The Armourer's House Read online

  Well, so they came riding up their own street at last, and saw the open doorway of the Dolphin House shining through the whirling flakes to welcome them home, and Aunt Deborah standing there with the red glow of the forge fire behind her; and the lovely day was over. They were home again. And presently Piers came back from returning the horses to the inn, and they all sat down to supper in the glow and warmth of the parlour, where Tamsyn’s tulip had opened in scarlet petals a little wider since the morning.

  Tamsyn was rather sleepy after the long cold ride, and when supper was over and everybody had gathered round the fire – everybody but Piers and Littlest, that is, for Littlest was in bed long ago and Piers had slipped away by himself – she became very sleepy indeed. She sat blinking at the red heart of the blaze, and thinking how the snow would be settling softly, softly, on the decks of the lovely ship and along every ledge and cranny and every carved garland of her high poop and forecastle – a white furred robe for a sleeping Princess – until she had very nearly blinked herself off to sleep. And then quite suddenly she was wide awake again, and thinking that she must go and make sure that her Christmas presents were quite safe. She had hidden them behind a chest in Kit’s Castle, but Littlest was so good at finding things he wasn’t meant to find, that it would be dreadful if he had discovered her carefully hidden store!

  So she got up very quietly, and went away. Nobody asked her where she was going or offered to come with her; nobody ever did ask you where you were going or offer to come with you, round about Christmas, in the Dolphin House; it was a point of honour. She stole upstairs as quiet as a mouse, round and round and up and up until she stepped out into Kit’s Castle. It was very cold up there under the snowy roof, and she shivered as she stole across the floor and knelt down beside the chest. The Christmas presents were stored as far behind it as she could reach, and just for one dreadful moment she thought they were not there at all; but she gave a wriggle and managed to reach along a little farther, and there they were, quite safe. She pulled them out a little, and counted them with her fingers. Yes, they were all there; and she got up with a sigh of relief and turned back towards the head of the stairs.

  As she passed the door of the cubby-hole which Piers shared with Giles, she saw that it was a crack open, and a bar of yellow friendly fight was shining through. (None of the doors that opened from Kit’s Castle ever latched properly, unless you were very careful.) Now Tamsyn knew that Piers had not quite finished a little sandal-wood box that he was making for his mother’s Christmas present, and she thought he would not mind her looking, because he had shown it to her days ago, and it was so pretty she did want to see how it was getting on. So she gave the door a gentle push. People seldom knocked at doors in those days; they just walked in, and if the person inside didn’t want them, he simply told them so, or even threw something at them, and they went away again. The door swung inward, and just for an instant she saw Piers without him seeing her. He was sitting at a table in front of the window, with the sandal-wood box in front of him, but he was not working at it. He was crumpled forward across the table, with his head in his arms.

  Then the door squeaked, and in an instant Piers sprang up and swung round on her with his head up and his eyes blazing, and demanded in a low, furious voice, ‘Can’t I have a moment’s peace in this house, without somebody poking and prying after me?’

  Tamsyn stood quite still in the doorway and gazed at him in horror. She had never seen Piers look like this before, with his face so white and his freckles so black, and his eyes blazing-bright and his beaky nose in the air. He didn’t look like Piers at all, but a complete stranger. A dreadful black pit seemed to have opened inside Tamsyn, and all the lovely day fell in ruins because Piers was terribly angry with her and thought that she had been poking and prying after him.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ she said, trying desperately to keep her voice from trembling. ‘I – I’ll go away.’ And she managed quite well, except for a woeful little wobble at the end.

  It was a very little wobble, but Piers must have heard it, because suddenly he stopped looking like a stranger, and said gruffly, ‘No, don’t go away. Come in and shut the door, Tamsy.’

  So Tamsyn came in and shut the door, and then she stood with her back to it, still gazing at Piers and gripping her hands together. She said breathlessly, ‘I didn’t come poking and prying! I came up to make sure Littlest hadn’t found where I hid my Christmas presents; and I saw your door open, and – and the candle, and I thought you might be finishing the little box; and I hoped perhaps you’d show me how it was getting on, because it was – was – so pretty, and I w-wanted to see it.’

