The House of Lanyon

by Valerie Anand

  “I think it’s a good idea,” Liza said. He had said no words of censure aloud, but she had heard them, just the same. Since Peter had ridden away she had tried hard to keep her father-in-law happy, and on the whole, by working hard, making sure that there was good food on the table at the right times and trying to agree with everything he said, she had succeeded. But the undercurrent was always there. I like you well enough, Liza, but you should have had a son.

  Well, she would have liked one, as well, she sometimes thought rebelliously. What a pity Richard Lanyon never seemed to realise that.

  However, he spoke amiably enough now as he said, “By the time Quentin’s old enough to marry, I hope she’ll have a fine house as her inheritance. Every time I see the Sweetwater place, I get new ideas.”

  Betsy said, “Well, well.” Kat clicked her tongue, Roger grunted and Higg shook his head as if in sorrow at the insanity of an old friend. Liza decided to introduce a new topic.

  “It’s time I went myself to see my mother and tried to break through this…this wall she’s put between us,” she said. “I’ve been afraid to go in person before, but a lot of time’s gone by. Maybe she’s not so angry now. I can see why she won’t see the rest of the family, but I know all about Master Dyer. She has nothing to hide from me, and after all, I’m her daughter. I ought to try, anyway. Father-in-law, may I go?”

  “After the haymaking,” said Richard. “Higg can go with you and you can come home by way of Dunster if you like. See your family and give them firsthand news. But don’t go upsetting yourself over it, if your mother wants to keep up the feud. Just let her.”

  “Is that the place?” Liza said to Higg as the two of them rode their ponies over a low hill and came in sight of the little abbey in the Devon valley below. It was indeed small; a tiny church beside a cluster of thatched buildings. There was a vegetable plot where two or three black-clad figures were working and a patch of fruit trees, hardly big enough to be called an orchard. It was all encircled by a wall with a gatehouse at the nearer side, but a few fields, which probably belonged to the abbey, lay on the gentle slope of the hillside beyond.

  “Yes, Mistress,” Higg said. “That be St. Catherine’s, where your mother is. Let’s get on. Don’t like this sticky heat. It takes it out of me.”

  The gate was closed but there was a bell rope, which Higg tugged. After a moment they heard footsteps, and then a shutter in the middle of the gate was opened and an elderly nun peered out. “Visitors, hey? Who might you be wantin’? Seen you afore,” she added to Higg.

  “I am Liza Lanyon, daughter of Margaret Dyer. She is living here. I’ve come to ask after her welfare,” said Liza.

  Bolts were pulled back. They dismounted and, leading their ponies, they entered and followed the porteress along a path to one of the thatched buildings, where she knocked on the door. It was answered promptly by another nun and the porteress announced them. The second nun went away briefly and then reappeared. “Mother Abbess will see you. This is her study time, but she is willing to interrupt it for you. Mistress Lanyon, please come this way. Dame Porteress, show the lady’s manservant the stables and then take him to the kitchen and see he’s given food and drink.”

  The abbess’s room was cool and dim, its stone walls and floor unadorned, but for that very reason it was a welcome haven in weather which, as Higg had said, was over-warm and sticky. Built into an alcove were shelves laden with parchment scrolls and several books and a supply of unused paper. Another book lay open on the plain walnut desk.

  “You wish to see your mother?” It was hard to guess the abbess’s age. Her pale face was unlined but her hazel eyes were knowledgeable and there were knotted veins on the backs of the thin hands folded at her waist. She had risen to greet her visitor and did not sit down again or invite Liza to do so.

  “If I can,” Liza said. “If she will not see me, at least, please, tell me how she fares.”

  “I will ask if she will see you.” The abbess was a small woman and had to look up to talk to Liza. “But I can tell you that if she does, what you find may disquiet you. Oh!” Seeing Liza’s alarm, she raised a hand in reassurance. “She is not sick. She sometimes occupies herself with spinning, which is useful, since we own sheep which are cared for and sheared for us by the brothers of a monastery not far from here, and we make woollen cloth to sell. But…well, let me take you to her. She lives in our guest house.”

