The House of Lanyon

by Valerie Anand

  Alfred had been right to say that the hall would not burn easily. The panels and the floor were of seasoned oak, nearly as hard as iron, and there were still no tapestries. The pile of benches and stools, with cushions thrown in, was ablaze in midfloor, but there was no shortage of buckets, which were always needed for carrying food and water to stabled animals or getting bristles off pigs. With nine of them at the task, once Hodge had rejoined them, the flames were put out. There were dark stains on the walls and floor and window chests and a few on the roof beams and much of the furniture was lost, but the hall was still there and the damage could be repaired.

  At the end of it all, Quentin rose and went to the door of her father’s makeshift prison and talked to him through it. Presently, she came to the hall where the others were all busy pulling the piled furnishings apart and prowling about with buckets, looking for signs of smouldering, to say that she thought it would be safe to let him out.

  “I knew you would manage him,” Liza said thankfully. “He was beyond me, or I wouldn’t have sent Nicky for you. If you’re sure it’s safe, set him free and bring him into the house. But only if you’re sure.”

  Quentin, warily, went back to the shed. “Father? Are you all right? Please be all right. I’m so worried about you.”

  “There’s no need to worry. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “If I let you out, you won’t…do anything dreadful again, will you? Please promise.”

  “No, I won’t. I’m in my right mind now. Don’t be afraid, my girl.”

  Quentin drew back the bolts and Peter emerged. He was trembling and looked sick. “Oh, my poor Quentin! What have I done? I think I was possessed.”

  His rage had gone out, like the fire. Quentin, talking gently to him, led him into the house and across the hall to the parlour. The others, still working, looked away. In the parlour she coaxed him to sit down, and a moment later Liza and Nicky joined them.

  “Ellen will get us some cider,” Liza said. “We’ve all got dry throats. The fire’s out, though. Everything is going to be all right.”

  She said it calmly and even felt that it was true, though in his rage, Peter had uttered things which would be hard to forget. It had been wounding to hear his declaration of love for the unknown Marion, but in a way, it had eased her own bad conscience. If he had truly, all along, felt for Marion what she had felt for Christopher, then it was no wonder that they had never, quite, been able to form the bond a married couple should, and just how virtuous would Peter have stayed if Marion had been still alive and had one day come back to him?

  The Sweetwaters, sooty, water-splashed and sweating, had finished in the hall and came in carrying full tankards and followed by Ellen with a trayload of more. John and Walter both looked angry.

  “Just what did you think you were doing, Nicky Lanyon,” John demanded, “dragging Quentin away up here, in her condition, into the middle of this?”

  “Her father was in such a state. He’d learned something…something that upset him very badly,” said Liza. “He wanted to set fire to the hall. Well, he did! Quentin’s the only person we thought could quieten him.” She looked around. “Quentin, you…where’s she gone?”

  “She was here beside me and then she suddenly went out,” said Peter dully. “Just now.”

  “Ellen, go and find her!” Liza commanded.

  Ellen set down her tray and disappeared. She was back in a very short time, her face frightened. “Mistress Lanyon…Master Sweetwater…I think the baby’s on the way. She’m walkin’ about in the kitchen but I think she did ought to be upstairs, in a bedchamber. I—”

  “But it’s early!” John shouted. “It’s two weeks too soon!”

  Peter and Nicky both sprang up.

  “If anything happens to her…” Peter looked horrified.

  Nicky, shakily, said, “We needed her here, but perhaps it was too much for her…” and then sat down again, his face stricken.

  “You went because I sent you, Nicky,” said Liza. “I’m sorry I had to send for her.” She turned to Peter and her voice was pitiless. “It was all I could think of, with the house about to burn down and hers the only voice you were likely to heed. If anything goes wrong now, it will be partly my fault, but mostly yours!”

  “Yes, his,” said Walter savagely, and pointed a quivering forefinger at Peter. “And if my son’s wife dies, I will kill him.”

