“He’s got to be settled somewhere,” Susannah said. “He mustn’t be turned out to wander. But I think it’s best if he doesn’t stay here.”
“It would be encouraging wantonness, to take him in,” said Cecy stiffly. “But find him an apprenticeship, by all means. And there’s no need to ask him what he wants. He ought to be glad of anything.”
Several members of the Weaver tribe exchanged secret glances. Aunt Cecy would never grasp that she wasn’t the head of the household. They had learned to see the comic side of it.
To have Blue Lyn saddled and take him out for exercise was all that Walter Sweetwater could now do for Baldwin. The house was full of weeping, but there was a dreadful sense of absence, too. Baldwin’s hectoring voice was so very much not there; far more so than if he were merely hunting or hawking or even gone to a war.
It always seemed unnatural for a child to go before a parent, though it was common enough. Agnes and Baldwin had not been the only children that Mary had borne him. There had been two other little boys, both dead of childhood illnesses before their fourth birthdays. Baldwin, though, had thrived, had lived to manhood, married and had a son, had ridden to battle and come back alive. He shouldn’t have died of a mere chill and a wound that ought to have healed—was healing, until he got into the fight, which reopened the wound, and fell into the river, which gave him the chill.
Now he was being washed and laid out by the womenfolk and his father couldn’t bear to stay indoors and Blue Lyn was fretting in his stall. Baldwin would have wanted someone to exercise him.
The horse, sidling and restless, needed a good gallop on the moors to take the itch out of his hooves, but to begin with, Walter guided him toward the fields of the home farm to the west of Clicket, a little patchwork of meadow and barley fields like a patterned coverlet, lying smoothly over a couple of low hills and stroked by some gigantic hand down into the deep crease between them.
Walter was making for the meadow where his sheep, which had been brought off the moor for the winter, were now grazing. The flock would have to be moved in a day or two. Edward Searle had told him that sheep should never stay on the same pasture long enough to hear the Sunday church bells ring twice. The pasture would grow rank with their droppings if they did. Out on the moor, they usually moved themselves.
“Folk think they’m foolish things, sheep,” Searle had said, “but that’s just because they’re creatures of the flock and like to be together. It looks as if they just do what the sheep alongside is doing, and can’t think for themselves, but you’d be surprised, once you get to know ’un. It’s a wonder to me, just as much now as it ever was, that when I’ve had to separate lambs from their mothers awhile, as we do at shearing, and then turn the little ones back into the flock again, the way lambs and dams know each other. To us, the ewes all look alike and the lambs all look alike, and sound alike, too, but they know. It’s a marvel, that’s what it is.”
Edward Searle had understood and loved his woolly charges and in the end had died among them. His heart had stopped when he was out in a meadow with them, wanting to look at a ewe that he said seemed sickly. His son Toby had found him, just lying there in the grass, quite quiet and peaceful. Toby was a skilled shepherd, too, not quite as tall and impressive as his father, but shaped in a similar mould all the same and devoted to his work, and his eldest son Edmund, who was grown up now and worked with his father, followed the same pattern.
It had been something of a joke with Baldwin that when Toby married, the bride he brought home from nearby Withypool had pale curly hair, a bleating little voice and yellow-brown eyes very much like those of a sheep. Baldwin had said things. Baldwin had a broad, not to say crude, sense of humour….
And now Baldwin’s father, trotting Blue Lyn along the path beside the sheep meadow, found his eyes stinging. He would have sold his soul at that moment to hear Baldwin laughing in his loud way at one of his own rude jokes.
What roused him from his sorrow was actually the sound of noisily bleating sheep, and as he came in sight of their meadow he saw what had happened. There was a bramble bush at the far end of it, and one of the ewes had got her fleece caught in the thorns. The rest were gathered around her in an anxious semicircle, bleating in sympathy. Spurring Blue Lyn to a canter, he hurried to the gate, pulled up and dismounted. Tying his horse’s reins to the gatepost, he went in and made for the scene of disaster.