  Much concerned, Liza followed the small, black-draped figure out of the room and then out of the building and across a cobbled space to another house. Again it was necessary to knock, but again a nun came at once and with a murmured “Benedicite, Mother,” she stood aside to let them in.

  The abbess led the way up a twisting stone stair. The guest house was built around three sides of a small courtyard and a covered gallery, overlooking the courtyard, ran around all the first-floor rooms, which opened onto it. The abbess knocked at one of the doors and announced herself. A voice called to her to come in. Signalling for Liza to wait, the abbess did so, but moved a little to one side, so that from where she stood on the gallery Liza could still see into the room.

  The room looked comfortable, with a bed and a table and stools, a window seat and, in one corner, a spinning wheel with a basket of wool beside it. Margaret Dyer was not using it, however. Dressed in a robe of unbleached wool, and with a plain coif on her head, she was seated, hands folded, on the window seat, half turned so as to look out at the rolling Devon countryside beyond.

  “Mistress Dyer!” said the abbess, rather too heartily. “I am sorry to see you so dispirited again. On such a day it is pleasant to walk in the grounds. Sister Honoria would go with you gladly.”

  “I know, but I don’t want to go walking,” said Margaret, not rudely, but despondently. She turned from the window and caught sight of Liza, hovering just outside the door. “Oh, so you’ve come. Thought ’ee would one day. All right. You may as well come in. I no longer care enough to get up and throw you out.”

  “Mother—how are you?” Liza entered the room and wanted to go to her mother and embrace her, but somehow dared not. Margaret’s eyes, both dull and unfriendly, repelled such affectionate gestures. “I’ve thought of you so often,” Liza said timidly. “And I’ve worried about you and so have the family in Dunster. I had to come, to know how you were, whether you needed anything….”

  “I never wanted to set eyes on you again,” said Margaret tonelessly, “but I knew it’ ud happen in the end. Here you be, and here I be, and you can see I’m well. I’m doin’ penance for my husband’s sins. Someone must, since I know he won’t. It eases my mind. I’m still a wife, even if I can’t bear to live with ’un, nor he with me.”

  “Doing…?”

  Margaret looked at her coldly and then undid the lacing which held the neck of her unbleached robe together. She pulled out a fold of the garment under it. “Come here and feel this.”

  “Oh, no!” said Liza as her finger and thumb told her the miserable truth. “Not a hair shirt. Oh, Mother!” She tugged the fold out farther and looking below, saw the pricks and scratches on Margaret’s skin. “Oh, why, why? He’s not worth it. Don’t do this to yourself, please!”

  “I’ll do it while I live and you’ve no say in the matter. Don’t go tellin’ them in Dunster what Herbert did. That’s between him and me.” She pushed Liza’s hand away, tidied her clothing and did up the lacing with fingers that fumbled. Then she turned her head away, to resume her contemplation of the outside world. “Go away. I can’t talk long to anyone. It’s too much effort.”

  “But…Mother…” Liza was at a loss.

  “Go away!” said Margaret.

  The abbess took Liza’s arm and drew her gently out to the gallery, closing the door after them. “Sister Honoria, the lay sister who looks after her, will bring her midday meal soon. She often sits with your mother, although she says they talk very little because Mistress Dyer seems to have no energy, no spirit. We do what we can. We pray for her and with
her. I have told her that it may well be sin to give way so to melancholy, and that she cannot take her husband’s sins, whatever they are—she won’t tell us that—on herself. But she only says she’s doing what she must. Come.”

  They walked back to the steps and went down them. “You are welcome to dine with us,” the abbess said. “But it might be better not to try to see your mother again. I promise you she is safe with us.”

  “But—something’s wrong with her!” Liza expostulated. “You said she wasn’t sick, but…”

  “She isn’t, in the usual sense, but I know what you mean. I have seen it happen before. No one can explain it. Mostly to people growing older, but not always. They fall into a lethargy and there is no getting them out of it. Some physicians say it is a thing of the body, some say it is of the mind and some call it an affliction sent by God, and perhaps they’re right. But no one knows the cure. Sometimes people recover, sometimes not. We will look after her as long as she needs it, that I can promise.”