  ‘Tamsy,’ said Piers, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t see it was you just for a moment, in the shadow of the door, and I’m sorry I was a beast.’ And then he did a rather queer thing: he held out one hand, very slowly, palm upwards, just as though he were trying to gain the confidence of a little frightened wild thing. ‘Come and sit on the end of the bed,’ he said.

  So Tamsyn came and sat on the end of the bed, and smiled at him in a rather watery sort of way because she still felt very odd inside and not at all sure of anything yet. And Piers picked up the little sandal-wood box from among the litter of tools on the table, and began to tinker with the silver clasp, just as though nothing had happened, while Tamsyn watched him and began to feel happier.

  ‘You see, you were quite right,’ said Piers after a little while, looking very hard at what he was doing. ‘I did come up to finish Mother’s box; and then I started thinking about this afternoon instead, and – and wishing things, you know.’

  ‘It’s horrid, wishing, and wishing, and not getting what you wish for,’ said Tamsyn very softly. ‘And she was lovely, wasn’t she – that ship.’

  Piers nodded. And neither of them said any more until he had finished working on the little box and put it away; and then Tamsyn said, ‘If you please, do you think we could look at the chart, just for a moment?’

  So Piers got the chart out of the chest where he kept his clothes, and unrolled it on the table, weighing down the corners to keep it from rolling up again; and he and Tamsyn bent over it in the glow of the rushlight. There were the golden islands washed by sapphire seas, there were the Americas with their snow-capped mountains and broad rivers and forests with jewel-bright birds among the flowering trees, there were the dolphins and the sea-serpents, and the golden sun and the silver moon; above all, there was the ship no larger than a walnut shell, with her sails full of wind and her bowsprit to the New World. Tamsyn gazed at her lovingly, all over, from stem to stern. The three stern-lanterns were the most lovely shape, just like her red tulip; and all at once Tamsyn made up her mind.

  ‘Piers,’ she said, ‘you know my red tulip?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Piers.

  Tamsyn slipped off the bed and stood up very straight, and folded her hands in front of her. ‘The Wise Woman who gave it to me, she said it would flower at Christmas and bring me my – my heart’s desire,’ she said. ‘I’ll give it to you, and then perhaps it will bring you your heart’s desire instead. And even if it didn’t, you’d still have the tulip.’ It almost tore her heart in two to think of parting with her red tulip, but she did not regret it for an instant.

  Piers looked up from the chart, with his nice half-smile running up into his eyes. ‘Tamsy,’ he said, ‘you are a nice person. But you must keep your red tulip; the Wise Woman wouldn’t like you to give it away.’

  ‘I – I don’t think she’d mind,’ said Tamsyn. ‘I don’t, really.’

  ‘Well, I do,’ said Piers, very firmly, but very kindly too. ‘You’re not going to give me your red tulip, but thank you very, very much for wanting to, Tamsy dear.’ Then he began to roll up the chart again. ‘Brr! It’s cold up here; we’d best be going down to the fire, old lady.’

  Tamsyn had not noticed the cold before, she had been too busy thinking about other things, but it certainly was very cold indeed; so cold that the snow that had drifted in
under the window-shutters had not melted at all, but lay there, feathery white on the dark sill, sparkling in the light of the tallow dip; and her breath and Piers’ breath curled up in little wisps like steam, and her feet were quite numb. So Piers put away his beloved chart and pinched out the tiny crocus flame of the dip, and took Tamsyn’s hand in his, and they went downstairs again into the warm bright parlour, to toast their chilblains before the fire until bedtime.

  10

  Lullay My Liking

  The snow snowed itself out in the night, and when the sun rose on the morning of Christmas Eve, all the City was clean and sparkling in its white furred gown. The streets were unmarked by any tracks yet awhile, and the sunny sides of the steep roofs were scattered with sparkling points of light as bright as stars, and every window flashed in the sunrise, so that once again London was a City with golden windows.

  Aunt Deborah and Meg the Kitchen were very busy all day, with Tamsyn and the Almost-Twins and Bunch and Littlest to help them. After a time Giles and Bunch went to join some boys who were making a slide in the next street, and the others got on better after that, though they still had Littlest to help them.

