The House of Lanyon

by Valerie Anand

  She did not, as Richard would have done, add that if he were not kind, he would have the Lanyons to deal with. There was no threat in her face or voice, only appeal.

  “Mistress Lanyon,” said Walter, “I am not a knight, but I could have been, had I gone to war and won my spurs on the field as my father did. I still try to follow the knightly code of behaviour. I do not pursue feuds with women.”

  Sir Humphrey Sweetwater, knight or not, would probably have set out to make Quentin’s life wretched and not thought twice about it, but Sir Humphrey had died at Towton a quarter of a century ago.

  “If your daughter fills her place as she should,” he said, “she will have nothing to fear from me, and my daughter-in-law Catherine has a very sweet temper. Quentin will be quite safe with us.”

  “Thank you,” said Liza, and gave him the smile which had long ago captivated a red-haired young deacon.

  Now he sat in the hall he had been able to come home to only because of this dark-eyed Lanyon interloper, and saw that the timid smile she was offering him was her mother’s smile all over again. He drew a deep breath and said gruffly, “I give you good morning.” And then, “I hope you will be happy with us. Be seated.” He had to drag the words out of himself, but drag them he did.

  “What should I do today?” Quentin asked. “I’ve brought my spinning wheel with me. It’s in the baggage we sent here yesterday.”

  “You can send it back to Allerbrook!” said Walter. He almost snapped, but not quite. “You’re a lady now,” he said, more gently. “Sweetwater ladies don’t spin and weave. They see to the herb garden, instruct the maids and the cooks, maybe make marchpane fancies. Or they embroider. Mistress Catherine here is making covers for settle cushions. Perhaps she’ll let you help with that. Eh, Catherine?”

  “Yes, by all means,” said Catherine, and, since she had now been in effect given permission to smile properly, did so.

  Inch by inch, over the next few weeks, Quentin created for herself a niche in the household, and blew on the small fire of affection she and John had kindled on their wedding night, until it grew into a bright blaze. When she declared that she thought she was with child, Catherine embraced her, and Walter, after a hesitant moment, gave her a kiss and said, “You must take care of yourself, my dear.”

  The battle was won. The first fruits of victory were made apparent on the day when, about to set out hunting, Walter remarked quite jovially that if they took a deer today, they’d send some venison to Allerbrook, seeing that the Lanyons were family now.

  And when, triumphantly, she presented them with Johnny, it seemed that the peace treaty between the Lanyons and the Sweetwaters was not only ratified but renewed. Life from now on, Quentin thought joyously, would be a sunlit, happy upland, like the moors on an August day, when the heather and the gorse were out and the larks were singing.

  “We’re not much worse off for giving Quentin her dowry.” Richard, having led Liza and Peter into the hall because he said he wanted to show them something, stood in midfloor, rubbing his hands together in pleasure. “We kept Rixons for ourselves and now we’ve got all of the rent the Hudds pay us. And we still have the quarry. Very satisfactory. I think we’ll have this plain old panelling ripped out at last and something better put in. We talked of that before, didn’t we, but then the war came and we never got round to it. Let’s get round to it now. There’s a fashion these days for Tudor roses. They’d look handsome.”

  “Tudor roses?” asked Liza.

  “Yes. King Henry’s married King Edward’s daughter Elizabeth and that’s Lancaster marrying York. The white rose and the red rose have come together. The Tudor rose is half white and half red. We could have roses carved into the panelling and then coloured. I’ve spoken to the carpenter in Clicket already, when I was in the village yesterday. He’ll come tomorrow to measure up. He’s got a good wood-carver working with him these days. New panelling, good seasoned oak, with a Tudor rose in the middle of each panel, painted red and white. That’s what I’ll have in here, and new carved fronts for those window seats, too—more Tudor roses, to match.”

  “He hasn’t asked me what I think,” said Peter, addressing the roof beams. “He’s just decided on his own. Again. And if anyone should ask me what I think, I think it’s pointless and a waste of money. Whatever you say, Father, it’ll take time to rebuild our savings. It’s as well the quarry is still flourishing! I don’t want to see more good gold and silver being spent on this house. From the start, it was pointless and a waste of money!”

