The House Of Lanyon. Valerie Anand

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      “But the point is…” began Father Meadowes, normally a stern and self-confident priest but unable to stem James’s irrelevancies.

      “No one has any proper sense of their duty anymore. Even priests aren’t staying on the right path, it seems!” Abruptly James abandoned his excursion into national affairs and returned to the real matter in hand. “Are you sure Christopher Clerk has vanished, Father? He hasn’t gone on an errand and forgotten to let you know? Something urgent, perhaps?”

      “I regret to say this, but I don’t think so,” said Meadowes. “He went out to meditate in the open air as he often does, but I expected him to return later and there was a matter to do with his studies that I wished to discuss with him. He hasn’t come back, and personal things are missing from his room. There has been village gossip concerning a girl. I took him to task and he assured me there was nothing in it, that he had merely escorted her home when she was accidentally separated from her family at the May fair and exchanged the time of day with her after church once or twice out of courtesy. Villagers do have a talent for making something out of nothing and I believed him then. I warned him to be careful and left it at that. Now, frankly, I wonder. Earlier this year he asked me some odd questions.”

      “What sort of questions?” Elizabeth Luttrell asked. She was seated, working at an intricate piece of embroidery while Wagtail snoozed at her feet. “He always seemed so earnest,” she remarked.

      “Yes, he did,” Father Meadowes agreed. “But the questions he asked were about leaving the church if a man changed his mind about his vocation. I asked if he were having doubts about his own and he said no. Now I’m wondering!”

      “He’s always seemed very quiet and conscientious,” said James. “Too much so, perhaps, for a young man.”

      “Yes, I felt that, too, sometimes,” Elizabeth said. “He was—is—so very…very self-contained, yet I sometimes felt that there was a side to him that was hidden.”

      The two men looked at her with interest. Elizabeth, usually a quiet woman, had a knack of occasionally making very acute remarks. Sharp as an embroidery needle, her husband sometimes said.

      She smiled at them. “All the same,” she added, “need we be anxious so soon? There could have been a misunderstanding…or even an accident.”

      She broke off as the gatekeeper’s boy arrived in the hall at a breathless run and barely sketched a bow before exclaiming, “There’s a Master Nicholas Weaver from the village, zurs and mistress! He’s axin’ to see Father Meadowes and he says it’s that urgent—can Father Meadowes see him now, at once. He looks that worried, zurs!”

      “Nicholas Weaver?” said James. “I know him. Hardworking man and a hardworking family, that’s him and his. It’s you he wants to see, is it, Father Meadowes? Maybe he’s got something to say about this mystery.”

      “Christopher was talking with a girl after the service on Sunday,” murmured Elizabeth. “It looked quite innocent, but…I wonder…”

      “The gossip,” said Meadowes ominously, “concerned a daughter of the Weaver family.”

      “Fetch Master Weaver along, boy,” said James.

      Nicholas came in with a firm tread, which concealed a secret hesitation. He had never been inside the castle before, never hitherto walked up the steep track from Dunster to the gatehouse with the castle walls and their towers and battlements looming ahead of him, and although he was not a man with a poor opinion of himself, he felt intimidated. At the gatehouse the porter had greeted him politely, but with an air of surprise. Villagers, even well-to-do ones like Nicholas Weaver, didn’t often call at the castle and certainly not to insist that they must immediately see men who held such dignified positions as castle chaplain.

      Despite his secret misgivings, Nicholas had been resolute and he had been admitted, but now that he was actually inside, he was awed by the scurrying of the numerous servants and by the great, beamed hall, with its huge hearth and the dais where the family dined. Thick rushes underfoot silenced his footfalls, the rosemary sprigs strewn among them gave off their scent wherever one stepped and the walls were hung with tapestries: a huge, dramatic one of Goliath being downed by a gallant little David, and a pretty one with a background of flowers and a lady in the foreground with a unicorn beside her.

      The fact that he had been led into the presence not only of Father Meadowes but of the Luttrells as well added further embarrassment. However, he bowed politely, murmured a conventional greeting and looked at the chaplain.

      James took control. “This is Father Meadowes,” he said. “At the moment something is making him anxious and we’re wondering if your visit is to do with the same matter. Is your business by any chance connected with one Christopher Clerk, Father Meadowes’s assistant?”

      “It may be,” said Nicholas. “If Christopher Clerk has left the castle. Has he?”

      “Yes. He’s vanished,” said Meadowes. “He went out after dinner as he often does. I had set him passages of Scripture on which to meditate, and in fine weather like today he likes to do that out of doors. He went off across the pasture that slopes down to the sea. I saw him go. But he hasn’t come back and we can’t find him anywhere.”

      “Does he have red hair?”

      “Very much so,” said James. “A tonsure like a sunset, as a matter of fact.”

      “My girl Liza’s vanished, as well,” said Nicholas. “And so have two of my ponies! I thought to look before I came here. And there’s been talk, about her and a young fellow with a red tonsure, possibly Christopher Clerk. We didn’t want to make a to-do over a bit of flirtation, even with a clerk, especially as we weren’t sure there was anything in it but silly tattle. We always thought Liza had some sense. We told her we’d found her a marriage and she seemed agreeable. We reckoned if there’d been any nonsense, it was just sweet talk and that she’d put it behind her. Now we think otherwise. We’re afraid she’s run away from home and if so, she’d hardly go on her own. Now you say this red-haired clerk…”

      “He’s a deacon,” said Meadowes.

      “Is he, indeed? Well, you tell me he’s missing. Have they run off together?”

      “It’s possible,” said Meadowes slowly.

      “So what can be done? I want my girl back. The marriage we’ve arranged is a good one and by that I mean a happy one. I’m a careful father, I hope. I’ve got her welfare at heart and a runaway priest isn’t what’s best for her.”

      “And you want to get her back before anything happens and before the young man she’s betrothed to finds out what she’s done,” said Elizabeth helpfully. “Father Meadowes, where might Christopher have taken her? Where does he come from? That might be a guide.”

      “Bristol,” said Meadowes. “But his father’s a highly respectable merchant there. He won’t have gone near his father! He studied in Oxford, but—no, I doubt if he’s gone there either. It’s hardly the place for a runaway couple to go to for sanctuary. I’d guess they’d make for a city, but they’d be more likely to choose Exeter or London.”

      “Three directions,” said James, thinking aloud. “London by way, to start with, of Taunton or Bridgwater, or south over the moor to Exeter by way of Tiverton. One of those.”

      “Bridgwater’s СКАЧАТЬ