Which really was a disaster. He had seen it happen before. Sheep clearly did have sense and feeling enough to be concerned if one of the flock was in trouble, but why in the world they didn’t have sense enough not to try conclusions with bramble bushes in the first place, he could never understand. Edward Searle had overestimated their intelligence in some ways. There were some ripe blackberries on the bush and the ewe had probably tried to get at them, but didn’t these creatures know they had fleecy coats that caught on thorns?
He was wearing gloves, since the day, though clear, was not especially warm, but they weren’t very thick. This, thought Walter as he began an attempt at rescue, was going to be difficult. It would have helped if the ewe had cooperated, but she was already frightened and when he took hold of her, she began to struggle, entangling herself more thoroughly than ever and kicking him hard on the knee. The oaths he let out did nothing to calm her. He tried to get a prickly branch out of the wool on her shoulder and as he had feared, the thorns went straight through his glove and drew blood, causing him to swear again.
“Need help?” enquired a voice from beyond the hedgerow that separated the pasture from the lane. Walter, still half-crouched in order to hold on to the ewe, glanced around but could see only a brown woollen cap and part of a forehead above the bushes.
“I’d be glad of it!” he called, and heard whoever it was encourage his horse into a canter, going along to the gate. A moment later the newcomer was running back through the field to join him and another pair of hands, not gloved but strong and leathery from outdoor work, were there beside his, bravely tackling the brambles. “If you’ll hold her still, sir, I think I can get this branch loose….”
“Here.” Belatedly, Walter remembered that as usual, he was carrying a dagger. He pulled it out. “Cut the fleece free where it’s caught the worst. Keep still, you damned stupid animal! I think she thinks I’ve come to turn her into cutlets. So I will, my girl, if you kick me again!”
The other sheep had drawn off to a little distance but were still watching, from time to time emitting anxious baas. Walter, who now had both hands free for the task, gripped the ewe so that she could no longer struggle while his unexpected helper eased some of the prickly stems away and sliced through the fleece where there seemed no chance of disentanglement.
At last they both stepped back, to let the freed ewe bound past them and rejoin her friends, who greeted her with a different note in their bleating, of welcome and relief, before they all flowed away in a woolly stream, which slowed down as it got out into the field, spread apart and stopped to graze.
“My thanks.” Walter turned to look at his companion, whom he now recognised. “Good God! Peter Lanyon! What brought you past here?”
“I was up on the moor, looking at our pony herd, and I came back this way, meaning to take a tankard in the Hart before I went home. Er…Master Sweetwater, my farmhand Alfred was in Clicket early this morning.” Peter spoke cautiously. “He went to see Father Matthew. He’s to marry soon. Father Matthew told him about your son and when he came back, he told me. I am very sorry for your loss. Please believe me.”
“Baldwin said it was you he fought and you who shoved him over the bridge into the water.”
“Yes.” The monosyllable was quiet but not apologetic. “Do you know exactly what happened on that bridge, Master Sweetwater?”
“I know what Baldwin told me.” Walter’s eyes were like dull pewter.
“And what, exactly, was that?”
“He challenged your right of way. He admitted that it was your right of way. But if on
ly you’d backed your pony as he asked!”
“He didn’t ask. He ordered. I was nearly across that bridge. When I wouldn’t back, he challenged me to fight and I took the challenge. Would you have backed, Master Sweetwater?”
Walter stared at him, shoulders tense with dislike, and then let them sag. “No. I would not. I can’t like you, Peter Lanyon, though I must thank you for your help just now, but I am not a dishonest man. It’s true. In your place, I suppose I would have done as you did.”
“It ended with Baldwin going over the parapet into the river, but only because he tried to push me over first. I fought back, but I was only saved because my…my boy Nicky was there and ran to me and caught hold of my feet.” It was painful to speak of Nicky. “I went down,” Peter said, “and helped your son out of the water. I told him to go home and get dry. I have heard now that he had a wound from Bosworth, which opened in the struggle—the White Hart is a cauldron of gossip—but I didn’t know of it then. I am sorry it happened, but I didn’t try to kill him, or want to.”
