The House of Lanyon

by Valerie Anand

  The workshop was big, built of stone, with three louvred roof vents, beneath which were big open hearths where cauldrons full of strange substances were bubbling. Materials were apparently soaking in them, and perspiring youths—all the workforce seemed to consist of youths except one young man who appeared to be in his twenties—were pushing them about with poles. From one cauldron, a couple of lads were lifting red-dyed cloth on their poles and draping it over a rack. Crimson drops, looking rather gruesome, fell into a drip tray below. Over another rack, some hanks of scarlet yarn had been draped.

  Built into the wall was yet another hearth, which seemed to be heating a giant oven, and also, set into the floor so that they were completely stable were a number of wooden vats, most of them full of liquid of some kind and some of them steaming. Materials were soaking in these, as well. The heat was colossal and an extraordinary mingling of smells, some nasty and some merely peculiar, filled the air.

  “No,” said Peter thoughtfully. “You’d hardly want your soup smelling like that!”

  “Now this dye,” said Herbert instructively, leading them to a bubbling cauldron, “is made from madder, rubia tinctoria a scholar would call it.”

  “Latin,” said Peter. “Meaning red colouring.”

  “You know Latin?” Dyer looked surprised.

  “I learned some at the school I went to for three years or so.”

  “And where was that?”

  “It was run by a schoolmaster in east Somerset. He used to take a dozen boys or so at a time, house and feed them and give them a bit of learning. My father was sent to him and he was still in business when I was growing up, so I was sent there, too. Some schools wouldn’t take boys from an ordinary farm, but he did,” Peter added.

  Out of courtesy to Liza, he didn’t also add that according to Richard, though the schools run by churches were often less particular, they were apt to turn boys into monks and priests and keep them from breeding families.

  “Seems you remember what you learned,” said Dyer, not sounding over-pleased about it. “So. I buy the madder root ready dried and ground and it creates the shade of red you see here. The cloth inside is being moved around to make the colouring even.”

  “What’s in there?” asked Liza, pointing to the sunken vats.

  “Oh, those are the alum tubs. That’s the first stage, before the dyeing proper begins.” Herbert, however, did not offer a closer inspection but led them instead to another simmering cauldron. “Now, this dyebath is a different shade of red. Madder was the basis but it was mixed with brezil wood. That’s costly—comes from India. Mix it with madder and you get a stronger red that wealthy folk’ll pay for. We’re not doing yellows today. Simon, come here and tell my guests all about our work!”

  He beckoned to the one fully adult member of the workforce. “This is my son Simon, who’ll take over from me one day when I get too old. He knows all the jobs in the workshop and sometimes fetches consignments of dyes for me that come from abroad by ship. Simon, meet my stepfamily. My stepdaughter, Liza, and her husband, Peter Lanyon.”

  Greetings were exchanged. Simon was a solidly made fellow, with a beard which, although fair, grew in exactly the same way as Herbert’s. At the moment he was dressed in red-splashed and sweat-stained garments, and was crimson with heat. He seemed glad enough to desist from prodding linen around a tub with a long pole in order to talk instead.

  “I heard Father telling you about madder and brezil wood. There’s a very rich scarlet dye made from insects, too—see those hanks of scarlet yarn? That’s what we used for them. We don’t do much work with it, though. It’s too expensive. Uses up fuel, too. You literally have to boil the material in it. That comes from an island to the south of India. Yellows we’re not doing today, as Father says, but for them there’s a berry that’s said to come from Persia or else there’s saffron from India. The best dyes nearly all come from faraway places—that’s why they’re so expensive.”

  “Where do you keep your ingredients for dyes?” Liza asked Herbert.

  “Oh, over there in that press against the wall. Not that they’ll mean much to you. Half of them don’t look like much, raw. You’d hardly guess what colours are hidden in them.”

  Liza wandered off, peering into cupboards and then into the mordant vats, before coming back to join her husband and stepfather as they left Simon to his poling and moved on to a door at the far end of the workshop, which opened onto a drying yard, where what seemed like miles of cloth swung on lines, in the breeze.

