The House of Lanyon

by Valerie Anand

  John said mildly, “Does it really matter? They’re not our tenants now so why should we care what kind of house they build for themselves?”

  His seniors regarded him with irritation. He was a Sweetwater as far as his solid build was concerned, but he had Catherine’s dark hair, and his well-shaped blue eyes were hers, too. He also had something of her sweet-natured temperament, which was becoming in a woman but completely unsuitable in a Sweetwater male.

  “He’s an upstart,” said Walter. “It doesn’t do to have peasants saying they are gentlemen and gentlemen forced into penury.” The amount he had spent to get Agnes married and the means by which he had acquired it would rankle for the rest of his life. Also, the Sweetwaters had gained nothing from the marriage. Agnes had become wholly a Northcote and had brought no valuable contacts or lucrative posts within reach of her blood relatives. She wrote to them now and then; that was all.

  “A man should stay where God has put him,” said Walter virtuously. “Social whirligigs are unhealthy. They make plain men restive, and who will till the fields if the labourers think themselves too grand?”

  “That whole family has pretensions,” said Baldwin furiously. “I hate the Lanyons. One day, our chance will come.”

  “But…” John was clearly about to express a point of view not in accordance with Sweetwater tradition. His father and grandfather, recognising the symptoms, turned to him frowning, but the threatening argument was disarmed by the clatter of hooves as Denis Sawyer rode in, followed by a groom leading a well-laden pack pony.

  “Ah, here’s Denis,” said Walter, not altogether displeased by the interruption. He was now fifty-six, and sometimes, to his own annoyance, felt wearied by things which in the past had stimulated him, and his dislike of the Lanyons was on that list. Heartily as he loathed them, he no longer had the energy to do more than abuse them verbally, and he didn’t like family disputes, either. Baldwin was the one with the violent passions now.

  “Sir!” Sawyer began to talk while he was still in the saddle. “Sir, there’s news! It’s running through Dunster like fire in peat. There’s not much doubt that it’s true! King Edward is dead!”

  The news was brought to Allerbrook by Ned Crowham, who rode from his home on purpose to tell them. “Because you live so far from anywhere—I wondered if you’d heard,” he said as they welcomed him in. “I don’t visit you often enough myself. It’s twenty miles of wilderness and I feel I’m travelling to the moon. In winter I don’t even try. It’s only when spring arrives that I can face the thought of it. Isabel the Second sends her kind greetings,” he added with a smile.

  Except for putting on yet more weight he was still, at nearly forty-four, recognisably the Ned Crowham he had been at nineteen when he came to George Lanyon’s funeral, even though he had long since lost his own father and was now Sir Ned Crowham of Crowham in east Somerset, and had added substantially to his family estates through a couple of wealthy marriages. His first wife had died young of a wasting sickness, leaving him with no children but in possession of the valuable Dorset manor which had been her dowry. His second wife had presented him with three sons and another valuable manor in Nottinghamshire. He travelled a good deal between the three counties where he owned land.

  As it happened, both his wives had been named Isabel, for which reason Ned usually referred to his present spouse as Isabel the Second. He was still fond of a joke, though he took life more seriously now that he was a man of property and had served at court. On his occasional visits to Allerbrook, both Peter and Liza had noticed how, now and then, if some political subject arose in conversation, his eyes would become expressionless and his face very still, as though he were thinking over things that he knew but did not wish to share.

  He had come to share knowledge this time, however, and when Peter said, “But how did the king die? What happened? He wasn’t an old man,” Ned knew the answer.

  “He went fishing, got wet, caught cold, was gone in a week,” said Ned. “Spring weather can be treacherous. Ninth of April, that was the date…” On the verge of taking a seat, he turned away and went back to the door, pushing it open. “Listen!”

  “What is it?” Peter came to his side.

  “Church bells, down in Clicket. Father Matthew is tolling a death. The news was hard behind me, clearly.”

  “I’ll send Nicky to tell my father. He and Jarvis are out seeing to the lambing. Where’s Nicky?” Peter asked as Liza, who had gone to fetch food and drink, came back into the hall with a tray.

