The House of Allerbrook

by Valerie Anand

  “Meanwhile,” said Jane to Tobias and Robert, “go upstairs, both of you, and rest. Philippa, go with Robert.”

  “I’ll send hot water up, and soap and clean towels with it,” Jane said to Stephen. “They mustn’t arrive in France looking like scarecrows. Let us hope that Nicholas stands by us and…Robert?”

  Robert had come running back down the stairs, his face aghast. “Grandmother…Mother…it’s Philippa! I think…”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  The Decree of Exmoor

  1586

  In after years, Jane said that on that August day in 1586, it was no human agency that decreed which of the Allerbrooks should live and which should die, but Exmoor itself: wild, beautiful Exmoor, ruthless as a hunting falcon, and seemingly possessed of a diabolical sense of humour.

  The afternoon was hot and the room where Philippa lay, struggling with agonizing birth pangs, was sweltering. She had been labouring only for five hours, which in itself was normal, but she was having a very bad time.

  “The child’s coming early. I’d say by about three weeks,” Jane said as Blanche, upset to the point of wringing her hands, came into the kitchen to join an anxious conference. Jane was heating water while Phoebe and her daughter Eliza cut up a linen sheet to make extra cloths and Alice stirred broth. “It need not be a disaster,” Jane said, “and she’s strong. This isn’t Sybil all over again. You say there’s been no change, Blanche?”

  “No, she’s just…battling. Letty and Nell are holding her hands. I think it’s worse than when I had such trouble with Robert! Tobias doesn’t know whether to go or wait,” said Blanche distractedly. “Whatever he does, I need to be with him, but to leave you now…”

  “You must go and so must Tobias. He can’t be put at risk, as well. What about Robert?”

  “Robert!” Blanche wailed. “He has no shame. He’s in Philippa’s room, too, as if a man had any business in a birth chamber, except for a physician or a priest! Nell is shocked and Letty is furious—well, you know Letty! He says he won’t leave Allerbrook until his wife is safe and the child is born. I can’t make him listen and nor can Philippa. She’s tried. She’s a good girl. I didn’t know how good. She’s longing for him to stay, I can see it, but still she urges him to go with Toby, for his own sake. Oh, what a toil we’re all in!”

  “You must go! You must. Oh…damn these sodding pains…hell and damnation…!”

  Stephen did not wish to eavesdrop, but as propriety forbade him to intrude on this female mystery and he was desperate to know what was happening, he was standing miserably outside Philippa’s door and listening. He thought wryly that although he had taken good care, when instructing his daughter in English, never to teach her any oaths, she had clearly learned some since she came to England. He had wasted his caution.

  “I’m staying till this is over,” said Robert staunchly. “My parents can go, and should, but if anyone comes searching for me, I’ll just have to hide. It’s been done before.”

  So it has, thought Stephen. As well I know. Can we get away with it again?

  Inside the birth chamber, Philippa might never have heard of Algonquin stoicism. “Why did you do it?” she shouted at Robert. “All this wrangling over what rituals you pray with, all this quarrelling over which queen should wear a gold crown and a purple cloak! What does it matter?”

  “Hush, hush. You’re wasting your strength.” Letty squeezed a damp cloth over Philippa’s wet brow, but Philippa pushed her away and with an effort raised herself against her pillows. She pointed to the leaded window, beyond which the August moors could be seen, drenched in sunshine and glowing with heather and gorse in full summer bloom. “There’s purple and gold out there, enough to satisfy anyone, and it belongs to us all. People don’t have to murder each other for it!”

  “Now, now. This is no time to be thinking of such things, anyway.” Paul Snowe’s wife, Nell, who was a conventional young woman and rarely did any thinking at all on abstract matters, tried to soothe her.

  “How can I not think of them?” Philippa shouted at her. “Oh, dear God! Here it is again…! These bloody pains! Oh no…damn…damn…!” Words dissolved into a wail.

  Robert stepped swiftly outside the room and, finding Stephen there, grasped his arm. “Father-in-law! Please go and tell my parents to set off at once. I’ll follow when I can, but they mustn’t wait for me. The evenings are still long. They can reach Lynmouth before dark, just. My mother has told me that’s where Nicholas Lanyon is now. Get them on their way!”