  “Blessed Mother, intercede for her!” pleaded Ellen tearfully, down on her knees beside Quentin’s bed. “Dear Lord, wilt thou not bring forth that which thou hast formed?” It was the fourth time she had uttered the ancient prayer for women in travail. The only response was another moan from Quentin and Ellen’s tears flowed faster. “Ellen!” Liza said desperately. “Get up! More hot water, more cloths to wring out in it, more chicken broth and make haste.”

  “It’s gone on too long, Mother.” Quentin, weak and exhausted from twenty-four hours of constant pain without result, clutched at Liza’s hand for comfort and then cried feebly as the anguish rose again. “I’m going to die. I just wish it could be over.”

  “You’re not going to die,” said Liza. “Ellen! Broth! And water and cloths!”

  “I’ve got the chicken broth.” John and Walter had ridden headlong back to Clicket, and an hour after that, John had reappeared with his mother. Catherine Sweetwater had taken charge in the Allerbrook kitchen. She had come into the room carrying a bowl. Ellen, still sobbing, got to her feet and passed her in the doorway. “At least those two maids of yours had the sense to start making the broth straightaway,” Catherine said. “Now, what’s all this about dying?”

  “I’m going to,” said Quentin, exhausted. “Can’t manage it. Can’t make it come.”

  “You’ve got to do it, and you’ve got to live. It’s your duty,” said Liza, wiping her daughter’s wet forehead and smoothing back the soaked brown hair which had been plastered across it. “Because if you don’t, your grandfather-in-law swears he’ll kill your father. John didn’t argue, either. Quentin, my darling girl, listen, it’s up to you now!”

  It’s up to me. Her mother had no idea, Quentin thought as another pain twisted her guts into knots, what that phrase meant. It always seemed to be up to her. She had had to fight for her mother after Bosworth—make Betsy behave, get her father and grandfather to soften their anger. She had been the only one who really fought for Nicky. She had done that twice. She hadn’t succeeded, but no one else had as much as tried.

  She had eventually reconciled her father—more or less—to her marriage; within that marriage, much as she loved John Sweetwater, she had had to work to call forth an answering love from him, to make terms with Walter. And she had been the one Liza sent for in desperation when her own father was overset and dangerous. Now she must live when it would be much easier and more comfortable to die, because if she didn’t, all hell would break loose all over again. Walter Sweetwater would renew the old feud, this time with lethal intent.

  Sometimes she thought she had spent her whole life trying to coax other people to be reasonable. Now here it was again. She must live, or else. She was tired of it. Let them get on with it.

  “No,” she said wearily. “I’m going to die. I want to. I can’t fight anymore.”

  “Rubbish, of course you can. Don’t you dare give up now,” said Catherine. “There are a few things we haven’t tried yet. Mistress Lanyon, is there any pepper in the house?”

  “I can’t go on. I can’t. Whoever’s made threats, whatever they’ve said, I can’t do anything about it!” Quentin wailed. “Why am I supposed to try? Why must it be me who has to stop people killing each other? Why do I have to be called because Father’s trying to destroy the house? Why must it fall on me? No, I don’t mean that, exactly, but…”

  “Come. If you can make jokes, you’re not dying,” said Catherine, presenting her daughter-in-law with a spoonful of broth.

  “Not making a joke. Just a mistake,” said Quentin, and then, seeing that however
accidental, it had indeed been a joke, unexpectedly laughed. The laugh collided with a violent contraction and turned into a cry, but as Catherine Sweetwater remarked afterward, laughter could be as good as a noseful of pepper and a few hearty sneezes for getting things to move. Five minutes later Ellen returned with the hot water and the cloths to find that a very small but very noisy girl-child was in Liza’s arms and Quentin, however tired, was still very much alive.

  “Elizabeth,” said John Sweetwater. “We settled, if the babe were a girl, that she should be Elizabeth, for you, Mistress Lanyon, and for our queen, Elizabeth of York. It’s a good Yorkist name,” he added with a glinting smile full of such charm that Liza, for the first time, understood why Quentin had so improbably fallen in love with this young man. “But Quentin? You are sure she will come through?”

