Yesterday evening, in the inn where they had spent the night, her father had come to bid her good-night and found her crying. Homesickness, the knowledge that an ocean lay between her and her birthplace, had suddenly descended on her. Stephen had comforted her as best he could, but he had gone away looking worried. She had made a great effort that morning to appear cheerful. Now, out on this open moor, her spirits had genuinely risen. Something in her answered to this place. Something in her was saying, Don’t be afraid. This is home. You have made the right choice.
Her father had done his best to prepare her. He had told her and her brothers as much as he could about Europe, its peoples and its history. He had even taught them to read and write, using charcoal and pieces of pale deerskin leather in lieu of paper. But her brothers had never taken to it, and although Philippa had wanted to learn, she had not had sufficient practice. In the Hillmans’ house, when offered the chance to read a book of verse, she had realized just how slow she was.
Thomasina had told her that Clicket was remote and that countrywomen often couldn’t read or write, but Bartholomew had said—jovially, yet not as a joke—that hers was a good family and she would be expected to have some learning. She would have to study hard, and she wasn’t used to that.
She would have to master horse riding, too. The near future looked alarmingly full of new skills to be learned. But the sense of homecoming remained. Something deep within her recognized this place.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Hellspawn
1585
Jane Allerbrook was in the parlour, adding up accounts. She rarely used the study, though Tobias did. She liked the parlour because it was in the tower, above the high-ceilinged chapel, and had such glorious views. She often sat there, even though it sometimes brought back memories, not all of them happy.
She was not entirely happy now, either. She knew she was lucky to have reached her mid-sixties and remained in good health, but there were things that troubled her.
For one thing, although many years had passed, she had not forgotten Stephen. She had learned through the agent who had charge of Clicket Hall that her restless nephew had sailed for the New World on a ship called the Sweet Promise. Eventually, word had reached England that the Sweet Promise had been separated from her companion ships and was presumed lost. That had been two decades ago and she had long since accepted that he was dead, but privately she still mourned him. His life and death both seemed so pointless, such a waste.
Nor was that all. Jane broke off her work in order to spend a few moments in worrying and also in being annoyed because she was worried. Jane longed above all for a peaceful life, but she had repeatedly been compelled to abandon domestic calm in order to look after those around her, as she had long ago promised herself she would. She was afraid now that such a time might come again. The world, as ever, was troubled and there were those in her household who might very easily run into danger. Sometimes Jane felt that her family—and in some cases her friends—lacked a sense of self-preservation. Why could they not just live and be happy instead of allying themselves with this faction or that?
They probably imagined that she didn’t know how their minds were working, but long experience had taught her that to have any hope at all of safeguarding the wayward spirits around her, she must be aware of what they were thinking. She knew more than they supposed.
Well, this was no day for fretting, with the moorland lying so serenely under a mild blue autumn sky and quietness all around. She bent her head once more to the ledger, pushing her eyeglasses more firmly onto her nose. Eyeglasses were one of the blessings of modern knowledge, allowing her to go on reading and studying accounts, which she needed to do to help Tobias. As a boy, he had tried to master arithmetic but had no aptitude. He was thankful to leave the ledgers to her.
This year the figures were good. The wool clip had sold well. An old arrangement under which they sold fleeces cheap to a weaving family in Dunster and took a cut from the profits on the finished cloth had been terminated by Jane’s father, and Jane had always been thankful for it. Now they could haggle and get the best prices. This year the harvest and the cider apple crop had also been good. Most of the women—Blanche, Nell, Letty, Phoebe and Phoebe’s twenty-year-old daughter Eliza—were at this moment down in the orchard, gathering the fallen apples for the cider press. There were some fine young bullocks and fat pigs, too, to provide salted meat, hams and bacon for the house, with a few animals over to be sent to market. They were well set up for the winter.
