The Armourer's House Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  1 Sails at Billingsgate

  2 The ‘Dolphin and Joyous Venture’

  3 May Day and Morris Dancers

  4 The Wise Woman

  5 How Tamsyn saw the Laughing Lady

  6 Tall Ship Magic

  7 A Tale for Hallowe’en

  8 Uncle Martin Comes for Christmas

  9 Down to Deptford

  10 Lullay My Liking

  About the Author

  Also by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Copyright

  About the Book

  If only she’d been born a boy, Tamsyn would never have been sent away to Uncle Gideon’s – the armourer’s – house when her grandmother died. She could have stayed by the wild sea that she loved with her Uncle Martin, the ship merchant.

  But instead, she is bound for busy, bustling Tudor London, and the armourer’s house, far from the coast and far from her beloved ships. Homesick and lonely in the loud family of cousins, it isn’t until she meets the strange old Wise Woman that Tamsyn is finally promised her “heart’s desire”. . .

  1

  Sails at Billingsgate

  Tamsyn Caunter stood on the doorstep of the little grey house and watched the grey sky above the treetops, and shivered in the grey March wind that seemed somehow colder than any wind she had ever known before. Her Uncle Martin, who had come out from Bideford to see her off on her journey, stood on the doorstep too, holding her hand in a large, warm, consoling clasp, and talking cheerfully about the glories of London Town; but he was almost as miserable as she was, and they were both listening all the time for the clip-clop of horses’ hooves on the cobbles, because Uncle Gideon had just gone to bring round the horse on which he was going to carry Tamsyn away to London.

  The little grey house had been Tamsyn’s home ever since she could remember, because she had been such a very small baby when her parents died and she came to live there with Grandmother, that there might just as well not have been a before-time at all, as far as she was concerned. And now Grandmother was dead, too, and Tamsyn must go right away and live with Uncle Gideon, whom she had never seen until three days ago, and with his family, whom she had never seen at all; she must leave behind her all the things and people she loved, like Uncle Martin and Sibbly the Cook. That was why she was so desperately unhappy; not because of Grandmother, for she had never really been very close to Grandmother, who was the sort of person you respect enormously but do not dare to love.

  ‘If only I could have gone to live with Uncle Martin!’ she thought desperately.

  Uncle Martin was a merchant of Bideford Town (what people call a ‘Merchant Venturer’), and had two ships of his own trading with countries half the world away, and a third ship a-building in Master Braund’s shipyard, that was to be swifter and more beautiful than either of them. She was to be called the Joyous Venture because she was to join in the new trade with the West Indies, which would be a very great adventure indeed. It would have been lovely to have gone and lived with Uncle Martin, and watched the Joyous Venture being built, and seen the tall ships come and go; but he was not married, and Grandmother had not thought that anyone could bring up a little girl really properly without a wife to help him; so she had arranged long ago that Tamsyn was to go and live with Uncle Gideon, because he had Aunt Deborah.

  But Tamsyn did not want to be brought up properly, she only wanted to be happy, and she gave a small, woeful sniff.

  ‘Think how nice it will be to have other children to play with!’ said Uncle Martin heartily, as though in answer to the sniff. But Tamsyn did not want other children, she much preferred ships. ‘And of course you could always come home when you are grown up,’ said Uncle Martin, even more heartily.

  That did cheer her a little, though being grown up seemed a long way off, because she was not quite nine yet; and she stifled the next sniff

  And next moment she heard the clatter of hooves she had been listening for, and Uncle Gideon came riding round the corner of the house and reined in before the door, looking down at the two of them in a grave, kindly sort of way. ‘I think it would be as well if we started at once,’ said Uncle Gideon.

  Tamsyn’s few belongings had already been stowed in the saddle-bags, and she had said goodbye to fat, kind Sibbly the Cook, who was now crying in the back kitchen with her apron over her head; and there was nothing to wait for. So she and Uncle Martin hugged each other goodbye, while Uncle Gideon sat on his fidgeting horse and watched a rook flapping up into the wind, as though he had never seen one before.

  ‘Why aren’t you a boy, Tamsy?’ Uncle Martin demanded indignantly at the last moment. ‘Then Grandmother would never have got this crotchet into her head, and you could have come and lived with me, and later on you should have been Master of the Joyous Venture.’