  There were times when one didn’t argue. Robert might not understand Philippa as well as her father would have liked, but it was certain that he loved her, and that was good enough. Stephen made for the stairs down to the hall. He was halfway across it, looking for Tobias and Blanche, when Paul Snowe came racing down from the tower.

  “Soldiers, Master Stephen! Comin’ across the moor from the north. God’s teeth, it do be hot up there on the tower. They’m about fifteen minutes away, but they’m comin’ this way.”

  “What is it? I heard Paul’s voice.” Tobias came hurrying from the chapel. Blanche and Jane, carrying cloths and a steaming ewer of water, appeared from the kitchen and Tim Snowe ran in from the yard, where he had been collecting fresh wood for the kitchen fire “Soldiers?” said Tim on a note of fear.

  “Tobias!” Stephen took command. “Go to the stable. Jack’s there. Get ponies saddled for yourself and Blanche. Robert refuses to go and there’s no time to argue! Go on! At once!”

  “Blanche has packed the saddlebags and they’re with the saddles,” Jane said. “There are cloaks as well—it’ll be cooler at night and on the ship. If Robert isn’t going, tell Jack to bring his saddlebags back inside. I’ll empty them. Blanche, you and Tobias just go. Go!”

  “Out by the back way,” said Stephen. “Straight up the combe and over the ridge. Then no one coming in by the main track will see you.”

  “But Robert!” Blanche cried.

  “We’ll protect him if we can,” Stephen barked. “Just go! Now!”

  “There isn’t time!” gasped Blanche.

  “There is if you move fast enough. Paul, go back up and keep watch. Come down again when they get close.”

  “But…” Blanche looked terrified. She stared at the cloths in her hands. “Just to go…like this…without Robert…”

  Jane took the cloths, put them and her ewer down on the table and then took Blanche in her arms. “Don’t stop to wrangle. Do as Stephen says. You’ll be with Tobias. You’ll come home one day and if we can save Robert, we will. Godspeed, both of you!”

  There was just barely time for Jane to give parting hugs and kisses to Blanche and to Tobias and then they were gone. “I’ll get Robert hidden,” Jane said. Snatching up jug and cloths, she made for the stairs.

  In the bedchamber, Philippa was once more convulsed with pain and Robert had given her his hand to clutch. Nell was clucking in disapproval and Letty looked murderous, but he was taking no notice.

  “Soldiers are coming. They’re nearly here,” said Jane briefly, putting down the jug. “Paul saw them. Robert, your parents are leaving now. I hope they’re in time. I suggest that you get under Philippa’s bed. The flounce of the mattress covering hangs well down and you’ll be completely hidden.”

  “If they do find me,” said Robert, “you had no idea I had done anything in London that anyone would call wrong. You’re my innocent grandmother. You’re astonished to find that I’d hidden under the bed. You thought my father had gone straight from London to visit friends in France.”

  “They won’t find you,” said Jane. “Surely they won’t! The one place that no gentleman is likely to intrude himself is the room where a young woman is in childbed.”

  She had, however, not reckoned with Captain Adam Clayman.

  Or with Exmoor.

  When Adam Clayman was a small boy, trailing along the shore at Minehead behind his parents, Danny and Eva, and digging clay with his own little trowel, he ha
d decided that one day he would have a different life. Becoming a soldier had given him that life. It had also got him away from the west country altogether.

  He hadn’t been pleased, three months previously, just as he was approaching forty, to find himself transferred back to it, when a captaincy fell vacant and someone suggested him as a suitable replacement because he had come from there in the first place. He had no interest in going back. He hardly remembered the area and he certainly didn’t know his way around it. He had kept nothing from his old life except that he called himself Clayman—and even then he had added the last syllable because it seemed to him that it sounded more dignified than just Clay.

  Now he’d got to find a house called Allerbrook. The Babington plot had burst into his world like a clap of thunder when a Queen’s Messenger arrived on an exhausted, sweat-soaked horse with rolling eyes and foam around its bit. The messenger, having once delivered his news, had all but collapsed, so hard had he ridden from London.