  “In the stable cleaning harness with Hodge. I’ll give him the message.”

  “Oh, send Hodge and let Nicky finish his work.” Peter took his friend’s arm and led him back to the comfort of a seat by the fire. “Hard work’s good for him. How do you like our new house, now that it’s finished, Ned? We’ve got extra people to help us run it, too.”

  It wouldn’t, Liza knew, be wise to say as much to Richard and she never had, but the two years and four months it had taken to bring the new Allerbrook House into being had, in her opinion, been two years of purgatory.

  It had been bad enough at the beginning, when they just lived in the few habitable rooms of the old house. They were squeezed for space even though they cleared a barn to use as a dairy, and the ominous creaking every time they trod on certain upstairs floorboards which extended into the damaged rooms at the front had worried her badly. It was impossible to hold any gatherings or even invite the Hannacombes to dine. But as time went on, things became still worse. Richard had held to his plan of knocking the old house down bit by bit in order to use the stone. He had decided to buy from the quarry he had used when building the hall, rather than bring supplies in from Peter’s, partly because it was a better match in colour, and partly to save on transport costs.

  “Though five miles is quite far enough,” he said. “And stone’s costly to start with. We’d better not waste our ruined farmhouse.”

  They could not knock the farmhouse down and simultaneously live in it, and before long the Lanyons had been obliged to camp—there was no other word for it, Liza said bitterly to herself—mostly in the hall. She arranged beds at one end, pushing tables and seating to the other. The place still looked congested, especially as her loom had to be put in the hall, as well. No guests could be asked there, either.

  The process of demolishing the farmhouse was difficult, too, for the massive walls could be broken only by levering the stones loose one at a time, with crowbars. Or, as Peter said grimly, by a boulder crashing down a steep hillside with a flood to help it on its way, but they couldn’t conjure that up to order.

  The masons were not a problem. When the hall was built, they had been accommodated in the farmhouse; this time they took lodgings in Clicket. Once again, however, there were hitches with the waggons which brought the stone. No wheels came off this time, but the brakes on one waggon broke on a steep downhill stretch of track and the driver prevented a bad accident only by turning his ox team and urging them up a bank. The waggon stopped but toppled sideways, spilling half its load. Neither the oxen nor the men in charge were harmed, but once more there was a long delay while repairs were carried out. Richard’s curses when he heard of it bordered on the blasphemous.

  When the work was finally finished, Liza ventured one complaint, half a joke. “The air’s still full of stone dust and sawdust. I doubt I’ll ever get it out of the linen, or even out of my lungs!”

  There was a grim truth behind the jest, for Roger never did get the dust out of his lungs. He and Kat, of course, had their own cottage, but they were often at the farmstead and the haze that continually hung over the site made Roger cough. Before the new house was finished, he took to his bed and died of a choking phlegm. Kat, after a few angry words flung at Richard’s head, went to live with a married daughter in Lynmouth.

  “I’ll stop on,” Betsy said. “I’ve been here so long I don’t want to move. But it seems to me that ’ee’ve paid for this here house with lives, Eddie’s and R
oger’s, and it’ll bring bad luck in the end, mark what I say.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense!” Richard barked, but added that he knew the house and farm couldn’t be run with so few people, and ordered Peter to find two more men and two more maidservants. “We’ve room for them now that we’ve moved in, as it were.”

  It was September, the time of year for hiring fairs, so Peter went to one and came back with two farmhands called Hodge and Alfred, and a pair of jolly young sisters named Phoebe and Ellen.

  Alfred was stolid, amiable, a sound worker and not given to wenching, but Hodge and Phoebe were now married, of necessity, since Hodge, far from being stolid, was good-looking and silver-tongued, and almost the first thing he did at Allerbrook was to get Phoebe with child.

  “Bad luck, like I said” was Betsy’s comment.