  ‘I wish I was a boy,’ gulped Tamsyn. ‘Oh, I wish I was!’ She had always wished that ever since she could remember, so that one day she could have sailed out over the Bar with one of those tall ships of Bideford Town and seen all the strange and wonderful things that sailors talked about when they came home again from their voyages. But she had never wished it half as much as she did now.

  But it was no good wishing; and it was time to go. Tamsyn managed not to cling to Uncle Martin when he stopped hugging her and lifted her up to the pillion saddle; she twisted her hands obediently in Uncle Gideon’s belt, when he told her to; and when he asked her if she was All Right Behind, she said she was, in a voice that hardly wobbled at all.

  So Uncle Gideon leaned down and gripped hands with Uncle Martin, and said, ‘See you in London one of these days, Martin.’

  And Uncle Martin said very cheerfully, ‘Aye, that you will, old lad. I shall come up to see my Tamsy before any of us are much older.’

  Then Uncle Gideon touched his heel to the horse’s flank, and they were off and away, tittupping over the moss-grown cobbles. Tamsyn looked round once, as they swung out through the gateway into the steep lane that led down to Bideford; and the last she saw of Uncle Martin, he was standing where they had left him, waving after them, with his flat merchant’s cap slipping wildly over one ear. (Uncle Martin never could keep his cap on straight, because his red hair stood so very much on end.) ‘Goodbye,’ he called. ‘Goodbye, my honey!’

  Tamsyn waved back, but she could not call in answer, because there was a large aching lump in her throat, and by the time she had swallowed it, the tall, wind-swayed hedge was between them, and she could not see Uncle Martin any more.

  Tamsyn rode all across England, sitting on the pillion behind Uncle Gideon and holding tight to his belt so as not to fall off; and it took them a whole week to do the journey. Every night they stopped at an inn, and Tamsyn was handed over to the innkeeper’s wife, and sometimes the innkeeper’s wife was nice, and sometimes she was not. Every morning she was lifted up again behind Uncle Gideon and they set out on the long day’s ride, just like yesterday and the day before. Uncle Gideon was very kind to her in a quiet sort of way, but it seemed a dreary week all the same, and the March winds blew very cold, and Tamsyn was very homesick and desperately low in her inside; and by the time they rode through the village of Charing and up the road between great houses and broad gardens that was called the Strand, and clattered through Ludgate into London Town, she was so stiff and cold and tired and unhappy that she hardly knew where she was.

  There seemed to Tamsyn to be a terrifying number of people in Uncle Gideon’s house!

  First there was Uncle Gideon himself, who was a Master Swordsmith and Armourer. He was long and lean and quiet and kindly, with grey hairs in his red beard. (All the Caunters had red hair except Tamsyn, whose hair was
black instead.) He had a rather sad face, and a queer way of talking, so that you were never quite sure if he was laughing at you; and he looked really much more like a scholar than a swordsmith.

  Then there was Aunt Deborah, who was warm and pretty, and had honey-coloured hair, which she coiled up under a black velvet hood like the ones the queens wear on playing-cards, because most ladies wore it like that in those days. Her eyes were blue as speedwell and when they went all starry, so that she looked like someone in a stained-glass window with the sun shining through it, she was generally wondering what she should give Uncle Gideon for supper, or whether she had enough fine holland over from making a shift for Beatrix to make a shirt for Littlest.

  Then there were the children.

  Piers was the eldest. He was fourteen and a bit, and apprenticed to his father, so that one day he would be a swordsmith too. He was quite distressingly ugly, with rufty-tufty dark red hair, and very large ears, and a bony sort of face with a beaky sort of nose covered in freckles. But somehow, when he started doing anything with his hands, such as mending a broken toy or rubbing Bunch, the little Italian greyhound, behind the ears, you forgot about his being ugly. He was a peaceable and quiet sort of person, and he had a way of going off by himself sometimes, and the Almost-Twins said he was dull, though they found him very useful when they wanted anything mended or a drawing made – because the things that Piers drew always looked alive. But from the very first moment that she saw him, Tamsyn did not think that Piers was dull. She thought he was probably a most exciting person, only the exciting part was underneath, so that it didn’t show.

