The House of Lanyon
Page 50
“That was a terrible day,” Nicky said as they stood together, looking at it. “When the fire happened, I mean.”
“Yes. Yes it was. Nicky, do you want to see Peter? He’s out with the sheep—he’s sixty-five but as able to get about as ever he was. He’d be sorry if he missed you. He likes to see you these days.”
“Poor Peter. I still sometimes want to call him Father, you know. Now I’m grown up myself, I can see what a muddle he must have been in.”
“He was. He’d loved you as a son for thirteen years and he wanted you to go on being his son and when he found that you weren’t, he didn’t know what to do with the love,” Liza said, and then looked astonished. “I’ve known that for years and never put it into words before. Fancy that!”
“I’ll see him—of course I will. But I want to give you something first, privately. Beside Quentin’s window is as good a place as any. I think she understands you and even understands about…”
“She does.” He had paused, but Liza, making a cautious footprint or two on another stretch of silent snow, finished his thought for him. “She fell in love with John just as I did, long ago, with your father.”
“Here,” said Nicky, and drew a small packet from inside his doublet. “I sailed north recently, to collect a consignment of copper for my first voyage abroad in my own ship. Which is lying in Dunster at the moment, by the way. The Luttrells are maintaining the harbour very well. But while I was in the north, I made some enquiries. I’ve seen my real father.”
“You’ve seen Christopher! He’s still alive?”
“Yes, though he’s frail. I knew that he’d gone to the north. You told me that, back then, when we first found out…about everything.”
“I remember. Peter told me and I spoke of it to you, before you left home.”
“I’ve thought for years that I’d like to find him, if it wasn’t too late. I’d only seen him once, and hardly under ideal circumstances. I did find him, but I think I was only just in time. He said himself that he didn’t think he’d got much longer. He’s still a priest, though he has a younger priest with him who does most of the work of the parish. They have a church in a Yorkshire village. He was happy to see me, very happy, and pleased to have news of both me and you. He gave me something for you. Here. Better not say he sent it, perhaps. If Peter asks, say it was a present from me. He won’t mind that. My fa…I mean, Christopher said that as the end of his life couldn’t be far away, he wanted you to have this, as a token of his lifelong prayers for you.”
She took the packet and opened it. And then looked at what it had contained, marvelling, holding it in one palm and turning it over with her other hand.
It was a patterned silver ring.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The origins of this book lie far back in time. It was, I think, the year 1959, and I was only about twenty-two on the day when, during a morning ride in Somerset, on the edge of Exmoor, I turned my horse onto a path halfway up the side of a narrow valley, with pine trees growing up from its floor.
I hadn’t been there before. Later I learned that the pines were on average 150 feet high and were among the tallest trees in Great Britain. On that morning they almost made me giddy. The path was level, roughly, with their halfway point. When I looked down, my eyes followed their slim trunks to the ferny ground far below. When I looked up, I could see them stretching far above me, tapering toward the sky. It was staggering. It was also exhilarating; another splendid thing I had discovered about a district which had fascinated me since I saw it first at the age of eleven.
I was not yet a writer, but I knew I would be one day. On that morning, looking at those pines, I knew that I wanted, intended, was determined, one day, to write a book with Exmoor and its surroundings as a setting.
It was many many years before the right opportunity and the right theme presented themselves. And then, one day, long after I really had become a novelist, my agent telephoned me and said he knew I had always wanted to write a novel based on Exmoor. Well, it looked as though the chance had come. There was a publisher who was interested in a historical novel with an English regional setting.
The House of Lanyon is the result. Nearly every place it mentions is real, except for Allerbrook and Clicket. These, like the characters, are fictional. There is no such house as Allerbrook; indeed, there is no manor house of that type anywhere on Exmoor. Where I have placed both village and house there is in reality nothing but moorland and isolated farms.
The name of Clicket is genuine. At one time there really was a hamlet called Clicket on the outskirts of Exmoor. It was however a very small community, nothing at all like the prosperous village I have described in the book, and it wasn’t in the same place. I believe it was abandoned sometime in the nineteenth century. It seemed a pleasant idea to use a genuine Exmoor name, that’s all.
To save Exmoor enthusiasts the trouble of noting references to places like Dulverton, Withypool and the River Barle, getting out their Landranger maps and trying to work out where Clicket ought to be, I will tell them that it is approximately (I won’t be too specific) between three and five miles west of Tarr Steps, the curious granite slab bridge across the Barle. Allerbrook House is a mile away from it, high up in a combe which is also fictional. I have simply and ruthlessly planted village, house and combe where I wanted them to be. Writers of fiction do that kind of thing.