  “Nothing like a natural breeze for drying,” Herbert said. “In bad weather there’s space enough at the end of the workshop to hang cloth for drying and it’s warm there, but give me God’s good winds any day.”

  “It’s so interesting,” said Liza. “I really must thank you. I knew a little about your work before, but I didn’t know the dyes had to be brought from such distant lands.”

  “Yes, I’ve got contracts with a couple of merchant captains based in Lynmouth and meeting ships there is part of our lives. They send word when they’re in port. Minehead or Porlock would be nearer, but the captains I use know my trade and can do the buying for me. Simon and I don’t mind the journey. It saves paying for the ship to make an extra call and it’s an outing for us now and then,” said Herbert Dyer cheerily.

  Christopher set foot inside the hall of Dunster Castle and for the moment forgot about Liza, or any notions he had had of making enquiries about the fate of his former love. It was some time since he had last come to the castle, and though he hadn’t liked what he found even then, it hadn’t been his business. Now, however, he had come here to live, and things had clearly deteriorated further. His scandalised and cringing nasal tissues were protesting.

  In the days of the Luttrells the castle had been kept sweet, with lavender and rosemary always strewn among the rushes on the floor of the hall and beeswax rubbed into the furniture. Applewood had burned in the hall fire, and Elizabeth Luttrell liked rosewater perfume.

  The present landlord, the Earl of Pembroke, had been absentee from the start, though not entirely through his own fault. At the moment he was said to be in attendance on King Edward and not likely to leave the court, as Christopher knew. Prior Hampton received news regularly and Christopher was aware that the court had been in an uneasy state for the past few years, ever since Edward had wrecked his cousin Warwick’s scheme to arrange a marriage between the king and a French princess by blandly announcing that he had married a widow called Elizabeth Woodville.

  “He’s poked Warwick in the eye and no mistake,” the prior had told Christopher in a gossipy moment. “And now, it seems, the new queen’s got enough relatives to populate a city and they’re out for all they can get. Edward’s giving them good positions with one hand and wealthy marriages with the other and I heard that Warwick’s as mad as a forest fire. There’ll be trouble one of these days. As if the land hasn’t seen enough of that!”

  No, the state of Dunster Castle was probably not Pembroke’s fault, but that of his steward, who had done nothing to correct the bad habits of the slovenly caretaker servants. No one had polished the furniture for years and years, or put as much as a single sprig of scented herbage among the rushes. It seemed doubtful that anyone had even changed the rushes.

  The place stank, of dogs, dead mice and something suspiciously like ordure, and whatever was smouldering in the hearth of the great hall certainly wasn’t applewood. The fire was smoking, and it reeked as though someone had tried to dispose of canine droppings and old chicken bones on it. Christopher looked down and saw that there actually were bones among the rushes, tossed to the dogs, no doubt. He had nothing against dogs, but the Luttrells had made sure that someone cleared up after theirs.

  He stood looking around him, appalled. The beautiful tapestries were still there, but they were dimmed, unbrushed, and the pretty flowered one with the unicorn and the lady had moth holes in it. He had been brought in and told to wait for the steward. He wandered up to the
dais to look more closely at the table. Its dull surface was not only dusty but also marked. Careless people had been putting hot serving dishes down on it without a cloth in between.

  Well, he wasn’t here as a steward. But God’s teeth, this was a disgrace. Very well! Steward or not, his name wasn’t Christopher Clerk if he didn’t, somehow, kick and prod the idle louts here into doing their jobs better than this. A few homilies on the virtue of doing the work you were paid for, a few clipped ears when the steward wasn’t looking…. Well, someone ought to bring this crowd of lazybones to heel!

  “So,” said Peter when at last he, Liza and Quentin were alone in the spare bedchamber they were to occupy that night. Quentin was asleep, in a crib beside the curtained bed. “This is the first time I’ve been able to talk to you without anyone else listening. You’ve been very quiet, as if you were thinking. Were you?”