  “I brought things. They’re in our saddlebags. A mutton ham and some money and a big round cheese. Please keep them and use them and let her have a share without telling her where they came from.”

  As they walked back across the cobbles to the nuns’ house, side by side now, the abbess turned her head and for the first time, she smiled. “We will do that. Don’t fear for her. We will take care of her.”

  “Thank you,” said Liza miserably. She added, “I’m travelling back by way of Dunster, where my brothers and my sister live, to give them what news I can. At least I can say that she’s safe—if no more.”

  The sticky heat dissolved into a downpour as they started for Dunster, and lasted for the two days of their journey. On open hillsides they rode with heads bent against the west wind and the rain blowing in from the sea; in the lanes, the mire was hock deep and the ponies were splashed with mud above the girth.

  “We’re goin’ to arrive wet through and with news about as cheerful as this here weather is,” Higg said as at last they emerged from the woods above Dunster and crossed the packhorse bridge where once Liza had quarrelled with Christopher. “I’m that sorry about your mother, Mistress Lanyon. Only maybe she’s better off there than in Washford. A busy workshop and a man like Dyer, all jolly and hearty, mightn’t be best for someone that just wants to be quiet. Though I’m not sure,” said Higg doubtfully, “that we shouldn’t have called at Washford to give Master Dyer news of her. He’s her husband, after all.”

  “No, Higg! I don’t want to go near Master Dyer. Master Richard deals with him when it’s necessary, but I can’t bear the thought of even seeing him in the distance,” said Liza angrily. “If he wants to know how his wife is, let him go to the abbey himself! If it hadn’t been for him and his dishonesty, she’d be happy with him now.”

  “Well, the illness might have come on her anyhow,” said Higg mildly. “Who’s to know? It could be the abbey’s the best haven.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Liza said, pulling her cloak more firmly around her. She glanced anxiously at Higg, who had sneezed twice since that morning. He was a healthy man normally, but he still had the cough he had acquired during the epidemic, and he had had several feverish colds since then, when he’d had to keep to his bed in his cottage. She hoped he wasn’t going to fall ill now.

  Liza had been at Allerbrook now for over twelve years and had visited Dunster very rarely since her marriage, but the woolly, unmistakable smell of the overfull Weaver household, the clack of looms from the weaving shed at the back and the usual air of domestic confusion still meant home. The moment she set foot in the house, she could hear one of the menfolk upstairs complaining that he wanted to change into a clean shirt and hadn’t got one, and a protesting female voice, pointing out that things weren’t yet dry from the wash. “It b’ain’t ideal drying weather, now, be it, zur?”

  The sound of the argument made her laugh. It welcomed her as much as the smiling faces of her family. Yes, this was her home, even though her parents were no longer here, even though Aunt Cecy was among the first to greet her, and her first words were “Well, Liza, you look fine and healthy and I’m glad to see it, but still only the one daughter, I hear?”

  However, someone had called her brother Tommy from the weaving shed and he came to her rescue, although for a moment she hardly recognised him. She had missed her father’s funeral, being still abed after Quentin’s birth, and had last seen Tommy when he was only fourteen. He was twenty-one now and disconcertingly like his father. He, however, knew her and seized her in a delighted hug. “Liza! We thought you’d forgotten us! Oh, we’re glad to see you.”

  “I’ve been visiting Mother. The news isn’t happy, I’m afraid. But first, we need to get dry and warm. Higg here has been sneezing and we’re both wet through.”

  “Elena’s here in the house. She and Laurence are supping here tonight. She’ll look after you. I’ll take care of Higg. Come in, man. I’ll get someone to take those ponies down to the stable and rub the mud off them. They look as if they’ve been rollin’ in it! You get that cloak off—God’s teeth, it’s drenched, right enough. There’ll be mulled ale before you’ve time to turn round. We’ve news of our own that’s not so cheerful, either, but that can wait. Joss!” He turned to shout up the stairs, where the altercation about shirts seemed to be getting noisier. “Help yourself to one of my shirts—we’re the same size! And stop makin’ such a to-do. Liza’s come to see us! That’s Joss, one of Laurence and Elena’s boys,” he added to Liza. “Not a boy now—he’s grown up since you last saw him. Well, let’s get you and Higg here dry and settled.”

