Valerie Anand - The House Of Lanyon

“Is he yours?” Liza asked. “He shouldn’t be let loose to scrabble in people’s gardens. Someone might throw stones at him or kick him!”

Wagtail barked again and struggled in her arms. And then she recognised the man. He was once more in clerical black, though this time in the more practical form of hose and jerkin, and he had pulled a dark cap over his fiery tonsure. Some of his red hair was visible, though, with an oak leaf absurdly clinging to it. Christopher Clerk, the young man who had read her mind and knew that she was sorry for the swindler Bart Webber.

“I hope he did no serious damage,” he said. “He belongs to Mistress Luttrell—he’s her lapdog—but he’s forever running off into the woods. I think he thinks he’s a deerhound! Can you hand him over the fence to me?”

Liza went to do so and his eyes widened. “Don’t I know you? Aren’t you Liza Weaver? We met two days ago at the fair.”

“Yes, yes, I am. And you’re Christopher.” At the fair they had stood and walked side by side. This was the first time she had stood face-to-face with him and really studied him. He had a snub nose and a square jaw with a hint of pugnacity in it, the effect both tough and boyish and remarkably attractive. His red-gold eyebrows were shapely above his smiling eyes, and once more she noticed how beautiful and unusual their colour was. That amber shade was quite different from the soft velvet-brown of her own eyes, as she had sometimes seen them when looking in her mother’s silver mirror. There were a few gold flecks in the amber, and his skin, too, was dusted with golden freckles. There was a slightly denser freckling on his chin, adding an endearing touch of comedy to his face.

The hands that reached to take the struggling dog from her, though, were beautiful, strong without being coarse, the backs lightly furred with red-gold hairs, the bones clearly defined beneath the skin, the fingers and palms in perfect proportion. She found it hard not to keep gazing at them.

On his side, he was having his first clear view of her. He took in fewer details, but the little he did absorb was enough—the deep colour of the beechnut hair showing in front of the coif, the candid brown eyes, the good skin. She was tall for a girl, and within the plain dark everyday gown her body had a sturdy strength. Not that either of them felt they were studying a stranger. It was more as though they were reminding themselves of something they had known since before they were born but had unaccountably forgotten.

“The bluebells are still out in your garden,” he said. His hands were now full of dog, but he nodded to the little splash of blue next to the herb plot. “There are wonderful bluebells in a dell on the other side of the castle. You can get there by the path past the mill. A few yards on, there’s another little path that leads aside, leftward, to the dell. Do you know the place? Anyone can go there.”

“Yes. Yes, I know it. But how do you come to know it?” Liza asked curiously. “I thought…I mean, you have your work.”

“I came across it a week ago—chasing Wagtail again! He’s always getting out, and whoever sees him slipping off usually goes after him—page, squire, man-at-arms, maid or cook or groom! Not the chaplain or Mistress Luttrell herself, though. They keep their dignity. I found Wagtail among the bluebells and I’ve been back since to see them before they fade. Father Meadowes—the chaplain, that is—gives me a passage from the Scriptures to meditate on each day, and three times I’ve done my meditating while walking about in the dell after dinner. At about two of the clock.”

He shouldn’t be saying these things. Liza knew it and so did Christopher. He shouldn’t, either, have lain sleepless last night, while the girl he had met at the fair danced through his mind, glowing with light and warmth so that all thoughts of priesthood and his vocation had melted like morning mist before a summer sunrise. Now the words he ought not to say had come out, apparently by themselves.

“I walk out to take the air sometimes, too,” said Liza. She smiled. “There’s a leaf in your hair. Did you know?”

“Wagtail’s fault. He tore straight off through the woods below the castle and I went straight after him. But it’s hard going if you don’t take a stick or, better still, a wood-axe along with you,” said Christopher, grinning, and because he was still holding the dog, he leaned forward across the fence and let her remove the leaf from his tonsure. It was the first time they’d ever touched. It made her inside turn somersaults again.

“I must go,” he said, and she watched him walk away across the meadow. He was almost a priest and her parents wouldn’t like this at all, but it made no difference. Something had begun that would not be halted. At the thought of seeing him again, her spirit became as light as thistledown, dancing in the wind. Around her, the scent of the herbs, the green of the meadow, the azure of the bluebells, the distant sparkle of the sea all seemed enhanced, brighter, stronger, as though her senses had been half-asleep all her life and now were fully awake at last. She felt about as sensible as a hare in March, or an autumn leaf in a high wind.

She would see him again. She must.

In the afternoon she slipped away, through the village, along the path that led to the dell, and found him there and they walked together.

Three days later, although the bluebells were no longer at their best, they met there again and this time they kissed. Then they sat down on a fallen log and stared at each other in consternation.

“I’m going to be a priest. Well, I already am, in a junior way. I’ve been a subdeacon and six months ago I was ordained deacon. Becoming a full priest is the next step, the final one. If I…if I abandon my vocation now, my father won’t take me back. He has other sons to settle. He’s a merchant in Bristol, successful but not rich.”

“I see. Well, you told me to begin with that you were going to be a priest. But…” Liza’s voice died away in bewilderment, mainly at herself.

Christopher thrust his fingers through his tonsure. “Liza, my father and mother are both steady, reliable people. They expect their children to be steady and reliable, too, and I thought I was! And then—we met at the fair, and you smiled at me and all my good sense has flown away like a flock of swallows at the end of summer! You make me feel as though my feet have left the ground and my head’s among the stars. I don’t understand myself!”

He stopped running his fingers through his hair and reached out to take her hands. “What I do understand is that my world has turned upside down. Liza, as I said, I’m already in the priesthood. To get myself released from this would be horribly difficult. I’d have to go to my bishop and he’d probably say I was committed for life. I’ve heard of men who’ve bought their way out, but I have little money. I suppose I could borrow some. I know I could make my way in the world, given time, but it would be very hard at first and perhaps I’d be in debt. Would you wait for me? Would they let you wait?”

“I don’t think so. They want to get me married, and they’d say that a priest can’t marry and that’s the end of it.”

Liza knew her family. They were good-natured as a rule, though liable to shout loudly in times of crisis—if, for instance, a pot should be spilled in the kitchen or a piece of weaving be damaged or if Aunt Cecy discovered a spider in her bedchamber—but with no real ill feeling behind the uproar. Nevertheless, for all their seemingly easygoing ways, they took their work seriously; nothing slipshod was ever let past. And they expected their private life to be properly conducted, expected that parents would arrange their children’s future careers and marriages and that the children would concur. The arrangements would be made with affection and consideration, but made, just the same, and with a very keen regard for respectability. What Liza was doing now would not be tolerated. She would be seen as a wanton who had tried to seduce a priest from his vocation. Her mother in particular would be horrified. Margaret prided herself on holding up her head among the neighbours.