  “Thinking! I’ve been seething since we came out of that workshop. I’ve been longing to talk to you, as well. Never in all my life…!”

  “Never what?”

  “Alum!” said Liza witheringly. “Alum indeed! There were three mordant vats and maybe one of them had alum in it. One of them had vinegar—cheap cider vinegar by the smell of it—and what was in the other, well, I hardly like to say!”

  “I think you must, love. What was it?”

  “Fermented piss.”

  “What?”

  “I really do know something about the cloth-making business. Much more than I let Master Dyer realise! I was always interested, more than some of the boys in the family were, and Father used to talk to me, and he’d talk frankly. Before people found out about alum, which is much better, they used fermented urine or vinegar to fix cloth so that dyes would hold, except that neither of them worked all that well. They’re out of date now because alum’s much better.”

  “But…are you sure that Master Dyer is…?”

  “When I went poking in that press,” said Liza, “there were three vinegar barrels stowed under the lowest shelf. I put my nose down and sniffed at them. And as for what was on the shelves! Persian berries and Indian saffron, indeed! He had barberries there.”

  “Barberries? What Kat makes that bitter jam from sometimes?”

  “Yes. They’re another out-of-date thing. They used to be used for making yellow dyes, but no good dyeing works uses barberries now! Oh, there were Persian berries and saffron there as well, but I suspect that somebody’s paying for good dyes and getting cheap ones, and that a lot of people are getting cloth where the dye’s not fixed as it ought to be. I think that’s what happened to me, when I used to send cloth here to be coloured red and yellow. He’s making a profit—and offering my family a big discount because he’s saving on dyestuffs and mordants. He’s getting away with it because whatever local Guild keeps an eye on Washford, it isn’t very thorough. Father would never believe any ill of him, though there were whispers when he was in Dunster. Well, I think the whisperers were right! No wonder he keeps moving from place to place!”

  “Dear saints. But what are we to do? If he’s really cheating his customers like that, then it’s only a matter of time before he’s caught! It’s a wonder he hasn’t been caught before.”

  “He was more careful at first, probably.”

  “Well, it can’t last!” said Peter, horrified. “It won’t even need a Guild to find him out. All it needs is one resentful customer with enough knowledge to work out what he’s doing! Then a complaint will be lodged with the parish constable. And that will be the end of him.”

  “I don’t know what to do, Peter. He’s married to Mother now! I wish we hadn’t come here. Or that we’d found out long ago and reported him ourselves, before she was tangled up in it. We can’t do that now! I thought we’d find something amiss, yes, but not this much! This is…it’s awful!”

  “My father wanted us to find out what we could. Well, we have. Now we have to tell him what we’ve found and leave it to him, like he told us. He’ll do his best to protect your mother; I think we can trust him for that. Don’t upset yourself. Maybe we can make Herbert stop this. Then he’ll be safe and so will your mother. Think of it that way. You’re a marvel. My nose would never have told me half what your nose has told you!”

  “Your nose can smell different things. I think you can smell a rabbit in the cabbage patch from the other side of Winsford Hill.”

  Peter laughed. Quentin made a little squeaking noise as though she were dreaming and then settled quietly again.

  “Liza…?”

  “Dear love.” Liza moved against him, feeling the hard pressure of his need, pushed back the covers, which were heavy, and drew him on top of her.

  “If you’re not tired…”

  “I’m not tired.”

  “Dear, dear, clever Liza…”

  Good kind Peter, whom I ought to appreciate much more, whom I ought to love, really and truly, from the very depths of me. He protected me from his father when Master Lanyon was angry with me. And he trusts me to love him. Oh, God, I’ve tried to love him. Make it so! Help me to be what he thinks I am. Let me have a son for him. Let us make a son tonight. Please.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ESTRANGEMENT

  “So now,” said Liza to her father-in-law, “we know what he’s doing. I’m as sure as I can be that he never swindled my father. Father was an important client. But I suspect he’s battening on smaller clients. Like me! He’s been getting away with it because it takes time for this sort of thing to become obvious. Any dye will run sometimes—if the water’s too hot or the soap’s too strong. It takes a while for the word to get round that cloth dyed in such and such a workshop runs more easily than cloth dyed somewhere else! It does get round in the end, of course. I’m quite sure that’s why he moved from Taunton to Dunster to Washford!”

