The House Of Allerbrook. Valerie Anand

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СКАЧАТЬ had made the journey on a pillion behind a groom and they had travelled slowly, but she was tired. By the time they were on the steep track down into the little harbour village of Lynmouth at the base of its towering cliffs, she was longing for a quiet bedchamber with a cup of wine to restore her.

      At the door of the house, just before the foot of the hill, they dismounted and servants came out to deal with panniers and horses. The main door opened straight into a big panelled parlour. Sybil had seen it before. When her parents were alive, the Allerbrooks had once or twice attended Christmas revels at the Lanyons’ home. Now, however, she paused uncertainly, wondering where to go, until Katherine tapped her arm and said, “Follow me.”

      The house was old and creaky and tall. Katherine led the way up a steep and somewhat rickety staircase to an attic room. There were no luxuries here, no hearth or bed-hangings. There was a clothespress, a window seat that lifted to reveal a chest below, one small shelf with a candlestick on it and a plain truckle bed with no bedding.

      “Your things will be fetched up presently and I’ll have the bed made up,” Katherine said. “For now, just take off your cloak and hat and leave them here, and then come down to the dining parlour. Do you remember where it is?”

      No rest, then. Not even a wash! She went down to the dining parlour, which led out of the main parlour, and found that food was being set out. She was not, however, to eat anything yet.

      “You can serve us while we eat and leave the other maids free to get on with other things,” Katherine said. Sybil stared at her and that was the moment when Katherine said, “There’s no room here for idle hands. Everyone’s always busy,” she added. “You can eat when we’ve finished.”

      She was presented to the servants as Mistress Sybil Waters, a young widow, a relative, but without means. “We’ve never known anyone called Waters, so as a name it won’t cause confusion,” Owen said.

      Sybil was willing enough to acquiesce, but the groom who had accompanied the party to Allerbrook certainly knew the truth, and she had no doubt that he would soon tell the three maids and the manservant Perkins all about it. If this was a port in a storm, it also promised to be a port in a hostile country.

      The days that followed were harsh. Katherine, however well-bred in society, was less fastidious in private, where she raised her voice whenever she pleased. Only Owen was exempt. His wife shouted at everyone else and handed out frequent slaps, and Sybil was sure that she received more than her fair share. At Allerbrook such things were rare. At Allerbrook, too, people often smiled. If only, in Lynmouth, someone now and then would smile at her. But no one ever did and on top of that, there was the work.

      Rooms must be dusted, clothes mended, onions peeled, loaves shaped, pots stirred, fish gutted, stores counted, floors swept, dishes washed, guests waited on, and Sybil was called upon to perform these tasks, for all the world as though she were a maidservant instead of a kinswoman.

      Owen belonged to a consortium of merchants, but he had a ship of his own and often sailed abroad to buy dyes and spices and bales of silk in person, rather than leave it to agents. He and Idwal were often away from home on trading expeditions, and the first time the two of them set off, Sybil hoped that there might be less to do. She was wrong. Left in command, Katherine became not so much a conscientious housewife as a slave driver.

      When the men were away, she said, that was the time to get some real work done. New shirts must be made for husband and son, and a spell of spring sunshine inspired her to have all the linen in the house, both bed linen and undergarments, thoroughly washed and put out to dry.

      Never before had Sybil been asked to work so long or so hard. At home she sometimes helped in the kitchen and dairy, but she had had time to herself to enjoy books—poetry, travel and devotional works. In the evenings they would all take turns with the lute and there might be dancing or cards or backgammon.

      She had realized that life at court would be different, but there she had hoped to find glamour, to wear fashionable clothes, to attend masques and tournaments. There was no glamour and precious little merriment in her life now. There wasn’t even time to read. She had pushed two books into her panniers, but she had not had a moment to open either of them.

      At times she was so tired that she could scarcely force her feet to walk, and she would stumble off to bed as soon as she could after supper had been eaten and she had helped to wash the platters. And oh, the aching, desperate need for somebody to smile at her.

      She was not asked to do heavy tasks like carrying full buckets about, but it seemed to her that the Lanyons were still, stealthily, creating conditions which might bring on a miscarriage. And that Francis had probably instructed them to do so.

      Her back ached constantly and the calling of the gulls as they wheeled and soared above Lynmouth, free as the wind and gliding on it with outspread wings, was like mocking laughter. Now, lying on her pallet at the end of another dreadful day in which one menial task had followed another in pitiless procession, Sybil tossed unhappily, unable to find a position which would accommodate her swelling abdomen in comfort.

      “All this,” she said aloud, “all this just because that Andrew Shearer got me giggly at his son’s christening party, plying me with cider, and then said, come and see how the red calf ’s grown, that was born so late this year. I don’t even like Andrew Shearer!”

      Not that Shearer was ugly. He had flint-coloured eyes but they could glint with amusement, and he had a knack of fixing his gaze on someone in a way that made the someone feel as though they were the only person in his world. His narrow face was shapely enough, and on the night of the celebration his black hair, though overlong as usual, wasn’t untidy as it normally was, but carefully combed.

      He had been persuasive, refilling her tankard with cider and looking at her, watching her, with those bright, flinty eyes. Then, before she knew what was happening, he’d put an arm around her, steered her out of the room where the others were dancing, across the central passage and into the adjoining byre, dark except for a glimmer of starlight through a gap under the eaves and full of the warm, pungent smell of cattle and horses.

      There’d been no more talk of the red calf then—not that they could have seen it in the gloom, anyway. Instead, Andrew Shearer had put his mouth over hers and gripped her tightly and somehow slid them both down onto a pile of straw in a vacant stall.

      She’d been fuddled and silly. The Shearers’ home-brewed cider was very strong and she knew she had drunk too much of it. She managed a feeble protest, of which he took no notice. He murmured soothingly and told her that she was adorable and petted her in a way which made her feel very strange, as though she wanted him to go on doing it, and then she’d been squashed beneath him and something rather painful but also rather exciting was happening….

      And then it was all over, and he was kissing her and saying Thank you, sweeting. Now we’d better get back to the others before you’re missed, and a moment later they were back in the main room on the other side of the passageway.

      At once Harry Hudd, that awful old man from Rixons, who smelt and had gaps in his teeth and a wind-reddened face that went all shiny when he drank cider and almost purple when anything annoyed him, was asking her to dance and Andrew was laughing and pushing her at him, and there she was, dancing, though she felt very peculiar, slightly sore and oddly wet. And that was that. Except that it wasn’t because the next time she should have started a course, she didn’t.

      Such a little thing. A few foolish moments in the dark byre with its animal smell and the rustle of shifting hoofs, СКАЧАТЬ