The House of Lanyon

by Valerie Anand

  “Yes, I see. And with that wound still giving trouble…well, keep him warm and try to induce a sweat. There is poison in his blood, a black and evil earth humour, but sweat may bring it out. Though…”

  “I know,” said Walter. “Send for a priest. My grandson has already gone to get Father Matthew.”

  When the physician had left, Walter went back to Baldwin. Catherine looked around. Her kitten face was very pale. “It was such a foolish thing. An argument about precedence on a silly bridge!” She let out a sudden sob, as much of anger as distress. “What a stupid thing to die for!”

  “He may not die. He’s strong,” said Walter, but there was little hope in his voice. “I dislike the Lanyons so much,” he said, “that once I’d have been in sympathy with Baldwin simply because of that, but now—I’m getting old, my dear. It is a stupid thing and it’s his own fault. I know.”

  Nicky sat in his window seat, as he had done the night he ran away to follow the man he thought was his father to Bosworth. He was waiting for the house to sink into slumber. He had laid his plans more carefully this time, as he now knew that when he ran off on that occasion, his mother had heard the harness-room door close. Sunset’s bridle and saddle were already hidden under a bush in a corner of the ponies’ paddock. No one would hear anything this time, indeed they wouldn’t. He was taking Sunset, not the chestnut pony Ned Crowham had lent him. Peter, who had never forgiven Ned for forcing him to change sides, had not returned the chestnut to the Crowham manor house but had sold it and given Nicky the money. Nicky therefore had funds and he was taking those as well.

  He had made a fool of himself, of course; thrown away his dignity. He shouldn’t have screamed and raged like that when his father…no, Master Peter Lanyon…chose to honour a Sunday morning by telling him that he was no longer the heir to Allerbrook. The news had taken him by surprise. In fact, he had never really thought about being grown-up and living on after his father and grandfather were gone, and inheriting all that they had owned, except for a dowry for Quentin.

  But once it was explained, then he knew how much he cared for Allerbrook and how much he felt that he belonged here. It was cruel to do this to him, cruel to blame him for what his mother had done. He had said that, shrieked it almost, flung himself at Father—no, Master Lanyon—tried to cling to him, tried to make things go back to where they were, when this man was truly his father and he was the son of the house and…

  Master Lanyon had detached his grasping hands, not roughly, but firmly. He had said something about helping Nicky to find another future life, even made suggestions about it. Would Nicky like to learn to weave properly, or be apprenticed to Herbert Dyer, or to a merchant? Nicky, sickened and furious, had turned away and run crying out of the room.

  No, not dignified. He was old enough to behave better. His world had fallen apart, but he shouldn’t have fallen to pieces himself. At his age, he knew, the dead king, Richard III, had had a man’s work to do, raising arms for his brother. It was time for Nicky, too, to become a man. He would need help, and yes, he would have to find a new future, but the Lanyons would have nothing to do with it.

  His real father couldn’t help him. He was a priest and he’d gone to the north of England, so his mother had said. But Nicky still had a real family, after all—his mother’s folk in Dunster. He didn’t understand how his mother could have broken her marriage vows, but she was still his mother; the affection she had given him all through the years was still a warmth in his memory, which was more than could be said for his grandfather’s harshness. And after all, whatever else she had done, she had given him life.

  That much he did understand. Working it out, painfully, through sleepless nights, he had recognised that he was glad to be alive and could hardly, therefore, turn in fury on those responsible for his existence. That would be unjust, and he knew injustice when he saw it. Grandfa—Richard Lanyon—had demonstrated it for him, all too plainly.

  The house was silent now. Father Matthew had made sure that he could read and write competently and he had penned a letter in which he explained why he was going and where. He laid it on his bed and weighed it down with an empty candlestick. He picked up his cloak and a bundle of belongings he had made ready, and tiptoed to the door. Letting himself out, he made his way noiselessly down the stairs, into the hall, and unbolted the outer door. The dogs in the kitchen sensed him and he heard them stir, but they knew his smell and didn’t bark.