  But he had picked up information on the way. It was certain, he said, that two of the conspirators had fled westward. He had found an innkeeper who had hired horses to gentlemen who met the description of a father and son called Tobias and Robert Allerbrook. They came from Allerbrook House and could well be making for home. It would be Captain Adam Clayman’s task to bring them in. Here was a warrant.

  His father had known the district, but Danny was dead long since. However, among the soldiers at Taunton Castle he found a Gervase Wells, who said he had once taken a letter to Allerbrook. Gervase could guide them. With six men, therefore, including Gervase, he set out.

  As he rode along through the August heat, Adam found himself intensely disliking his county of origin. He hated the bleakness of the hills and the darkness of the wooded valleys, and the barrow mounds made him feel creepy. He had been told as a child that they were haunted, and the sight of them produced atavistic twinges in his guts. He would if necessary have bivouacked on top of a barrow mound, he said to himself, and was irritated to find that he was lying.

  There were also other causes of annoyance, and Captain Adam Clayman had a short temper.

  On a day like this, the open hillsides were like a griddle. Distances wavered silkily in the heat. At one point they found themselves on a pebbly path across a hillside which had lately been on fire. To either side stretched blackened expanses of what had been heather, with here and there the charred skeletons of gorse bushes. It was like a country of the damned.

  He felt—they all felt—as though they were being cooked in a monstrous pan to provide dinner for some ferocious sun god, and as if that were not bad enough, there were the flies. There were clouds of them, especially when the path led through bracken. He and his companions were driven to pulling bracken fronds and waving them about as fly switches to ease both their own misery and that of the horses. They even went to the lengths of pushing fronds under the edges of their helmets, to keep the humming pests out of their eyes, although it meant peering through a green fringe to see their way.

  The wooded combes were less fly-ridden until the track took them deep into one, and across a river ford, when a new horror appeared in the shape of huge black horseflies that bit. One landed on Adam’s wrist. He knocked it off, but not before it had drawn blood. Another actually managed to bite his thigh through his breeches. The man just ahead of him was bitten on the neck and snarled with disgust as he smashed the insect away.

  None of them crossed the ford without being attacked by the bloodsucking terrors, and their curses made birds fly out of the trees.

  When he reached this place Allerbrook, Adam said to himself, he would enjoy arresting those two fugitives. He hoped they would be there! It would pay him for this ride through such a scorching, fly-infested hell.

  The afternoon was passing but it was still stiflingly hot when Gervase brought them to a track across the moorland above Clicket, and pointed out the church tower in the village below. “We’ll see Allerbrook House in a moment,” he said.

  Gervase was not happy. One part of him had welcomed the idea of going to Allerbrook, because perhaps he might see that amazing young woman, Mistress Philippa, again. But she would not be glad to see him; he would be an enemy, one of the men sent to arrest her husband and her father-in-law. There would be an unpleasant scene if they did find the wanted men at the house, and it would be worse if Clayman gave way to his temper.

  They jogged on. Few birds sang in this heat, but a corncrake gave its harsh call from a barley field as they rode past, and a buzzard drifted overhead, hunting for prey. The crenellated tower of Allerbrook House came into sight. For a moment Gervase thought he glimpsed someone on top of the tower, but if so, the figure vanished almost at once and he couldn’t be sure he had really seen anyone.

  The house also went out of view as the path changed course and a spur of hillside came between. As they rounded the spur it reappeared, but now there was a new obstacle. They pulled up sharply. The track was bounded on one side by a ditch dividing it from a field of rye, and on the other by a steep heather-covered drop, and the way ahead was blocked by a herd of black cows. The foremost cow, which had impressive horns, was right in their path, staring at them with more intelligence in her eyes than any mere bovine had the right to possess.

  “Get out of the way!” bellowed Clayman, brandishing his riding whip. There were clouds of flies around the cattle and a detachment came to reinforce those already buzzing around the horses. Clayman swept them away with his bracken fly-swat. The lead cow regarded him with contempt and turned broadside on, lowering her head to pull at some clover by the wayside. He whacked her flank, whereupon she turned and once more presented her horns to him.