There was a silence. Then Peter said, “After Bosworth, I heard of two westcountrymen, a father and son, hanged at Henry Tudor’s orders because they had been at King Richard’s side when he fell. I wondered at first if they were Baldwin and his son. When I heard that it wasn’t so, I was glad. I wouldn’t have wanted such a thing to happen to them.”
“Baldwin was a fool to pick a fight when he was injured. I know. So do you. You haven’t said it, but I can see you thinking it.”
“If you say so, Master Sweetwater. But when I offer my condolences, I mean them.”
“If I’d realised straightaway that it was you just now, I’d have told you to go to perdition and leave me to deal with my own sheep.”
“And I’d have ignored that and come to help anyway. For the sake of the sheep,” said Peter.
“Bloody Lanyons. Always a thorn in our sides, like bramble in a sheep’s fleece.”
“I sometimes wish,” said Peter, “that we could just be neighbours. Will it offend you if I am in the churchyard when Baldwin is buried? I would mean it respectfully, but I won’t come if you object.”
“I won’t object. Just don’t be noticeable,” said Walter. He sounded tired and Peter, looking at him, saw that the lines in his face told the same story. “I grow weary of feuds,” Walter said. “And people clack their tongues in the White Hart and laugh about us. Baldwin will be buried on Wednesday morning, the twenty-eighth. It will give time for me to send word to his sister. She may wish to come. Just about everyone for miles will be there. The Lanyons may as well join in. If your father allows!”
“I shan’t ask his permission,” said Peter.
Peter had left his pony tied to the other end of the gate where Walter had left his. They walked stiffly back together, loosed their mounts, nodded to each other, got back into their saddles and parted. Peter, forgetting about the tankard of ale, rode home, thinking.
He did indeed feel sorry for Walter’s bereavement and he knew why. Last night Nicky had left home, although this time he had also left a note and they knew where he had gone. Richard had forbidden anyone to go after him and with sorrow, both Peter and Liza had agreed that perhaps this was best. But it was the reason Peter had saddled Plume and taken to the moor this morning. Nicky had been his son for so long, had saved him at the bridge and yet had had to be rejected. Now he had rejected Peter in turn. Nicky was lost and it was a dreadful thing to lose a son. The sense of the boy’s absence hurt so much.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
EXTRAORDINARY CHANGES
Quentin Lanyon loved her family. It came naturally to her. Her parents and brother were dear to her and if her grandfather was dictatorial he was nevertheless still her grandfather and it was normal for people to love their grandparents. It did not occur to her to question these things.
One day, she supposed, she would have a husband and children and would love them, as well. Beneath all this, like the hidden foundations of a house, was the assumption that all her family members loved each other.
This foundation had occasionally shuddered—for instance when Grandfather was harsh with Nicky—but always, hitherto, peace had been restored in the end. She had never envisaged a state of affairs where love would cease altogether, where the family would be split into factions, with her mother ostracised and tearful and her brother no longer a member of the family at all. It was beyond her comprehension.
At the beginning, when Liza had shut herself into a spare bedchamber and Quentin had looked after her, Liza, sitting tearfully up when her daughter brought food to her for the second time, had wiped her eyes and made an attempt to explain.
“Have they told you everything, Quentin? Do you know what’s happened, about Nicky and all?”
“Yes. I overheard some of it, anyway.” Quentin spoke awkwardly, unsure what her mother expected her to say.
“I wish I could make you—or someone—understand. I care so much for your father. But Christopher—Nicky’s real father is called Christopher—well, I met him before I was married and, well, it may happen to you one day and then you’ll know. No one it hasn’t happened to can ever know. You meet a man and he isn’t specially handsome or clever or wealthy or…or anything that makes him different from a thousand others, but you look at him and the world turns upside down and it never turns back again.”