  Work ended early in the Armoury, because of it being Christmas Eve, and after a great deal of handshaking and bobbing and wishing each other a Merry Christmas, the workpeople all went home, and Timothy departed too, with a sprig of bay in his bonnet, whistling down the street on his way to spend Christmas with his own family on the other side of London. Then Uncle Martin arrived back from seeing somebody about something down at one of the wharves beyond Billingsgate, and said that the Mary Garland had been sighted coming upriver, homeward bound from the Canaries, he believed, and that pleased Aunt Deborah, because she hoped that now she would be able to buy some fine white sugar. There was generally white sugar to be bought in London after a ship came in from the Canaries.

  Uncle Gideon and Uncle Martin hung up the Christmas evergreens between them, while Aunt Deborah stood by and said how clever it was of them, and Tamsyn and Beatrix fetched and carried, and Littlest trotted backwards and forwards, gathering up the bits and pieces.

  Giles came home when it was bread-and-raisin time, and afterwards he and Beatrix, Tamsyn and Littlest and Bunch all got themselves up the steep stairway to Kit’s Castle, to wrap up their Christmas presents. Littlest wasn’t old enough yet to worry much about giving presents, so he sat with his legs stuck straight out before him, in the middle of the floor, with Lammy and his beloved peacock feathers, and did queer complicated things with bits of twine and pasteboard and scraps of wood, while Bunch sat beside him, watching very carefully with his head on one side and his tail giving little interested thumps every now and then. But the other three had each a corner to themselves, and a rushlight to see by, for it was getting dark, and were being very busy and very secret. There was a fourth corner, of course, behind the head of the stairs, which Piers could have had; but he had wrapped his presents up already. They knew that, because Giles had found the parcels when he just happened to be looking in Piers’ clothes-chest to see if his own partlet strip had got there by mistake, and now he was clearing up in the workshop.

  Tamsyn spread all her presents out and looked at them in the yellow glow of her own particular rush-light, feeling very proud of them. There was a really lovely little orange tree in an earthenware pot, for Aunt Deborah; it had five shiny dark-green leaves on it, and she had been growing it from a pip ever since the spring. There was the partlet strip for Uncle Gideon, which had been kept clean in an old kerchief ever since it was finished; and a wooden horse with green and red stripes round its middle which had cost her a whole penny, for Littlest. There was a cross-stitch crock-holder for Beatrix. (It wasn’t so much that she thought Beatrix really wanted a crock-holder, but she couldn’t think of anything else, and she couldn’t help knowing, although of course she had tried not to, that Beatrix had made one for her; so it seemed quite fair.) There was a simply wonderful caterpillar, very big and with tufts of crimson hair along its back, in a little blue pasteboard box with air holes in the lid for it to breathe through, for Giles. Tamsyn had found it in the garden when she was at her wits’ end to know what to give him, and it had been a great anxiety to her, because at first it had refused to eat anything except its box; but at last she had tried it on quince leaves, and it liked them and gave up eating its box, so that was all right. There was a kerchief for Uncle Martin, and there was another partlet strip – that was for Piers. It was embroidered in scarlet with strawberry flowers and heartsease and maiden pinks, and some of the stitches were rather big because by the time it was finished it was almost Christmas and Tamsyn had been in a great hurry, but it was very pretty, and she did hope that Piers would like it. She had a part share in a kerchief that they were all giving to Meg the Kitchen too, but Beatrix was keeping charge of that.

  Mistress Whitcome had given them some soft white paper of a sort they had never seen before, which was really for putting between the folds of the gold and silver tissues in Master Whitcome’s silk warehouse; and it was lovely for wrapping up parcels. The Almost-Twins had managed to get most of it, but Tamsyn had some gold paper which had been at the bottom of the pile, and which they had not noticed because it was only gold on one side, and folded with the gold side inmost. Tamsyn had seen the gold glint at one corner, and carried it off while the others were arguing about which of them should have the most tissue paper, so she was quite content. The gold paper was rather stiff – it was the sort that Morris dancers used – and there wasn’t very much of it, but she managed to tie a little bit of it round the orange-tree pot, and that left enough for Uncle Gideon’s and Piers’ presents, and a little bit of tissue-paper for Uncle Martin’s and the crock-holder; and anyway, she couldn’t have wrapped up the caterpillar or Littlest’s horse if she had had all the paper in the world, because the caterpillar would not have been able to breathe, and the horse had the sort of legs that you couldn’t wrap up, however hard you tried. When she had finished she sat back on her heels and looked at her parcels, and they really did look nice! White-paper-wrapped and gold-paper-wrapped, and tied up with strands of scarlet silk that had been left over from Piers’ partlet strip, and the dark, shiny leaves of the orange tree, and the jaunty little horse, and the blue box with the caterpillar in it, all sparkling in the most enchanting and festive way in the light of the tallow dip.