  Like a shadow he slipped away from the house and into the pony paddock. There had been some rain during the day, but the tack he had left under the bush had been protected and was dry. Sunset greeted him with a snort but came to hand willingly enough. Nicky saddled him and mounted. The sky was clear, as it had been the first time he ran away, and once again there was a moon, though only half of one. But it was enough.

  He turned his back on home, and rode away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  A SENSE OF ABSENCE

  Tommy Weaver was an early riser. On this shining late September morning, which had a faint smell of frost in the air, he was out of bed at first light and hurrying downstairs in dressing robe and slippers to heat some shaving water, while Susannah still slept. Having roused the fire and set the water pot on the trivet, he said good-morning to the maidservants who by then were coming downstairs, too, and went to unbolt the front door.

  Sitting on the doorstep, a riding cloak huddled around him against the early chill, was his nephew, Nicky Lanyon from Allerbrook.

  “Nicky! What on earth…?”

  Nicky stood up, shivering. “Can I come in, Uncle Tommy?”

  “Of course.” Tommy stood back. “But what are you doing here—when did you come? And why? What’s happened?”

  “I’ve run away,” said Nicky, stepping into the main room as Tommy closed the door after them. “No, that’s wrong.” He turned to face his uncle and Tommy saw that he was at the stage of growth when a boy’s body begins to elongate, to stretch toward manhood, and the contours of his face begin to settle. He had always thought of Nicky as Liza’s little boy, but this youth had ridden with an army and been held prisoner. His boyhood had been left behind at Bosworth. “I didn’t run away,” said Nicky. “I chose to leave, and it’s not the same thing. But I need shelter somewhere and time to think, so I came here, to my mother’s family. Will you let me stay, until I can decide what to do next?”

  “Of course we’ll let you stay, but why did you run…leave home? What’s amiss there?”

  There was a silence. Then Nicky said, “It’ll upset you, Uncle Tommy, if I tell it all. Maybe I’d better not. I was the son of the house and should have inherited Allerbrook and all that goes with it, but I’ve been cut out of Master Lanyon’s will. But it’s not my fault. I’ve done nothing wrong, I promise. Please can we let it go at that?”

  “No, we can’t—don’t talk nonsense!” Tommy barked. “Now, look here…oh, for the love of heaven, look at you, you’re frozen. Sit down. Sit, I said. Don’t stand in the middle of the floor like a tombstone in a churchyard! Wait.” He strode through the door to the kitchen and after a few moments reappeared with a tankard of ale, a chunk of bread, a knife and a pot of honey on a tray, while behind him a maidservant ran up the stairs, calling Susannah’s name.

  “They’re frying some bacon. They’ll bring it in a minute.” He pushed Nicky into a settle and pulled a table within his reach. “Get some food inside you. My wife’ll be down in a minute and I’m going to fetch Cousin Laurence. Whatever it is you’re scared of saying is a boil that needs lancing. I can see that, if you can’t. He’ll help.”

  Leaving Nicky to his breakfast, he went across the road at a run, still in his robe and slippers, to pound on the door of the opposite house. He returned once more within a very short time, with both Laurence and Elena. They, too, were early risers and he had found them up and dressed, though Elena’s grey hair was only roughly combed and she hadn’t put her coif on, and both of them were startled and bewildered by wha
t he had to tell them.

  Susannah, also bareheaded, though she had pulled on a gown and overgown, was with Nicky when they arrived, talking to him while he ate. The bacon had been brought and he was obviously ravenous. He rose to greet his cousins, but Laurence told him to sit down again and finish eating.

  “Then tell us what’s brought you here. It must have been something serious to bring you riding through the night.”

  With Laurence’s arrival, family authority had come into the room. Tommy looked at him gratefully and even Nicky seemed steadied by his elder cousin’s presence, though when he had gulped his final mouthful, his first words were, “I can’t explain properly. None of it makes sense. I can’t stay at Allerbrook and I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to say things.”

  “I think there are things you will have to say,” said Laurence calmly. “For one thing, Tommy says your father has disinherited you but it isn’t your fault. Whose fault is it, then?”