  “Yes.” Richard was grim. “So far he’s kept one step ahead of the hunt, so to speak.”

  “Yes, just that!” Liza was animated and indignant. “And now I think he wants to prop up his business by getting work from my family, who’ll do it because now they’re his family as well, in a way, and he can pretend to be doing them a favour with his discount while he makes up the difference—and probably more, by a nice little margin—by charging for mordants he didn’t use! My family’s reputation, or their profits, in the end, don’t matter to him. Oh, it makes me so angry!”

  “Did you say anything to him?”

  Liza shook her head and Peter said, “Not with Liza’s mother there, but we’re worried for her sake. If he gets caught, and he will if he goes on like this, she won’t be able to look her neighbours in the eye.”

  “It would matter so much to her. She’d never get over it. We had to tell you, but don’t go to the parish constable. Please, Father-in-law, don’t do that!” Liza pleaded.

  “Don’t worry,” said Richard grimly. “There are other ways of dealing with Master Dyer, without the constable. Well done, Liza. Very well done indeed. I’ll saddle Magpie in the morning.”

  Richard, riding alone on a long-legged horse, left home early the next morning, used shortcuts over the moorland and covered the miles to Washford easily by midday. There was an inn in the village, where he dined and Magpie could have a manger. “I doubt if Master Dyer will ask me to dine,” he had remarked to his family before starting out.

  He was back by nightfall, though he had lengthened his journey by travelling via Dunster and at first seemed more inclined to talk of Dunster and the Weaver family than to report on his meeting with Herbert.

  “There’s a steward in the castle these days. The Earl of Pembroke—he’s the castellan now—has never been near the place and the farmland’s going back to the wild. I saw two great fields with brambles spreading out from the hedges and clumps of bracken where there ought to be crops, and as for the harbour! Nowadays the sea’s going back so fast that half the quay’s out of use altogether. If the inside of the castle is as bad, then it’s nothing by now but a great big hovel.”

  “B
ut what about…?” Peter began.

  “And I thought,” said Richard, refusing to be interrupted, “that you’d like news of your family, Liza. Your cousin Laurence seems to know what he’s about. He’s looking after it for your brothers while they learn the business all through. Your great-uncle Will’s still alive, though frail as thistledown nowadays, poor old fellow, and hardly stirs from his chair.”

  “How does Elena manage Aunt Cecy, I wonder?” Liza said, setting his place for him at the table in the hall, while Betsy fetched his supper. The rest of them had eaten theirs.

  “Laurence told me all about that,” said Richard, grinning. “Said Elena just got on with her spinning and told Aunt Cecy if she wanted to run the household, she was welcome. Left it all to Cecy, and the old girl soon got tired of having to work out what was to be cooked for dinner, listing what was to be bought and worrying over whether the flour bin was going down too fast, and chivvying the maids on washday. Cecy’s handed the task back to Elena and the worst she does now is carp now and then just for the sake of it, and Elena takes no notice. If your mother had thought to pull the same trick, she’d maybe still be in Dunster and Herbert Dyer could take his own road to hell and do no harm to her.”

  “Well, it didn’t turn out that way,” said Peter. The weather had turned chilly, as it sometimes did in May, and he was sitting by the fire with his favourite dog, Rusty, who had been the most beautiful puppy in Silky’s last litter, between his knees. “Father, did you see Master Dyer?”

  There was a moment of silence. Betsy came in with food and put it in front of Richard, who took a spoonful of broth and broke some bread before saying, at length, “Yes, I saw him, and it weren’t pleasant. I made him take me round the workshop and I did a bit of sniffing at this tub and that and then I said to him, let’s talk outdoors. Why, says he. You’ll see when we’re out there, I told him. So we went into that drying yard he has at the back and I said my piece. Then he said his. I won’t repeat it.”