Tobias and his son, Robert, were out on the farm. Blanche had been unlucky with children and there had been no more since Robert, but he had grown into a good-looking young man, dark haired and brown eyed as his grandfather Ralph had been and with something of the same swashbuckling nature, yet with a kindness in him, a touch of genuine romance that Ralph had certainly not possessed. Jane was proud of her grandson.
She was concentrating on some addition when the noisy lowing of cows broke out somewhere, followed a few moments later by excited shouting. Startled, she peered from the window but could not see what was happening. However, the sounds were depressingly familiar.
“Hellspawn again!” said Jane, and casting her work aside, she made for the spiral stairs down to the hall, and out across the yard to the track beyond. Where she stopped short, annoyed but not surprised. She had seen it all before.
Riders were approaching: a man on a big bay horse, with a girl on his pillion, and a second man on a cob and leading a packhorse. Between riders and house, however, there was an obstacle, in the form of a herd of black cows. They were blocking the track completely and one of them, as though she were some kind of ringleader, had planted herself right in front of the horses with the air of a besieged medieval castellan watching the advance of enemy forces.
The man on the bay was shouting at her to move over. But, as she possessed a discouragingly large pair of horns, she stayed put. The man tried to ride round her, but she shifted her position and got in the way again. The girl began to laugh.
The last time this had happened, Jane herself had been caught on the wrong side of the cows with their belligerent warrior queen, and had had to take to the fields and approach her own home by another path. Now, although she knew it would be of little use, she marched forward and shouted at the cows, as well. None of them took the slightest notice.
She was looking round for assistance and wondering where her grooms had got to when a small, weather-beaten man appeared on foot, panting up the slope from the direction of Rixons and waving a stout stick. Behind him, also waving sticks, came two hefty, flaxen youths, and loping after them, barking noisily, a hairy black-and-white dog.
“Sorry…sorry, zurs, madam.” He was addressing the newcomers, not Jane, who needed no explanations. “Bloody animal. Had the devil in her zince she wur calved. Get out of ’un’s vield, her would, even if I’d got a castle wall round ’un, ’stead of a vence. Others all vollow ’un, like she vor their queen. But I don’t call she Elizabeth. Hellspawn, I calls she, and a bloody nuisance, that’s what!”
“Master Blake!” said Jane indignantly. “Get those animals off the track, will you? Now!”
He and the youths, with shouts and curses and the not very efficient aid of the dog, which was clearly ill trained, set about rounding up the cows. They were phlegmatically reluctant to move, except for the overintelligent ringleader, who turned around and lowered her horns at the dog, which yelped and retreated. The weather-beaten man stopped short to mop his brow and then, with relief, to greet reinforcements.
“Ah, Master Toby, canst thee help? They’m out again and blockin’ the way for thy guests yur. I’d turn she into collops and joints, so I would, ’cept she’m a good milker and her calves, they do be beauties!”
Tobias, bestriding a pony, had come from the Allerbrook fields to help. He joined in vigorously with the farmer, thwacking the bovine ringleader off the track, and helping the youths to herd the other animals out o
f the way, as well. In the middle of it all he glanced toward the riders and called out that he was sorry for all this, and would welcome them properly in a moment. Then his gaze sharpened and he pulled his pony up. “I do believe—I’m not mistaken, surely? God’s teeth! You’re Stephen.”
“Good day to you, Tobias,” said Stephen, manoeuvring the bay in order to prevent the ringleader from trying to break away in the wrong direction. “And to you, Aunt Jane!” he added in a shout, across the backs of half a dozen cows. “I’ve come home!”
“Stephen!” said Jane, at once astonished and slightly disbelieving, as she stood beside the tall bay horse, looking up at its riders. “It really is you? After all these years? And who is this young lady?”