  “Nicky,” said Susannah, “if you’ve done something to make your father angry, or he thinks you have…well, whatever it was, try to tell us about it. Please. Has it been a…a mistake? I can’t believe you’ve done anything as dreadful as all that.”

  “I didn’t do anything. It wasn’t like that.” The food had made him feel warmer, but the presence all around him of his elders, though reassuring in one way, was also thrusting him back toward his childhood. He had begun to feel like a little boy again, and worse than that, a little boy close to tears. The night ride had been not only cold, but frightening.

  He hadn’t felt like that the night he ran off to join his father on the way to war, because then he had ridden across open moorland, in bright moonlight. This time the moon was waning and rose late, and the last part of the ride had in any case been through the woods above the village of Timberscombe, farther up the Avill Valley than Dunster was.

  No moonlight came through the dark trees that met above his head and although he kept telling himself not to be afraid, that there was nothing to fear, every gruesome tale he had heard in his childhood came back to him. On dark nights, ghosts and witches and demons might be abroad. Anything might be lurking in the shadows to either side. He had felt sick with the long-drawn-out dread by the time he came at last across the packhorse bridge and into the safety of the sleeping village. And after that, after turning the pony into the Weavers’ paddock and leaving the tack in the shelter they had built there for the animals, and walking back to their house, he had had to sit on the cold doorstep for what seemed like an eternity.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m tired. I rode nearly all night. The pony’s in your field, Uncle Tommy. It was still night and I didn’t want to wake anyone up, so I sat on the step till morning.”

  “Nicky!” said Tommy protestingly.

  “Is it a girl? Have you got a girl with child, even at your age?” asked Laurence.

  “Oh, surely not!” Elena put a hand over her mouth.

  “No, I haven’t!”

  “Nicky,” Laurence said, “you must tell us! Someone else in your family will if you don’t. One of us will ride out there and ask!”

  Nicky gave in. “Father…Master Lanyon…says I’m not his son and Mother’s been shut up in one of our spare rooms, crying all the time. Quentin took food to her. She’s come out now, but she walks about like a ghost, not speaking. Not even to me, though when she sees me, she starts to cry again. And hardly anyone ever speaks to her. Master Lanyon says my real father’s someone called Christopher Clerk—”

  “Christopher Clerk?” said Laurence. “Him!”

  “Yes. Coming home from the war, we came on him and Mother together, sitting in a hollow on the moor, and I look just like him and so I’m not a Lanyon and I can’t inherit Allerbrook and…I don’t want people to know about my mother. I didn’t want to tell you!”

  “Oh, dear God!” said Tommy.

  Susannah, practical and acute, said, “You can rely on us for one thing. We’ll keep your secret. Now that we know what really happened. Won’t we?” She looked appealingly at the others, who nodded.

  “We’ll never tell anyone,” said Laurence. “You came here because you weren’t happy at Allerbrook. We’ll say that. Your grandfather’s a hard man. Anyone who’s met him knows it. Don’t worry.”

  That same night, in the candlelit sickroom at Sweetwater House, Walter and Catherine tried to quieten Baldwin as he tossed and struggled to breathe, and then saw him lapse into silence and coma and the harsh rattle of approaching death. In the unsteady light Walter’s eyes met Catherine’s across the bed. “I think I should wake John.”

  Catherine picked up Baldwin’s hand and then the tears began to run, silently, down her face. “There’s no life in his hand,” she said. “He can’t feel me. Baldwin, I’m here. Can you hear me? It’s your Kitten!”

  Walter left the room, but met John just outside the door, out of his own bed already, a cloak thrown around him. “I just woke and felt as if…”

  “Yes. He’s going, I think. Come in.”

  Others followed him, wakened, it seemed, by the same instinct which had roused John: the steward Denis Sawyer, Catherine’s maid, Amy. They gathered at the bedside. After a time, the painful breathing grew very faint and there came a gap so long that for a moment they thought it had stopped. Then came another gasp for air and Catherine thought wildly, “I’m still married. I’m still Baldwin’s wife. My husband is still alive.”