Oddly enough, there is no reference in the book to a valley with tall pine trees in it, but the memory of that morning’s ride was with me all the time as I wrote The House of Lanyon. I have loved writing it. I hope it will give pleasure to readers, too.
Valerie Anand
November 2006
THE
HOUSE
OF
LANYON
Valerie Anand
A READER’S RING BOOK CLUB GUIDE
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The following questions are suggestions to help your book club find new and interesting ways to approach a discussion on Valerie Anand’s The House of Lanyon. We hope these suggestions will stimulate discussion and increase your enjoyment of this book.
MIRA Books provides Reader’s Ring Book Club guides for many other fine novels. To learn more about these guides, and the novels themselves, please visit www.MIRABooks.com.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
This book is set in fifteenth-century England and attitudes to marriage at that time were very different from present-day perspectives. The arranged match was normal, especially when inheritance or business arrangements were involved. Even today, arranged marriages (or at least arranged introductions) are the norm in some cultures. What do you feel are the pros and cons of arranged marriages?
A stringent class system was very much in evidence in this book. Were there any advantages in maintaining that structure? Do you think the class system motivated Richard Lanyon’s actions? Has society, as you know it, completely shed the class system?
Many of the characters in The House of Lanyon go through life keeping uncomfortable secrets. Peter, Liza, Richard and Christopher all do so. For which of these characters do you feel the most sympathy? The least?
The principal setting of this story is Exmoor, in southwest England. Do you feel that Exmoor in any way affects the plot—that its physical characteristics form part of the cause and effect in the story?
The love affair between Liza and Christopher is presented as a real love, not a passing infatuation. Given that Liza is pressured into marrying Peter and that Christopher is almost compelled to remain in the priesthood, do you sympathize with the way they finally become lovers, or do you feel they should have refrained?
Peter has a terrible shock when he realizes that Nicky is not his son. What difference might it have made to the rest of the story if he had never found out? Were his actions justifiable?
When Peter learns of Liza’s infidelity he is outraged, but eventually he defends her from his even more outraged father. Quentin, too, springs to her mother�
�s defense. Do you think these are reasonable reactions? How would you have responded if you had been either Peter or Quentin?
Several households are described in the book. The principal three are the homes of the Weavers of Dunster, the Lanyons of Allerbrook and the Sweetwaters of Clicket. Discuss and compare them. Do you have a clear preference for one household over the others?
The women of the time had to work hard to run their homes, and they often helped in family businesses, too. The women of Allerbrook milk cows, do dairy work and help with the harvest; the Weaver women make yarn and weave. In Marion Locke’s home, the women gut fish. Were they, do you think, happier and more fulfilled than the Sweetwater ladies, who were mostly confined to giving orders to the servants?
The old adage “the more things change, the more they stay the same” could be applied to family life in the fifteenth century and the twenty-first century. What concerns/issues/pleasures do we experience today that our fifteenth-century friends also dealt with?
As you saw in the story, the prevailing political winds can and do blow with enough force to cause serious problems in a small community such as Clicket. How would the average family have been affected by a call to arms?
Why do you suppose that Liza’s mother, Margaret, chooses to marry Herbert Dyer?
Herbert Dyer proves to be a dubious character. Would it have been better had Liza and Peter not discovered his underhanded business practice? Or would things have been worse for Margaret, in the end, if the law had caught up with him? She believes she is right to leave him. Do you agree? Compare the standards of the fifteenth century and the modern world.
Horses were important in those days—the equivalent of the car today. On Exmoor, deer and sheep were also important. Can you pinpoint any moments in the story when horses, deer or sheep created turning points in the plot?
Family traits and characteristics have a way of showing themselves in succeeding generations. Discuss.
If you had to change places with any of the characters in The House of Lanyon, whom would you choose?
A theme throughout the book is Richard Lanyon’s determination to raise his family higher in the world and to outdo the Sweetwaters. Do you empathize with these motivations? Given his modest origins, why was he so obsessed with “climbing the ladder,” so to speak? Can you make any comparisons between Richard Lanyon and someone you know today?
ISBN: 978-1-4603-0900-1
THE HOUSE OF LANYON
Copyright © 2007 by Valerie Anand.
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