away from the house on some unknown errand.
Uncle Will turned to peer after her. “There she goes. Well, let’s hope all she wanted was a breath of air and that she b’ain’t runnin’ off with her red-haired swain yetawhile. You take an old man’s advice. Say nothing to her about him. Pretend we don’t know. No need to upset the wench. But get her wed, and fast. Get word off to Richard Lanyon tomorrow and tell him yes. That’s what I say.” Another wave of smoke poured out of the fireplace and he choked again. “Can’t anyone do something about this? Put a bucket of water on that there fire and get to sweeping the chimney!”
CHAPTER FOUR
ONE MAGICAL SUMMER
Peter’ll do as far as I’m concerned. When Liza heard her father say those words, she had heard enough. She sat back on her heels, miserably thinking, while the murmur of voices continued below her. At length she rose quietly from the floor, picked up a cloak, unbolted her door and stole out. The stairs were solid and didn’t creak. She went softly down them, glad that in this house they didn’t lead into the big main room as they did in many other houses, but into a tiny lobby where cloaks and spare footwear were kept, and from which the front door opened.
She could hear a buzz of talk and a clatter of pans in the kitchen. If anyone saw her, she would probably be called in to help and chided for having left it in the first place. She opened the front door as stealthily as she could, darted through, closed it and set off, crossing the road, trying to lose herself quickly behind the stalls in the middle of it, in case anyone should be looking from the window.
Bearing to the right, past the last cottages and the Abbot’s House opposite, she hurried out of the village. Then she turned off the main track, taking a path to the left, crossed a cornfield and emerged onto the track that led to the next village to the west, Alcombe, two miles off.
She felt uneasy as she crossed the field, for here, as at Allerbrook, the corn had been cut and a couple of village women were gleaning in the stubble. Although they were some way off and did not seem to notice her, she was nervously aware of them.
Beyond the cornfield stood a stone pillar on a plinth, a monument to the days of the great plague in the last century. Villages then had kept strangers out in case they brought disease with them, but commerce had to go on; wool and yarn, cloth and leather, butter and cheese, flour and ale must still be bought and sold and so, outside many villages, stone pillars or crosses had been set up to show where markets could be held.
“I’ll be by the plague cross at ten of the clock on Tuesday,” Christopher had said at their last meeting. “I’ll have an errand past there that day. The Luttrells send things now and then to an old serving man of theirs in Alcombe. He’s ailing nowadays. They often use me for charitable tasks like that, and lend me a pony. Meet me there if you can. I’ll wait for you for a while, though I’d better not linger too long.”
It was only just past ten o’clock, Liza thought as she slipped out of the field, out of sight of the gleaning women. Had he waited? Would he be there?
He was. There was his pony, hobbled and grazing by the track, and there was Christopher, his hair as bright as fire, sitting on the plinth.
“Christopher!”
He was looking the other way, perhaps expecting her to come along the main track instead of through the field, but he sprang up at the sound of her voice, and turned toward her. She ran into his arms and they closed about her. “Oh, Christopher! I’m so glad to see you!”
“Are you? What is it, sweeting? Something’s wrong, isn’t it? I can always tell.”
“Yes, I know you can!”
That was how it had been from the beginning, when they met in the spring, at the May Day fair in Dunster. It had been a fine day, and the fair was packed and raucous. There were extra stalls as well as the regular ones, offering every imaginable commodity: gloves, pottery, kitchen pans and fire irons, hats, belts, buckles, cheap trinkets, questionable remedies for assorted ills, lengths of silk and linen from far away as well as the local woollen cloth, sweet cakes and savoury snacks cooked on the spot over beds of glowing charcoal. There were entertainments, too: a juggler, tumblers, a minstrel playing a lute and singing, a troupe of dancers and a sword swallower.
And, creating an alleyway through the crowd and inspiring a different mood among the onlookers, an unhappy man stripped to the waist except for a length of undyed cloth slung around his neck. Splashed with dirt and marked with bruises, he was escorted by the two men who that year were Dunster’s constables. Ahead of them walked a boy banging a drum for the crowd’s attention and announcing that by order of the Weavers Guild of Dunster, here came Bart Webber, who had been mixing flax with his woollen yarn to make his cloth, and selling it as pure Dunster wool, and had been fined for it at the last manor court.
It could have been worse. The hapless Master Webber hadn’t been whipped or put in the stocks, and the crowd was good-humoured and not in a mood for brutality. Many of them knew him socially, which inclined them to restraint or even, in some cases, sympathy. He was still drawing a few jeers, though, and an occasional missile—handfuls of mud and one or two mouldy onions, which had caused the bruises. His situation was quite wretched enough and his face was a mask of misery and embarrassment. Liza, distressed, turned quickly away.
Her parents had often told her she felt things too deeply and ought to be more sensible. They clicked regretful tongues when she persisted in going for walks on her own or when they found her in the garden after dark—“mooning after the moon,” as her father put it—or being stunned by the splendour of the constellation of Orion, making its mighty pattern in the winter sky. Yes, Nicholas said, of course the moon looked like a silver dish—or a lopsided face or a little curved boat, depending on which phase it was in—and yes, of course the stars were beautiful. But most people had more sense than to stand outside catching cold, especially when there was work to be done indoors.
Sometimes Liza felt that she was dedicating her entire life to appearing sensible when inside herself, she often didn’t feel sensible at all, but wild and vulnerable, like a red deer hind, fleeing before the hounds.
Now she wanted to get well away from poor Bart Webber. Elena and Laurence, who were with her, stayed to stare but Liza, abandoning them, edged back through the crowd. Then she realised that a young man who had been standing next to Laurence had turned away, too, and was beside her and seemed to want to speak to her. She looked at him in surprise, and he said kindly, “You didn’t like seeing that, did you?”
She stopped and studied him. He wore a clerk’s black gown and a priest’s tonsure. The ring of hair left by the tonsure was an astonishing shade of flame-red. “I know him,” she said. “Bart Webber. He’s dined with us. No, I didn’t like seeing him—like that.” It occurred to her that the young clerk had been watching her and that this was impertinent of him. With a rush of indignation she said, “You were looking at me?”
“Forgive me,” he said mildly. “But when I saw you move away alone—well, in such a throng, you shouldn’t be on your own.”
“I was with cousins, but they’re still back there. I’ve other relatives somewhere about, though, and my home is over there.” She pointed.
“Let me walk with you to your door, or until you find some of your family.” His voice was intentionally gentle, cooling her flash of annoyance. “You never know. There could be cutpurses about.”
She let him escort her and as they walked, they talked. He was Christopher Clerk, halfway to priesthood, studying with the chaplain at the castle. She was Liza Weaver, daughter of Nicholas Weaver who, with his family, owned three Dunster houses and was head of a business which carried on both spinning and weaving. “Our cloth’s quite well-known, and so is my mother’s special fine thread.”
“You sound as though you’re proud of your family,” he said.
“I am! And you must be proud of your vocation, and of living in a castle! Is it very grand, with paintings and carpets from the east and silken cushions for the