  Baldwin, loud, arrogant Baldwin, had not always been an easy man to live with, but he had never ill-used her. They had lived their parallel lives, meeting at board and bed and on social occasions; otherwise keeping to their own worlds. Baldwin had his horses, his hawks, his hounds and his weapons; Catherine oversaw the household, plied her needle and tended her herb garden. She had been restful; he had been protective. It had worked.

  The worst criticism he had ever made of her was when he remarked once or twice that it was unlucky that she had had a difficult time bearing John and never thereafter conceived again. Even then, he qualified it, every time, by adding that John was healthy; no one could say she hadn’t done her duty and provided an heir. She had been content as his wife.

  Some minutes later, she knew that she had become a widow.

  “Well, he can’t stop here,” said Aunt Cecy flatly, sitting very upright despite her eighty-two years and behaving as though she were in charge of this family conclave in the big room at the Weavers’ house. “It b’ain’t decent.”

  “It’s not for you to say!” snapped Laurence. “If it’s for anyone, it’s for Tommy and me. None of this is the boy’s fault. He’s Liza’s son and there’s no doubt about that!”

  “Yes, and what’s Liza? A strumpet! She tried to run off with that man when she was a girl and now it seems she’s had him after all, and Nicky’s the result. Bad blood will out, my boy!”

  “Since I’m over seventy, I’m not going to be called a boy by you or anyone else,” said Laurence, turning red as he always did when he was angry. “Nicky’s a boy, though, poor lad, and he’s brave in his way and he’s Liza’s son, no matter who fathered him. Tommy, what do you say?”

  “I agree. I don’t want to see Liza ever again, but Nicky himself is a different matter. Susannah agrees—don’t you, Susannah? And what about you, Cousin Elena?”

  “Nicky’s not to blame, but I’d rather not see Liza again either,” said Susannah. “She might be bad company for our Joanna.”

  “I’ve always felt a bit sorry for Liza,” Elena remarked. “Seems to me that maybe she and Christopher Clerk really loved each other. He might have found a way to free himself from the church or else, well, there’s many a priest has a comely housekeeper, or an arrangement with a woman somewhere, and many a priest that has nieces or nephews, so-called, and everyone knows they’re really his, but no one comments. Maybe we should have let her go.”

  “Never!” said Tommy, outraged. “This is a respectable family. We’d never tolerate such a thing. We gave her a
decent marriage to a decent man and she should have been grateful.”

  “And once you’re wed, you’re wed,” said Aunt Cecy. “Tommy’s right. What’s she got to complain of, I’d like to know? Living in a fine house now, b’ain’t she, highly respected and all the rest of it? Yet she goes and behaves like this! I call her a strumpet and I don’t want that boy of hers here. Besides, what use is he? He’ll never be any good on a loom.”

  “That,” remarked Laurence’s son Joss, who was among the most gifted weavers in the family, “is true enough. Put Nicky in front of a loom and…well…”

  They all nodded and, in some cases, sighed. The mayhem that Nicky could wreak on even the simplest piece of weaving suggested not so much ineptitude as some kind of perverse imagination.

  “No, he’ll never make a weaver,” said Laurence. “But he’s old enough to be apprenticed to a trade. We just have to find one where he won’t cause muddle and confusion. Where is he now?”

  “At the field, looking at his pony,” said Elena.

  “He’s an active lad,” said Tommy. “There’s a merchant I know in Lynmouth—he takes cheeses and iron and leather goods abroad and imports things like silk and brocade and foreign wines and dyestuffs. Brings in dyes for Herbert Dyer—that’s how I met him. Once when I was in Lynmouth I went into an alehouse, and there they were. If he’s willing to take on an extra apprentice, that might suit Nicky.”

  “What’s his name?” Laurence asked.

  “Owen ap Idwal. He’s a Welshman, but he married a Lynmouth girl and settled there so as she could be near her kin. He sails with his ship sometimes, does his own selling and buying. Nicky might get a chance to travel and I somehow fancy he’d like that.”