  “Brutes!” Clayman spluttered. “Where’s their herdsman? God damn these bloody flies! Move aside, you stupid animal! Move!”

  The cow lowed at him and stood firm. Behind her, her sisters browsed placidly on the verges of the track. They formed as solid a barrier as a bramble hedge. “For the love of God!” bawled Clayman.

  Gervase pushed his horse up past his captain, came alongside the obdurate ringleader and by shoving and prodding, at last induced her to turn around. Her tail flicked him across the face—purposely, he suspected—and made his eyes water, but turn she eventually did, and slowly the entire herd was induced to shuffle around and start back along the way it had come. Presently shouts were heard in the distance, and a small, walnut-complexioned man accompanied by a pair of flaxen-haired youths and a black-and-white dog came puffing up the hill on foot, gasping apologies.

  “Are these animals yours?” Clayman shouted at them.

  “Aye. Simon Blake I be,” said the small man. “They’m my cows, right enough. Allus gettin’ out, they are.”

  “Can’t you keep your fences in repair?”

  “That there lead cow, Hellspawn I call she, she’ll wreck a fence soon as look at it. Her ’ud get out of the Tower of London, her would.”

  “I doubt it,” said Clayman coldly. “For the time being, though, I’d be glad if she’d just get out of our way! We’re on the queen’s business!”

  “Ah, well. We be just country folk, zur, Exmoor folk. Don’t know nothing about queen’s business round here.”

  “Just get that bloody herd off this path!” Clayman made a swipe with his whip and Simon Blake only just succeeded in evading it. “Now! Hellspawn, you call her! Very apt!”

  “Where are the soldiers? Shouldn’t they be here now?” Jane said, hurrying down into the hall. Tim Snowe and Stephen met her. They were grinning.

  “I’ve just been up on the tower,” Stephen said. “Paul came halfway down and called me and he was laughing. They’ve fallen foul of Blake’s cow Hellspawn and the rest of the herd. She’s got out again and taken the other cows with her. Thank God for it. Tobias and Blanche have only just got away. They wouldn’t have been in time, but for Hellspawn! The cows blocked the soldiers’ way and held them up just long enough. Hellspawn’s done us all a favour. But Blake and hi
s sons are there now and they’re shifting the herd. We’ll see the soldiers at any moment.”

  Paul came rapidly down from the tower. “They’re well nigh here!”

  “Go to the stable and find something to do,” said Stephen. “Something ordinary. We must all look innocent. Aunt Jane, here are Robert’s saddlebags. Quick, go upstairs and empty them in my room and then go back to Philippa. Look after her! I’ll let our visitors in and be polite to them.”

  “Call me when they arrive,” said Jane shortly, and with that seized the saddlebags and hurried away.

  Emptying the bags took only a few moments. She threw the contents into suitable chests and presses in Stephen’s room, dumped the bags themselves in a cupboard and sped back to Philippa.

  She found the drama there quite bad enough, without soldiers to complicate matters. Robert was under the bed; on it, Philippa was suffering so intensely that Jane found herself fearing for the girl’s life. Nell and Letty, now reinforced by Phoebe, all much distressed, were alternately murmuring prayers and applying warm wrung-out cloths to Philippa’s distended stomach. Downstairs, Jane had left Eliza and Alice still occupied with heating more water and stirring more broth. Eliza was in tears.

  Philippa’s room did not look toward the yard, but Jane’s ears, straining to hear, picked up the whinny of a strange horse and the barking of the dogs. She went down at once, trying to arrange her features into an expression of surprise and preoccupation. The preoccupation was real enough. Philippa’s condition was alarming.

  Out in the yard she found Stephen talking to half a dozen soldiers, who were still on their horses. Jack had ordered the dogs to lie down, but the geese, led by the gander who was always a feature of Allerbrook, had gathered around, cackling in their usual fashion. The soldiers looked strange, not to say absurd, for they were very dusty, except where sweat had made rivulets down their grimy faces, and most of them were peering at the world through fern fronds stuck in their headgear.