  “Nonsense!” Richard barked.

  “We’re farmers! It’s land we should value, not Tudor roses in the panelling! And if we’d never built this place, we’d still be on the old terms with our neighbours. They think we think we’re above them now! The Shearers almost look the other way when they come across us—Liza’s charity to Tilly only matters to Tilly—and one of the Hudd boys took his cap off to me in Clicket the other day. I don’t like it. It’s embarrassing.”

  “Well, I like it,” said Richard. “Take heart, boy. When we can afford it, you can decide what to have in the way of stained glass for the chapel. That’ll be next.” Peter’s disgusted expression seemed to amuse him. “Then we’ll have the tapestries I recall you once went all poetical about. It’s odd,” he added thoughtfully. “If the Sweetwaters hadn’t gone hunting the day of my father’s funeral and crashed into the procession, it’s quite possible I’d never have built this house at all. How very strange.”

  “It might not have happened either if the stag had run in a different direction,” Peter retorted.

  Life as an apprentice with Owen ap Idwal in Lynmouth actually suited Nicky Lanyon very well. He had not forgiven his family for casting him out; he would never forgive them, as long as he lived. But nevertheless, it was a fact that life with Owen ap Idwal was more exciting than life at Allerbrook and about a thousand times more exciting than sitting at a loom in a weaving shed at Dunster.

  For one thing, it didn’t mean staying in Lynmouth all the time. The town at the foot of the towering cliffs was very small, and from its sister town of Lynton at the top of the same cliffs it looked as though the great walls of rock were crowding its thatched and slate cottages into the harbour. But the harbour and the ships that came and went were the heart of the place. And as Nicky soon discovered, Owen ap Idwal sometimes came and went with them, on his own ship, the Fulmar, and so on occasion did the boys he was training in his trade. Before Nicky had been with him for a year and a half, he had travelled to Venice and back twice.

  Owen ap Idwal himself was short, dark and possessed of a crackling energy. He normally went up the creaky stairs in his house two at a time, leaped from the Fulmar’s deck to the quay and back again instead of stepping sedately, bolted his food, tossed drink down his gullet rather than savouring any of it, and unpacked goods at full speed, slashing wrappings away with the sharp knife he always carried, and cursing in Welsh if the knife didn’t cut through them at the first slash.

  Sometimes he cursed the boys as well, or even cuffed them, but there was no ill humour in it and to Nicky, after his grandfather’s attentions, these occasional clouts were nothing at all. The ones handed out to the boys, the maids and her young daughter by Owen’s thin, busy and short-tempered wife, Constance, were harder. Their two eldest daughters were married and gone and their son acted as the captain of the Fulmar, but their youngest girl, Gwyneth, who was only ten (“She came as a surprise,” Owen had once said jovially) was still at home and there were two maidservants. The maidservants claimed that Constance was capable of being in half a dozen places at once and always for the purpose of finding that someone had done something wrong.

  “One speck of dust on a girt old tabletop or one crumb on the floor, or else you stop mopping or beating eggs just for half a minute to chatty, like any maidens might, and there she be, all of a sudden, when you thought she was up in the attic annoying the rats!” they said.

  Neither hated her, though, and
Gwyneth loved her, because Constance, in her busy-brusque way, could also be kind at times and she was good to the maids if one of them were hurt or ill or needed time off for some right and proper reason, such as visiting genuinely sick parents, or courting.

  “A wench has to have her chance with the lads,” she would say quite tolerantly, and it was said that she and Owen had given very good wedding gifts to previous maidservants who had married.

  The goods that Owen handled were interesting, too, though the cheeses he carried for export had such a powerful smell that the first time Nicky sailed with his employer, the nausea that plagued him on the first day had more to do with the reek from the hold that plagued him on the first day than did the motion of the ship.

  But he liked handling the soft, cured hides: calfskin, deerskin, pigskin and the stout leather made from adult cattle. He admired the ready-made leather boots and gloves, fringed and embroidered, which Owen also took abroad, and was fascinated by the variety of things that could be made from iron.