Amid the usual cacophony of dogs and geese, the travellers had come into the yard. Paul Snowe and Robert had appeared on foot and Tobias was just getting off his pony. The man who had been leading the packhorse was dismounting, too, and moving his charges out of the way. Blanche had arrived as well, and so had most of the other women, now including Jane’s maid Alice. They stood in a cluster, as wide-eyed as Jane herself, wondering at the sight of Stephen Sweetwater, who hadn’t been heard of for twenty years, and agog to know who the girl on his pillion might be.
The girl was wearing a green velvet cloak and her head was adorned with an elegant green hat with a long brown feather in it. Robert was looking at her with immense interest and had already swept off his cap in order to bow to her. Stephen was grinning.
“Yes, it’s me. Really me.” He was brown from weather, and his face had unfamiliar lines, but his voice was the same. “Let me present my daughter, Philippa.”
“Your daughter!” said Jane wonderingly. Robert, meanwhile, had stepped forward to help the girl off the horse, and once down, she curtsied very correctly to Jane and then stood up, throwing back her cloak.
She was as straight backed and slender as a young pine tree, with a look of lithe strength which was somehow foreign. Jane was sure she was not wearing stays, and furthermore, that she had no need of them. Un-English, too, was the amber skin and the curve of her nose, the high cheekbones and the set of her dark eyes. Her shy smile, though, was enough to bridge any gap of strangeness. Jane found herself smiling back.
Stephen dismounted in turn. Paul Snowe went to help the hired man with the horses and the luggage. Tobias said, “I see that Simon Blake’s cows are still being a nuisance. I suppose that infernal animal Hellspawn led them out again. I don’t know how she does it. It isn’t that he doesn’t look after his fences, but if she finds a fence post that rocks just a little, she’ll lean on it till it gives way. Blake swears she goes around the field testing the posts! He ought to train that useless dog of his better, though.”
“Blake is the tenant at Rixons now,” Jane said to Stephen. “The Haywards are both dead. Blake is a widower with two sons, and is making a good job of Rixons, except for this trouble with the cows and the dog.”
“Many things will have changed,” Stephen said. “I’ll have a thousand questions to ask, I can see that.”
“We’ll all have questions!” said Blanche. “You must have had some adventures since we last saw you.”
“Adventures and dangers, too,” said Philippa, speaking for the first time. Her voice was clear, faintly accented, but not hesitant. She had turned her shy smile to Robert. “But we have come through safely.”
“I shall light candles in our chapel in gratitude,” Robert said.
“That is an excellent plan. We are all glad of your safe homecoming,” Tobias said a little stiffly. “Well, the two of you had better come inside. Your man will see to your animals, and our groom, Jack Edwardes—he’s Phoebe’s boy, Tim Snowe’s grandson—will help him and see that he is given refreshment. Here’s Jack. Welcome home to Allerbrook, anyway, Stephen, and Mistress Philippa, too.”
As a greeting it was polite and correct, but the tone was hardly effusive, all the same. Stephen glanced at Jane and winked. Clearly he had noticed. Was this, Jane wondered anxiously, going to be a really happy homecoming or not?
As they went toward the hall, Robert walked at Philippa’s side. He was smiling and talking to her and the dark, graceful girl was responding, turning her head to look up at him. Walking beside Jane, Stephen once more caught her eye. He nodded toward them and raised his eyebrows, grinning more widely than ever.
“Nonsense,” Jane whispered. “It’s true that Robert has a romantic streak, but they’ve only just met.”
“I fell in love with Philippa’s mother and she with me at our first glimpse of each other. She was the daughter of a tribal chief and I was a stranger from the other side of the world, but it made no difference. We knew at once.”
“Oh, really, Stephen!”
“I promise you,” said Stephen. “I know the symptoms. It might even be a good thing. I’ve brought Philippa to England and I have to see her settled. She’s been homesick, but falling in love is a good cure for that, given the other party is suitable. Is this one suitable? Who is he?”
“He’s Tobias’s son. He and your daughter must be second cousins!”
“What of it?” said Stephen. “They won’t need a papal dispensation these days, will they?”