  “Bloody careless,” said Richard, and Jarvis Hannacombe, who—because the girl preferred another swain and passed her condition off as his responsibility—had narrowly escaped enforced matrimony with a lass in Clicket, put on a prim face and said, “Not the right thing at all, fouling his own doorstep, like.”

  “He’s good with the sheep,” said Richard, “and Phoebe’s a wantwit to let it happen. But she’s handy with a broom, I’ll say that for her. They can have Kat’s cottage, and no more talk of bad luck, Betsy, if you please!”

  The new Lanyon household had shaken down together and they had been in their completed new home now for a week. To Liza, it was an immense relief.

  It was even possible, she thought, now that life was returning to normal, that everything else would return to normal, too. Maybe Nicky would even become his trustful, affectionate, if sometimes disobedient self again.

  The beating after the death of Eddie had been reinforced at times by further beatings from his grandfather. Peter took no part in these but did nothing to prevent them, either. “My father may be right. I just don’t want to do it myself,” he had said to Liza when she protested.

  The outcome was that Nicky had now become more or less what Richard and Peter wanted him to be—respectful, hardworking and courteously spoken. Only Liza was aware that the loving side of his nature seemed to have died. He rarely laughed these days, and sometimes she had seen him do something she thought he had learned from Peter (who had demonstrated it frequently after arguments with his father about the expense of the new house), which was to chop wood or do some other physical task with furious violence, as though to relieve a secret rage.

  Well, the news of the king’s death ought to distract all of them. “What will happen?” she asked when she returned from sending Hodge with the message.

  “The king’s elder son is in Ludlow, up in Shropshire,” said Ned. “He will be brought to London and crowned, I suppose. Richard of Gloucester is the Protector of the Realm until the prince comes of age. He’s in Yorkshire, but I imagine he’ll be sent for. There may be trouble.”

  “Why trouble?” Peter asked. “The succession’s clear enough.”

  “Gloucester will control the country and Gloucester loathes the queen’s family, the Woodvilles,” said Ned simply. “And they’ve got half the good posts in the kingdom. They’ve also had charge of the elder prince until now. His maternal uncle, Anthony Lord Rivers, is his guardian. It’s an interesting state of affairs. Let us hope it doesn’t lead to fighting.”

  “If it does lead to fighting,” said Herbert Dyer to his son Simon, “you might have to go. You’re only thirty-five. We’d better pray for peace. I don’t like these rumours that the Woodvilles tried to keep control of the king’s person.”

  “Gloucester seems to have dealt with them. The queen’s in sanctuary, one of her sons has fled the country and her brother Lord Rivers is under arrest. Though I don’t suppose Prince Edward is any too grateful for that,” said Simon. “Rivers looked after him in Ludlow. However, if it comes to the point and the Protector calls for extra men, I’ll do my duty, as all honest men should.”

  It was a sour joke, understood only by the two of them. Since Richard’s ultimatum, years ago, their workshop had been so extremely honest in its dealings that Herbert Dyer and his son had acquired a shining reputation for miles around. They had been complimented on it often and publicly. On the whole, it had been worthwhile, since it had brought in business enough to compensate for the money that virtue had lost them.

  But Herbert, lying at night in his solitary bed, missed Margaret so intensely that he rarely spoke of her, because to do so made the wound of her loss throb so very badly. He would never forget the bitter words with which they had parted. To his life’s end, he would regret the things he had said to her, and shrink from remembering the things she had said to him. It had been the interfering Lanyons’ fault. He would never forgive them for dividing him from Margaret.

  Nor would either he or Simon ever forget or forgive the threat that Richard held over them. Simon’s wife, who knew nothing of the threat or what had led to it, sometimes heard them make sardonic jests about honesty and was often puzzled. She remained puzzled to the end of her days, for they never told her the truth.

  News usually reached Dunster Castle promptly. The son of the Earl of Pembroke who had died before Barnet and Tewkesbury were fought, another William Herbert who was now Earl of Huntingdon, took marginally more interest in the castle than his father had. He had never set foot in the place, either, but he styled himself Lord Dunster and he recognised a political crisis when he saw one and wished to be prepared for trouble if it came. That meant preparing any castles which happened to be in his charge.