  “It’s good iron, lad,” Owen told him. “There’s a mine or two near here, so there’s not much cost for transport. I get things made by a blacksmith in Lynton.” Sometimes he took Nicky and the other three youths he was training up to Lynton to watch the smith creating fire irons and rakes, bread ovens and ploughshares, hammers, chisels, currycombs, nails and buckets and chains.

  Life at sea, once he had got over the sickness and learned how to sleep in a hammock and to believe that however wet and cold one got in bad weather, seawater wouldn’t give him a chill, appealed to Nicky, too. He was an active boy and on his very first voyage learned how to manage the sails as well as any sailor.

  Venice, the city which seemed to grow out of the very sea, amazed and enthralled him, and the goods he found himself handling on the way home gave him new cause for wonder. There were bales of gleaming silk, kegs of spices, which unlike the cheeses smelt aromatic and exciting, and earthenware jars of dyestuffs from lands so far away that they were to him little more than legends.

  For all his resentment against his family, he would have said he was well settled in life. He would finish his years with Owen ap Idwal and then, he hoped, work for a similar merchant, for pay, until such time as he could set himself up in business. The Weavers had said they would help.

  He was seventeen, well grown, that day in the late summer of 1489 when, returning with Owen from another voyage to Venice, he stepped onto the quay at Lynmouth and found himself face-to-face with Herbert Dyer.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  TAVERN TALK

  Nicky stopped short. He couldn’t recall the name of the bearded elderly man with the good clothes and the square build, but he felt he had seen him somewhere before.

  “Surely I know you, sir?” he said. “Are you here to see Owen ap Idwal?”

  “Yes, I am. My son engaged him to bring dyestuffs in for me and word reached me that the Fulmar had been sighted. I had a fancy to be here to meet her when she made her home port. I’ve not ridden to Lynmouth for years, but suddenly thought I’d do it once more, before my limbs entirely seize up with age. And yes, I think we have met somewhere before, but I can’t remember where. What’s your name?”

  “Nicky Lanyon, sir.”

  “Nicky Lanyon! So this is where you went! I heard that you’d left Allerbrook. The Weavers told me. I am Herbert Dyer.”

  “Oh! Yes, of course. I should have known you at once! I am sorry.”

  “Well, you haven’t seen me since you were a boy. We met a few times at the Weavers’ house in Dunster, when you came there as a lad, with your father. You’ve been travelling on this ship?”

  “I’m apprenticed to Master Owen, sir. The Weavers arranged it. I visit them now and then, but obviously not at the same times as yourself. I haven’t been there at all lately.”

  “There have been changes. Lady Elizabeth Luttrell and her son Hugh are back in the castle and Hugh Luttrell’s been getting both Dunster and Minehead harbours dredged out. One day, your master’s ship may tie up at Dunster quay. Does Master Owen suit you?”

  “He would say it matters more if I suit him! But yes, it’s a chance to see the world. We’ve just come back from Venice.”

  “The Weavers said you’d been thrown out after a family dispute, though they didn’t say what sort of dispute.”

  “It wasn’t a pretty business, sir,” said Nicky awkwardly. If the Weavers had kept the truth from Dyer, then he wasn’t going to reveal it. His mother was still his mother. It was and always had been Richard Lanyon he blamed for his exile. Dyer put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I’ll ask no questions. I know Master Richard is a hasty man and domineering, if you don’t mind me criticising your family.”

  “No, I don’t mind,” said Nicky, pugnaciously enough to send Master Dyer’s eyebrows rising toward his hairline. Nicky was himself surprised to realise how deep the wound of separation from his home and family had gone. This chance meeting had touched the scar and made it sore again. He would not now go back to live at Allerbrook for any consideration, yet he sometimes thought, I’d like to visit, see my mother again. I miss her. Only, I can’t face the thought of seeing Richard Lanyon.

  “Master Owen is below, sir,” he said. “Shall I take you to him? You will want to examine your goods, I take it.”

  “Yes, and pay for them. Then I must organise their transport—by boat to Watchet and then packhorse to Washford, it’ll be, as usual.”