  Before long the whole family, including cousin Joss in his borrowed shirt, had gathered in the big main room to drink mulled ale and exchange news. Liza told them of Margaret’s strange malady, though she did not mention the hair shirt. Her mother had said she was not to tell the Weavers why she had really left Herbert, and Liza would not disobey her. Besides, even to think of her mother in that self-imposed discomfort was anguish and she knew she couldn’t speak of it without crying.

  “The nuns seem to be looking after her as best they can,” she said. “Now, tell me where my brother Arthur is.”

  “That’s the thing we’ve got to break to you,” said Tommy. “When all the trouble broke out, the lord of Dunster Castle, Lord Pembroke, I mean, sent someone round to do some recruiting. Or conscripting, rather. He took Arthur, and another of Laurence’s sons—the youngest one, Dickon. Twenty-seven, he was. Good job neither of them was married. They didn’t leave widows and children crying for them and that’s something. I’m sorry, Liza. They were killed in the fighting before Pembroke was captured. There’s a lot of families in Dunster that have lost men. We didn’t send word to Allerbrook because the news was all muddled at first. We kept hoping maybe it was wrong. We didn’t get firsthand word until a Dunster lad came home a month ago.”

  “Arthur—dead?” She had not let them see that she wanted to cry for her mother, but the tears pricked now, for her brother. “Oh, no!”

  “Aye.” That was Great-Uncle Will, still in his familiar chair although by now he was over eighty-five. “Tommy’s your dad’s heir now, Liza.”

  “Better not send word to St. Catherine’s,” said Liza. “It would do Mother no good to hear of it. Oh, this cruel war! My husband’s away, too, though we’ve heard he’s alive, but when he’ll come home I’ve no idea!”

  “More mulled ale for you, my girl,” said Tommy. “Try not to be too sad. The lad who came home said he saw Arthur die and it was quick. One sword slash and it was over. Let’s hope it was the same for Dickon.”

  “I’m glad of that,” said Liza in a strained voice, and did not repeat what Richard had once told them, that people reporting such deaths always said they had been quick, whether it was true or not.

  Laurence and Elena were both at supper and Liza thought that although they were of course not young, they looked older than they really were. They had lost two sons now to the fi
ghting between Lancaster and York and grief had left its mark.

  The supper was generous and as good in quality as ever it had been under Margaret’s skilled guidance. Higg, who had been given dry clothes from the skin outward, while his own steamed in the kitchen, partook like everyone else, although Liza noticed that he didn’t seem to be eating much.

  “Aren’t you hungry, Higg?” she asked, leaning forward to speak to him down the table.

  “Seemingly not so very, Mistress,” Higg said. Or rather, croaked.

  “Higg! What’s wrong with your voice?”

  “I’m sort of husky, Mistress. It’ll be the damp that’s done it, I daresay.”

  Liza got to her feet and walked down the table to put a hand on his wrist. It almost burned her fingers.

  “You have a fever! You should be in bed.”

  “How is he?” Liza asked next morning, encountering Tommy as she climbed up to the attic room where Higg had been put to bed.

  “Not too well, Liza. Go in and see for yourself. Elena’s brewing him a draught—she’s handy with herbs. Horehound and honey, she says, for his throat and feverfew to cool him.”

  Liza went on and into the room, not without a shiver because although it was so many years ago, this was the very room where she had been not only imprisoned but beaten. But the memories fled when she saw Higg lying on a pallet, his face flushed and his breath coming harshly.

  “Sorry, Mistress. Can’t talk much.”

  “Elena will bring you something. Then you must try to sleep.” He was warm enough; coverlets had been placed over him and the weather was sunny again. If only it had been sunny on that two-day ride! “I’m sorry I dragged you on this journey. But we shall get you well again and I’ll stay here until you are. I’ll send a message to Allerbrook to explain.”