“Oh, dear God,” said Jane as the anxiety which had troubled her mind as she sat doing accounts in the parlour suddenly sprang into new life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
An Interest in Gossip
1585
Stephen stepped out of his bedchamber into the long gallery and took in what he had not noticed the previous night: the presence of a picture on the wall almost opposite his door. Placed between two windows and framed in gilt, it measured about nine inches wide by a foot high, and it was a portrait of Jane Allerbrook.
She wore golden-brown damask, with a divided front to reveal a cream kirtle embroidered with small flowers, and short, puffed damask sleeves over long undersleeves of the same embroidered cream material. She had a neat white ruff and a moderate farthingale, and her hair was netted in silver. The painted brown eyes smiled at him as though they could actually see him. He was studying the picture when Philippa came out of her own room and joined him.
“Do you recognize her?” he asked, remembering that Philippa had never seen a portrait before she came to England. There were a couple in the Hillmans’ house, but he did not know if she had noticed them.
“It’s Great-Aunt Jane, isn’t it?” Jane, welcoming Philippa to Allerbrook, had asked to be called that, and explained how relationships were named in England. “But it must have been painted a long time ago,” Philippa said. “It’s like her, but…she is older now, surely.”
“Yes, I think you’re right. It wasn’t done recently. She must be well into her sixties by now. I must ask her when it was painted.”
“Her dress is beautiful,” Philippa said sincerely. “Though it can’t be comfortable!” She looked down at the quite simple gown she had put on, which had a very small ruff and no farthingale. “I have had such a struggle to get into these things this morning and they are so stiff and scratchy. Will I really have to wear such clothes forever?”
“I’m afraid you must, my dear. You will get used to it. If you had grown up in England you would never have known anything else.”
“I will not wear those things called stays. I don’t need them and I hate them,” said Philippa, for once abandoning her usual impassivity. “I don’t come down into a point where my stomach is!” She looked again at the portrait. “But it is a lovely picture of her, although she looks worried. Look at the lines around the eyes.”
“You eagle-eyed Algonquin! But yes.” Now that he looked closely, he saw that Philippa was right. Well, it was natural enough.
“She has had her troubles in the past,” he said. “Plenty of them. I suppose they left their mark.”
Jane, sitting by the fire and sewing, paused, needle in hand, as Stephen came into the hall. He stopped, wrinkling his nose. “I can smell apples. I remember that aro
ma so well. You’ve begun making cider.”
“Letty and Robert are showing Philippa how the cider press works. She must feel very strange among us all. You have brought her a long way from her home, Stephen. Her childhood must have been so different from life here that however hard I try, I don’t suppose I’ll ever imagine it right. I thought that if she had something practical to do, something new, it would help her. Tim Snowe’s lending a hand, too, loading apples into the hopper. He’s become our indoor man now—our butler, so to speak. Stephen, why did you come back? And why did you bring your daughter?”
“I was shipwrecked, as I told you yesterday evening. I was taken in by a friendly tribe and had to make the best of it, but I missed England badly and I taught my children all about it. When the chance came to return…well, I took it. Philippa wanted to come mostly because she wanted to be with me. She’ll adapt—you’ll see. Are you not glad to see me, Aunt Jane?”
“Of course I am!” said Jane, and then wondered how true it was. She had sometimes dreamed how she would rejoice if Stephen suddenly walked in the door. But a curiously unpredictable atmosphere had always surrounded Stephen, and it hadn’t changed. Here it was again. She was overjoyed to see him, oh, of course, but if only she could shake off this absurd feeling that in these troubled times, to have him in the house was somehow to open the door to disturbance.
“Your daughter is very beautiful,” she said, and then hesitated before adding, “Stephen, my grandson, Robert, has promised to give her a first riding lesson this morning. I could hardly object, because she must of course learn to ride. I said that she can use my pony Beechnut—he’s descended from Hazelnut and is just as quiet. It was kind of Robert, but…”
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