  “Quentin is sitting up and taking broth,” said Liza. “I’m rather sorry that Master Walter didn’t come back with you from Sweetwater House. I would like a few words with your grandfather, John. Quentin will come through. In a few moments you can see her and your daughter. When you go home, tell Master Walter that we will hear no more talk of revenge and murder!”

  “He may not have meant it,” said John.

  “I rather think he did,” Liza told him. “Though I’d have done all in my power to stop him. I’d have made the parish constable arrest him for disturbing the peace with threats if I had to. One thing our new King Henry has done is introduce a little more law into the land.”

  There was a brief, tense silence. John Sweetwater’s face darkened and in that moment he was wholly a Sweetwater, with as much arrogance in his eyes and the tilt of his chin as there had ever been in Sir Humphrey’s.

  “My late father, Baldwin Sweetwater,” said John, “did not think that women should interfere in men’s business.”

  “If Master Peter Lanyon were harmed, do you really think either Quentin or I would agree that it was nothing to do with us? That our bereavement wasn’t our business? Come, come, Son-in-law,” said Liza, and then, realising that she sounded exactly like her own parents, “Let us have a little common sense!”

  Again there was a moment of tautness during which Liza’s attempt to be reasonable strove in midair with the time-ingrained pride and the violent traditions of the Sweetwaters. She held John’s eyes and almost held her breath, as well.

  And then he laughed. “Quentin would think her father’s death, or mine, come to that, was very much her business and I expect she’d say so. She’s strong-minded, is Quentin. I saw it when she answered your call and got up behind Nicky without a second’s hesitation. I pray she’ll never take such a risk again.”

  Peter had taken no part in their exchange. He had a stunned air, as though too much had happened too rapidly for him to take in. He looked around him, at the damaged hall. “I can’t believe I caused this. And I still can hardly believe that my father—”

  “The burial will be tomorrow,” said Liza, cutting him short. It would be better, she felt, if they didn’t discuss the transgressions of Richard Lanyon. She had already told the rest of the household that whatever they had heard at that horrible dinner table had better be forgotten.

  John remarked, “I think the stonework here will always carry those dark stains, but surely the woodwork can be restored?”

  “Yes. It will be. I’ll see to it,” Peter said rather shortly, turning to him at last.

  A silence fell. There might well, in the future, be a good many silences, Liza thought. There would be times when for this or that reason, conversation would veer in dangerous directions and have to stop, or change course. Walter Sweetwater and the Lanyon family would hardly be able to look each other in the face for a very long time, while both she and Peter had said things to each other which could never be forgotten but should never be mentioned again, either.

  She’ll never be long long ago for me. I loved her. I loved her!

  And I loved Christopher Clerk and now I see why! He wasn’t a Lanyon!

  No. Let those dreadful, truthful, telling phrases be lost in time and silence. They must not be repeated. Nor must the scorn in I sent him, you fool, because there’s a faint chance you might listen to her! You won’t listen to anyone else!

  There was one thing she must ask him, though. “Peter…”

  “Yes?”

  “Nicky is outside just now, attending to his horse. He’ll go back to Lynmouth after the funeral. I would like it if he could visit me again, now and then. He is my son, after all.” She held his eyes steadily as she spoke.

  Here was another of those difficult pauses, in which the thirteen years during which Peter had believed Nicky to be his own son, and the moment when Nicky saved him from Baldwin, came to the minds of both Peter and Liza, though in John’s presence they could not possibly be mentioned.

  Peter was also having thoughts of his own which he knew it would be best not to utter. I’m free now. I hated my father the day I tried to burn this house down, but now I need not even hate him. I’m even free of that. He can’t control me anymore, and as for Marion…I suppose he’s paid for her now.