A girlhood memory came back to Liza as she spoke, something she rarely thought about now, though when Quentin was a child, she had told her about it. “Do you remember, when you were about twelve, one January night I pointed out the constellation of Orion to you? That magnificent pattern, stamped on the sky?”
“Yes. You said you’d marvelled at it when you were a little girl yourself. But…” Quentin was now more puzzled than ever.
“Well, sometimes a man can stamp his image into your mind like that, and there it is, for always, blazing and beautiful. It’s like being put under enchantment, only it isn’t enchantment, it’s love, and if it’s real, it doesn’t die. We should have married, though if we had…”
Quentin, trying none too successfully to understand what Liza was talking about, felt embarrassed by these confidences. They matched nothing in her experience and besides, it was as though she were the one with authority and her mother a pleading child, and that wasn’t natural. But the hollowed pallor of her mother’s face would have touched far harder hearts than hers. She put her arms around Liza, who said, “If we had married, you would never have come into being and I’m glad you did. Nothing’s simple. But years ago—fourteen or so—I met Christopher again and once, just once, we gave way. And then Nicky was born.”
“But the other day…?” Quentin prompted, puckering her brow, wanting to understand, although it was like trying to make sense of a very unfamiliar dialect.
“The other day we met in a dell on the moor, just to talk, to sit side by side as friends do. It was the second time we’d done so.” Liza paused, finding herself unable to describe the quality of those two companionable meetings. She and Christopher had indeed done nothing but sit together and talk, of everyday things. He had told her of his work at the castle; a marriage service he had conducted recently at which the groom had got his responses muddled; and how he and the new Mistress Hilton had between them persuaded the steward to have the castle completely cleaned—“spring-cleaned, except that it was summer”—from battlements to basement.
She had talked to him of the farm and the cows, telling him how, since ceasing to be Sweetwater tenants, they had acquired a bull of their own which had chased Hodge twice, and how they had once more replaced their ram, this time with a crossbred animal which had the superb fleece of his predecessor but not the enormous horns and outsize skull.
She could not find words for the quality of those conversations, the comfort of them, the pleasure of talking so easily, without the hint of fear which her father-in-law always inspired in her and without the distortion which was slight but always there with Peter because
they had not chosen each other and would, left to themselves, have both chosen differently. All she could say was, “When people grow older, Quentin, that’s how it is. Just to sit and talk is enough. All the rest is in the past and long ago. Except…”
“Except that there’s Nicky?” said Quentin, still puzzling it out.
“Yes, there’s Nicky. And your father caught us, sitting in a dell, and Nicky—I’ve always known it—is Christopher all over again. There’s no mistaking it, not when you see the two of them together.”
Here at least was something she could grasp. “If only,” said Quentin passionately, “Father hadn’t taken that sheep path. If only you hadn’t been right in his path!”
“Then no one would ever have known. I’d have taken my secret to my grave with me, darling, and who would have been harmed? Your father would have gone on thinking he had a son, and Nicky, one day, would have had Allerbrook and what would it matter?”
“Grandfather says it matters.” Quentin’s voice was not accusing, only bewildered. “He keeps on saying it, and thumping tables with his fist. He keeps saying that Nicky isn’t a Lanyon and has no right to Allerbrook.”
“Has he said that in Nicky’s hearing?” Liza’s voice broke, once more, into a sob. “Oh, poor Nicky!”
“Not yet, but I think he’s going to. Father says I’m not to warn Nicky—they’ll tell him themselves. It isn’t fair,” said Quentin roundly. “Lanyon or not, the farms have to be looked after by someone and why can’t people just leave things alone and be happy?”
“No, it isn’t fair, but that’s the way it is.” Tears slipped from Liza’s eyes, quietly but relentlessly. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, darling. I may have to go away, go to St. Catherine’s like my mother did. I don’t want to go. It’s strange. When I first came here, I thought I’d never get used to it, never call Allerbrook my home, but it’s home now, has been for years and…and it’ll break my heart if I have to leave it. Only…”
The House of Lanyon Page 42