  “I know all the boatmen here. Do you use the same ones each time? I can arrange the transport for you.”

  “Can you? Well, I’d be grateful. After that, perhaps we could have a drink together in a tavern, if your master will allow.”

  “Yes, he lets his older apprentices go to taverns.” Nicky wasn’t sure that he wanted to drink with this man from the past, whose conversation had already made him homesick, but it wouldn’t do to refuse an invitation from one of Owen’s clients. “Thank you, sir.”

  Dyer smiled. A lad with something against Richard Lanyon. He had responded by instinct to that pugnacious note in Nicky’s voice. A young man who had reason to resent Richard Lanyon was someone with whom Herbert Dyer would probably get on well. “I’ll take pleasure in buying you some ale, if Master Owen agrees,” he said. “The Harbour Inn will do.”

  The Harbour Inn was a low-ceilinged cavern, badly lit, in which the sawdust on the cobbled floor wasn’t changed often enough. However, the ale and cider were good, and in cold weather there was always a good fire in the hearth. When Nicky and Herbert went in, they found it crowded. Two other ships had arrived on the same tide as the Fulmar, and many of their crew, having furled the sails, unloaded the cargo and scrubbed the decks, were now taking their ease in the inn.

  There were a number of locals, too. Nicky and Herbert squeezed between two benches full of men who smelt of fish and seemed to be discussing a mackerel catch, and found themselves a double settle close to a bald individual with tufts of greying hair over his ears, who had a small table and a stool to himself, possibly because he didn’t merely smell but positively reeked of goat. Herbert gave their order to a serving girl, and then turned to Nicky.

  “Tell me about Venice. That’s a fine adventure for a boy brought up at Allerbrook and never going farther afield than Dunster.”

  A little while later, when the girl had brought their ale and the level in the tankards was going down, Herbert said interestedly, “If you don’t want to tell me what went amiss between you and your family, well, as I said, I won’t question you. The Weavers were obviously willing to help you and I’d trust their judgement. I suppose you fell out with your grandfather. You needn’t tell me whether I’m right or not, only I know him!”

  “Well, that was more or less the way of it, Master Dyer. I don’t want to go back to the farm. I just feel I was done out of something that was properly mine,” Nicky said.

  “Didn’t your father stand up for you?”

  “No,” said Nicky shortly, thinking tha
t, odd as it seemed, he still thought of Peter Lanyon as his father and Richard as his grandfather and probably always would, however much he loathed those two self-righteous grown men who had victimised him, a boy of only thirteen, for something that was no fault of his.

  “Overborne, I suppose. Well, as I said, he’s a harsh man, is Richard Lanyon.” Herbert shook a disapproving head. “His father was the same! Has it come out in you, I wonder? You don’t have Lanyon looks, but maybe one day you’ll be a merchant and rule your household like a tyrant king.”

  “I hope not, sir,” said Nicky. “I value my own freedom. I’d try not to bully others out of theirs. If I’d stayed, I’d have had to marry where I was told, while now, when I meet a girl I like as I hope I will one day, I can please myself.”

  “If you’d stayed you probably would have had to marry to order,” Herbert agreed. Their tankards were empty and, picking them up, he waved them at the girl, signalling for refills. “Did you know that before your father was wedded to your mother, he wanted to marry a girl from this very port but wasn’t allowed to?”

  “No—did he? A girl from Lynmouth? I never heard that.”

  The girl brought a jug and gave them more ale, for which Dyer paid, ignoring Nicky’s attempt to do so. “It’s true enough,” he said, “though that time your grandfather may well have had the right of it, because I heard that the girl ran off with someone else anyway. She wouldn’t have been a sound, decent wife like your mother.”

  “No,” said Nicky, keeping his voice neutral. “Obviously not.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Dyer, enjoying himself, “it seems the wench was pleasing—hair like a pale gold mist, Richard Lanyon told me, or something of that kind. Marion Locke—that was her name. He even had a notion—he let this out to me once—that he might marry her instead and wipe his son’s eye well and truly.”