  And because his father was gone, Peter need no longer deny those thirteen years of affection between Nicky and himself, an affection which had been strong enough to make Peter change sides at Bosworth, and bring Nicky running to his aid during the fight on the bridge. In a calm voice, he said, “But of course I’m agreeable. Naturally Nicky may visit.”

  John glanced at the two of them and looked as though he wanted to ask questions, but did not. The reason Nicky had left home would remain forever a Lanyon secret.

  Catherine appeared at the door. “John, you can see your wife and daughter now.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  TOKEN

  “Nicky! I’m so pleased to see you. It’s been over a year!” Liza’s voice was crackly now, like her weathered old skin or the creak in her joints when she moved. She was close on seventy, and felt it.

  Nicky, on the other hand, was thirty-two and in his prime, a successful young merchant who had married the daughter of his former employer and now lived in Lynmouth with Gwyneth and their two little sons and had lately acquired a ship of his own.

  He did not know, as he stood in the hall at Allerbrook looking at the panelling and window chests and Tudor roses, all of them carefully restored long since, that even now, when his mother was old, the sight of him made her inside turn over because he looked so like Christopher Clerk. He saw, however, that she was—as always—delighted that he had come visiting, and he gave her Christopher’s tough grin, which was more of a reward than he dreamed.

  “I had a good ride over the moor,” he said. “Your crops are ripening well, though I think you’ve had deer in the barley again. You’d better have a word with the Sweetwaters’ harbourer and see if he can’t set the hounds on the miscreants.”

  “Yes, I’ll tell Peter. How are your family?”

  “All well—now. Gwyneth is as lively and merry as her father still is. The boys have had measles, but they’ve come through safely. They’re good lads most of the time,” said Nicky, “and even when they’re not, I don’t beat them. They both take after me and they might not forgive me.”

  There was a brief silence, one of the silences that Liza had foreseen when Richard died and Quentin’s daughter was born. Nicky had never forgiven Richard for his beatings or for casting him off, and look what had come of that long bitterness. After a moment she said, “Did you call on the Sweetwaters as you usually do, and see Quentin?”

  “Yes. I found her in the dairy with Elizabeth, making clotted cream. The Sweetwaters have never quite succeeded in turning our Quentin into a lady,” said Nicky, grinning again. “Johnny told me that last year, at harvest time, she made him arm himself with a scythe and go out reaping with the rest of the parish!”

  “I know. We had him here, taking his place in the line across the field. Her husband doesn’t mind,” Liza said. “John claims that his grandfather Walter was very intereste
d in his sheep and used to go about sometimes with Edward Searle. He’s happy enough to see his son and daughter learning to be practical. Walter approved, too—Catherine told me. Peter and I never spoke to him again, nor he to us, after the day of the fire until the day he died, but he valued Quentin. It was for her sake that he threatened Peter! It was all very complicated. Well, the old feud died with him.”

  “Thank God it died. Can I have another look at Quentin’s window in the chapel?”

  They went to the chapel together. It was not large, but like the rest of the house, it had been enhanced during the fifteen years since the fire, at Peter’s expense. The day he made up his mind to embark on improvements for the hall and the chapel had been one of the rare occasions when an area of silence, hitherto as pristine as untrodden snow, had acquired just a few footprints.

  “I’ve been thinking, Liza. You know, I’m quite proud of our house now. Father was right. We didn’t end up dressed in rags and begging for alms in Clicket or Dulverton, did we?” He had never before made even an oblique reference to the day he had tried to burn down the house and even now, Liza silently noticed, Marion’s name was not mentioned. It never would be. “We’ve prospered well after all,” Peter said, “and I find I have land enough to content me. There are a few things I’d like to add….”

  So tapestries now adorned the hall and the sun made coloured patterns on the floor of the little chapel when it shone through the stained glass of the windows Peter had installed. The first to be put in was known as Quentin’s window.

  “It’s a thank-you to her,” Peter had said. It showed an angel, whose face bore a certain resemblance to that of his daughter, standing before a building with arms outspread, denying entrance to a man who held a flaring torch aloft.