused misery to his wife. I couldn’t bear to see Mother embarrassed because her husband had been been put in the stocks for cheating his customers. I’m afraid for them,” she said unhappily. “I keep thinking of the trouble I had with his red and yellow dyes. He wouldn’t play games with my father, but he may have cheated me—just one farm woman sending home-woven cloth. Oh, I may have been born Liza Weaver, daughter of one of his best customers, and later on his stepdaughter, but I’m a Lanyon now, and I’m living out on the moor, away from my family, and he thinks women are all fools. He’d take advantage of me the same as he would of any woman among his customers. I fancy there may have been many of us.”
“This hall should have made him think again about farming folk,” said Richard.
“It did,” said Liza. “So did Splash and Magpie, when he saw them in the field. I think Allerbrook made him uneasy. I don’t trust him. It seems to me that he wants to increase his business and is trying to use family connections to help him. I fancy he’s waved figures in front of my family and got them to believe that he has benefits for all of us in mind, but all he’s really after is benefits for him, at our expense if it comes to it. And I just don’t see how he’ll get really worthwhile benefits even for him, unless there’s some sort of trickery going on.”
“I think,” said Peter slowly, “that when the lambing’s over, we should pay him a visit and look round that workshop of his. No reason why Liza shouldn’t visit her own mother and take an interest in the workshop while she’s there, now, is there? And she knows something about the business. Liza’s the one who must go. I’ll take her.”
“You’ll do that?” Richard asked, looking at Liza.
“Yes, I will,” said Liza. “We’d better find out, though what we can do about it, with my mother caught up in it now, I can’t think.”
“Leave that to me,” Richard said. “Let’s get at the truth first.”
It’s strange. I’m really not unhappy. I care about Allerbrook, and having Quentin makes a difference. A great difference! She’s beautiful. I tried to do what Mother said, to make up my mind to be happy, and now I more or less am, and even Father-in-law has stopped saying things, though if I don’t conceive again soon I suppose he’ll begin again. But Peter is kind. I’m as well-off as most women. Mother was right. Only, talking about Bart Webber reminded me. It all came back. I thought I’d left Christopher behind, but…it seems I haven’t. Will I ever? Can I?
It was now suppertime on the day of Dyer’s visit, and Liza was not at table eating rabbit pie but instead was lying flat in a muddy lambing pen, with a bucket of water and a pot of goose grease beside her and one arm inside a distressed and bleating ewe, trying to work out through her fingers which of the tangle of legs she could feel belonged to which lamb. There were certainly two of them, and sorting them out without being able to see what she was doing was always a challenge, and she was hungry and this was as messy a job as God ever invented.
It was useful work, though, and she seemed to have a talent for it, and if she succeeded this time, there would be beaming faces everywhere. Hence the thoughts now coursing through her head.
She had little to complain about. She was the wife of Peter Lanyon, a respected farmer of Clicket parish. Her home was better than most farmsteads were, now that the hall was part of it; she had plenty to eat and clothes to wear; she even, now, had a child—not the son everyone had hoped for, but the son might follow yet.
And Peter was a good man. Many women, bullied women, beaten, overworked women, envied her and she knew they did. It was shameful to discover that deep within her the little flame was still there after all, still burning, the flame that was not for Peter. When first she came to Allerbrook she had dreamed of Christopher at night, quite often. That hadn’t happened for a long time, but she had a feeling now that the dreams might return, wakened by talk of Bart Webber and the reminder of that day at the fair.
Well, dreams were secret. If Christopher did come to her in her sleep once in a while, no one need know except herself…ah! She had traced that little foreleg back to its rightful owner, and got it out of the way of the lamb lying in front…now, if she let the ewe push…poor thing; she was bleating so. If she were human, she would be crying out for help. The lamb was coming forward, sliding toward the light. Here it came. And its twin was following. “All done, you poor thing,” said Liza to the ewe. “Look, lovely twin girls.”
The ewe, much relieved, was struggling to her feet, turning to inspect her progeny, and Peter came into the pen just as Liza was plunging her greased and bloodied arms into the bucket of water.
“You’ve done it!”
“It was a difficult one. I was afraid we’d lose them all.”
“Far from it, by the look of that.” The ewe was nosing at her offspring and beginning to wash them and the lambs were already attempting to stand up. Peter fetched the towel Liza had hung over the gate and handed it to her. “You really have a way with you, Liza. Liza…”
“Yes, dear?” said Liza, rubbing her arms as clean as possible.
“I’m not one for too much talking about such things, but I really love you. It’s a wonderful thing, having a wife one can trust, really trust.”
“I’m just ordinary,” said Liza, very busy with drying herself. “Not s
pecial in any way.”
“Oh, but you are,” said Peter, laughing.
Dear God, said Liza inside her head, make the flame spring up for Peter. Make it! Why won’t it? I thought all this was over. Why is it that after all, I still burn for Christopher?
“I have no objection,” said the prior of St. George’s Benedictine monastery. William Hampton was a calm individual, not given to making objections for the sake of it. “I don’t own the man. He has never taken vows as a monk, although he has become a priest. In that capacity, he’s useful to the brothers and to our vicar, Will Russell. He takes services on occasion when Russell is away, or falls sick. We sometimes send Father Christopher out to other churches as well, when their vicars need help. In fact, we’ve lent him to the castle once or twice. There are chantries attached to this church—not based here, but controlled from here—and when there’s a vacancy, the vicar and I had intended to recommend him as a chantry priest. But you say you really need him at the castle for good?”
“Instructions from my lord of Pembroke, sir,” said Master Miles Hilton, the steward of Dunster Castle, sipping wine in the prior’s sanctum. He was elegant and relaxed, legs stretched out in front of him, ankles crossed. “We have no chaplain at the moment. We have had difficulties with chaplains ever since the Luttrells left and took their own man, Father Meadowes, with them, and the Earl of Pembroke became the landlord.”
“Yes, your chaplains do come and go, don’t they?” said Hampton. “Every time I dine at the castle there seems to be someone different in the chaplain’s seat.”
“We’ve had three!” said Hilton with feeling. “The first was a career man who soon found himself a deanery in Gloucestershire. The second one went on an errand to Winsford, lost his way in a moorland mist, found himself on Winsford Hill instead, thought he saw a ghost on one of the old mounds up there, came back hysterical—his horse brought him…sensible animals, horses—and left next morning.”
The House of Lanyon Page 21