  The Almost-Twins came next. There was Beatrix who was rising eleven and had a delicate nose and hair as red as flame, and hated getting dirty or sticky or her feet wet, just like a cat. And there was Giles, who was practically ten. He had a delicate nose and hair as red as flame, too (though he did not mind at all about getting dirty or sticky or his feet wet), so that people often thought they were twins. Beatrix was generally pretending to be somebody else; most often it was Catherine of Aragon, but sometimes it was other people, so that nobody ever knew, when she came down in the mornings, whether she was Queen Catherine in Prison, or Mistress Whitcome-two-doors-down-the-street, or somebody out of the Bible. Her family had got quite used to it now, so that they hardly noticed. Giles liked eating and fighting and keeping beetles and caterpillars in boxes. There had been a dreadful time when he was quite small, when he had brought a large box of snails into the house and they had escaped in the night and got simply everywhere; but people did not remind him of it. Not if they were wise. He and Beatrix never did anything apart if they could do it together, but they quarrelled a good deal.

  Lastly there was Littlest, whose real name was Benjamin; and Littlest was round and sweet as an apple, with red cheeks and cornflower-blue eyes and straight red-gold hair. Littlest was always busy and never cross, and he was three-and-a-bit years old.

  There should have been Christopher, too, the oldest of them all, and named after Tamsyn’s father (though they called him Kit for short). But Kit had gone to sea and not come back, just as Tamsyn’s father had done. It had all happened just after he left school, when Master Roger Whitcome, who was a silk merchant and Uncle Gideon’s friend, had offered him a voyage with his ship, the Elizabeth, which was trading with Alexandria. Kit had wanted desperately to have just one voyage before he settled down to learning his father’s trade; so he had gone. And the Elizabeth had gone down off the coast of Portugal in a great storm. A homeward-bound ship had saved many of the crew and brought them back to England, but not Kit. That had been nearly two years ago, and nobody seemed sad about it now; in fact they were a very gay family. But they all missed Kit, just the same, and Aunt Deborah watched the street sometimes, as though she expected to see him come walking home.

  That was the family, and they were all as kind as kind could be to Tamsyn – even Beatrix when she could spare the time from being someone else – and so was Meg the Kitchen, who was inclined to be stout and inclined to be deaf and sometimes inclined to be cross, and so was Bunch. But there were so many of them, and there was only one of Tamsyn, and they were not her own family and she couldn’t feel a bit as though they were. Anyway, she wasn’t used to living with a family at all, and there were a lot of things about it that she hated. She particularly hated having to sleep in the same bed with Beatrix at night; it wasn’t that Beatrix kicked or anything like that, it was just the not having a corner of her own where she could be private by herself. Beatrix didn’t seem ever to want to be private; she liked an audience, all the time, so she did not mind sharing her bed with Tamsyn; and nobody had the least idea how often Tamsyn would have cried herself to sleep, but for the fact that Beatrix would have known about it.

  The house where they all lived was in a narrow street so close to the river that they could smell the mud when the tide was out, and so close to the Black Friar’s Monastery that they could hear the chapel bell ringing to prayers all through the day. Every house in the street was a merchant’s or a goldsmith’s or something like that, but Uncle Gideon’s house was the only one that belonged to an armourer; and it had a gilded helmet over the door, so that people could see at a glance that it did. It was a very narrow house, but so tall that its steep gables thrust up head and shoulders above the houses on either side, and every storey jutted out a little farther than the one below, until the topmost storey almost overhung the roof of the house over the way. It was quite a young house, and its beautiful timbering was still golden – not grey, like the weathered timbering of the really old houses in the street: and the four corbels that supported the sticking-out part of the first storey were carved into the shape of dolphins; joyous, leaping dolphins, painted bright blue. People loved brilliant colours when Henry VIII was young and gay; they dyed their stuffs and silks in all the colours of the rainbow, and wore golden sleeves and shoes of crimson velvet, and enriched their houses and their ships to match. Lots of the houses in the street had carved and painted timbers to make them beautiful. The house of Master Bodkin, the goldsmith over the way, had a lovely pattern of vines on its doorposts, and Master Roger Whitcome’s doorway had its lintel carved into garlands of roses and pomegranates, all painted as gay as gay could be. But the Caunter children all liked the dolphins best, and they called the house ‘the Dolphin House’ because of them.