  When he learned, firstly, that Richard of Gloucester had executed Lord Rivers, the young king’s maternal uncle and erstwhile guardian, and then, astoundingly, that someone (rumour pointed fingers at Gloucester himself and also at Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, a diocese which included Dunster itself) was casting doubt on the lawfulness of the late king’s marriage and therefore on the legitimacy of his two sons, Lord Dunster sent his orders. These were accompanied by money with which to carry them out and a squad of men to reinforce the skeleton garrison at Dunster.

  The castle was to be put into a state of defence, with crossbows and cannon; the storerooms were to be filled with nonperishable food, the walls were to be checked and trees which might help an enemy gain entrance were to be cut down. Father Christopher and Miles Hilton, who had been in charge of the castle hitherto, and to some extent still were because they knew it thoroughly while the captain of the new garrison did not, found themselves extremely busy.

  On the day Christopher had so graphically pointed out the shortcomings of the castle maintenance, adding the fact that he was strong enough to put pressure on Master Hilton in a most direct and physical manner, Hilton had been furious. However, time and some diplomacy on Christopher’s part had eroded this somewhat.

  “I don’t mean that you ought to get behind a broom or take to mending tapestries,” Christopher had said reasonably. “Only that you ought to make other people do it.”

  As it chanced, a few months after that Hilton found himself a wife, the bright young widow of a Dunster woodworker. The woodworker had been much older than she was, well established in his trade, and of a saving disposition. Dying, he left her with a coffer full of silver. On her side, Mistress Anne Fry was accustomed to keep her house neat and when she joined her new husband at the castle, saw no reason that shouldn’t be kept neat, as well. Mistress Anne had done a great deal to smooth the friction between priest and steward.

  Now, while the political news turned into a whirligig, with power spinning from boy king to Woodvilles to Richard of Gloucester, Christopher and Hilton worked in double harness in something like accord. Both were equally horrified when, at length, a messenger on a tired horse clattered up the long slope to the gatehouse to announce that the Duke of Gloucester was now King Richard III and that the young ex-king Edward and his brother were lodged in the Tower of London out of the public eye, and King Richard’s coronation would be on July 6.
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br />   “There’ll be risings, sooner or later,” said Hilton as he and Christopher stood on the walls looking out over Dunster High Street and watching the everyday traffic below, of people on ponies and people on foot, coming and going. For all his idle airs, Miles Hilton was politically sharp enough. “Boys turn into men. The princes have been dispossessed and they won’t forget it and nor will a good many others. A party will gather round them as they grow up. There are still Woodvilles in influential places and they’ll lead the way. Trouble’s coming, for sure. That is, if the boys grow up.”

  “You mean…but they’re King Edward’s sons!” Christopher was scandalised. “Gloucester was always faithful to Edward. Loyalty Binds Me is his motto.”

  “King Edward’s dead,” said Hilton. “But Gloucester may prefer to stay alive, and if there were to be a successful rising on behalf of those boys, I doubt if he’d live long. Besides, he’s inured to such things. King Henry VI died very conveniently, after Tewkesbury. Very conveniently. Nothing could have drawn the She-Wolf’s teeth as effectively as that. All her wars were to put him back on the throne so that she could be the power behind it, and in the fullness of time, behind their son. But the son was killed on the field, and as for King Henry—do you remember the proclamations? That he had died of displeasure and melancholy? No one believed a word of it. King Edward only let the French king ransom her because she could do no more harm.”

  “Yes. I heard that she died a year or so back,” Christopher said. “As King Louis’ pensioner, and apparently it wasn’t much of a pension. But the boys would be a different matter. Dispossessed kings are likely to turn into dead kings—that’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I do. Those boys are lodged in the Tower. What if something happened to them there? Who, outside it, would know exactly what? No one knows for sure what happened to the other royal brother—George of Clarence—the one who kept betraying King Edward. He was shut in the Tower and supposed to have drunk himself to death on Greek malmsey, but how does anyone know?”