  Inside the house was nice, too. The ground floor was mostly workshop, except for the kitchen and things like that, at the back. The workshop was rather dark, but when the forge fire was blown up the red light flooded into every corner in the most exciting way. It was very full of leather-topped tables and work-benches covered with tools, and the great anvil stood in a clear space in the middle, and there were little anvils too, for all the small and delicate work of the armourer’s craft. And hanging on the walls and propped up on the benches were all the wonderful things that Uncle Gideon and his journeymen and prentices made for the great lords to wear and carry when they went to war or jousted with each other in the new Tilt-Yard the King’s Grace had built beside Whitehall Palace; helmets of blue steel inlaid with silver, wonderfully jointed gauntlets, bright, deadly sword-blades, whole suits of armour standing in dark corners and looking terrifying as though there was someone inside them. It was a very busy place, the workshop, with old Caleb, the swordsmith, and the others in their leather aprons, moulding, polishing, cutting the sheets of metal with great shears; and Piers and the other prentice, whose name was Timothy, scurrying about and fetching and carrying and learning the trade; and Uncle Gideon in his long black gown overseeing the work or putting the delicate finishing touches to a piece of armour. Timothy had one blue eye and one brown one, and he always squinted in the most enchanting way at Tamsyn and Beatrix when they came through the workshop with Aunt Deborah. (For the front door opened into the workshop, and the stairs led down into it, so that you had to go through it on your way out and in.) But Piers never did more than look up from his work for a moment. He
seemed always to be so very busy learning to be an armourer.

  At the top of the first flight of stairs was the guestroom, which was very beautiful, with a big bed in it hung with crimson curtains worked all over with pansies and sops-in-wine; and the parlour, where the family lived and ate and spent their evenings. The parlour was beautiful too, with panelled walls and an oriel window that had real glass in it, and a smoke-hood above the hearth carved with pomegranates for Catherine of Aragon, a pot of frilly double daffodils on the window-sill, and a chest carved with snarling leopard-heads in which Uncle Gideon kept his books. He only had three – but nobody had many in those days – one was called the Odyssey, and one was called the Iliad, and one was called Euripides, and they were all in Greek. Uncle Gideon loved them very much, and wouldn’t let anyone go to the chest except Piers, who loved them too, especially the Odyssey, which was about ships and seaways and wonderful adventures.

  Upstairs again was Aunt Deborah’s and Uncle Gideon’s chamber, and that had glass in the window too; and the room where Tamsyn and Beatrix slept in a big bed with dark-blue curtains and Littlest slept in a truckle bed with no curtains at all; and that room had no glass in the window. It was rather draughty when the wind blew, because you couldn’t shut out the wind without shutting out the light as well.

  Highest up of all, high under the eaves, among the stars and the winds of heaven, were the tiny cubby-holes that belonged to Meg the Kitchen and Piers and Giles and Timothy, and a long, low attic that ran all the length of the Dolphin House, with a window at one end looking across the river, and a window at the other end peering down into the street. There were boxes and bales stacked against the walls, barrels for storing apples in bran, an old side-saddle, and several quarter-staffs propped in a corner, creaking floorboards, and cobwebs festooned from the rafters, and an interesting smell of damp and mice and hidden secrets. This was supposed to be a place for storing things, but really and truly it was the Children’s Kingdom, and they called it ‘Kit’s Castle’. Kit had started calling it that, when he was five years old; he had stood at the top of the stairs and shouted, ‘I am Kit Caunter, and this is my castle’. And it had been Kit’s Castle ever since. There was a big chest under one window, where the children kept all the things they had collected at odd times: some pieces of gay, worn-out cloth, and a king’s crown of gilded pasteboard with the gilt beginning to wear off, a pair of wooden swords, and a sandal-wood box with a hunting scene carved on the lid, and a dried sea-horse that an old sailor had once given Kit, a pewter mug with a dint in it, and five peacock feathers, and a lot of other things. Giles kept his beetles and caterpillars up there too, in boxes with air holes in the lids. When it was wet or cold, so that they could not play in the narrow garden, or whenever they happened to feel like it, even if the sun was shining, they would scramble up the steep stairway that wound round and round its central post like the stripes round a barber’s pole so that you were quite dizzy when you got to the top, and drag out all the delightful things in the chest and do whatever best pleased them, with no one to interfere.