  The others had not finished yet, and Tamsyn could hear little rustlings and heavy breathing coming from the other corners of Kit’s Castle. It was all shivery-exciting. Tamsyn picked up her treasures and stowed them carefully behind the chest again, ready for the morning. Then she said, ‘I’m going to turn round now.’ Then she waited while she counted ten, and turned round; but she took care not to look into other corners even then, because it was a point of honour not to look into other people’s corners on Christmas Eve. She blew out her rushlight and went and sat on the play-chest in the window, with her feet drawn up under her for warmth. And next moment she heard Piers shouting from the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘I’m coming up,’ shouted Piers, and up he came.

  ‘Don’t look!’ cried Beatrix, making hurried scuffling noises. ‘Don’t you dare look!’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of looking,’ said Piers. ‘My eyes are tight shut and the key of them is in my wallet.’ And he came and sat on the play-chest beside Tamsyn, and they looked out at London together.

  The sky was full of stars, sparkling and frostbright, except where the moon rode high above the crowding roofs of the Southwark shore; and the City seemed a city in a fairy-tale, every ledge and cranny deep in sparkling frosted snow, and every carved saint and angel and demon on the tower of every church ermine-hooded and ermine-cloaked. There were lights everywhere, marigold windows in the shadowy walls of houses, and golden lanterns hung before the doors, and every light reflected in the river so that it made two. For in those days people still called Christmas Eve the Feast of Lights, and set candles in every window and lanterns be
fore their doors, to welcome the little King.

  ‘Everything feels as though it was sort of waiting – for something lovely to happen,’ whispered Tamsyn. Somehow the snow and the starshine and the lovely expecting feel of Christmas Eve made her not want to talk above a whisper.

  ‘It always feels like that on Christmas Eve,’ Piers whispered back. ‘Lights, and stars, and snow, and people in their houses, all holding their breath and waiting.’

  ‘How lovely for the sailors in the Mary Garland to be home for Christmas,’ said Tamsyn. ‘Not right to their own houses, I mean, but just – home.’ And then she tucked her feet farther under her with a little cosy wriggle, and cuddled closer against Piers. ‘At home in Devon at twelve o’clock on Christmas Eve all the animals in the stables kneel down like being in church. Sibbly the Cook told me. I wonder if it’s the same everywhere.’

  ‘I expect so,’ said Piers.

  Tamsyn thought for a little while, gazing out at the starry City. Then she said, ‘Tell-true, Uncle Martin’s dog, he used to go out and sleep in the stable with Jenny the Mare, on Christmas Eve – not on any other night – just on Christmas Eve. How do you s’pose they know?’

  ‘Perhaps they remember,’ said Piers. He thought very hard for a while – Tamsyn could feel him thinking, right down his arm. Then he said, ‘I’m sure animals remember all the things that have happened in their families, not just the things that have happened to themselves, as we do. Look how Bunch turns round three times before lying down, because he remembers the time when dogs were wild and made hollows in the long grass to sleep in by turning round and round just like that. Perhaps horses and oxen and donkeys remember what happened in their stable that first Christmas; and dogs of course, there was surely a dog there too. Perhaps they remember so clearly that at midnight on Christmas Eve they seem to see it all again. For just that one moment; lantern light on yellow straw, and their own breath curling up like smoke in the lantern light, and Mary in a cloak cut from the midnight sky, and Joseph in a cloak stained with the warm brown earth, and the little Baby sleeping in their manger, and angels with crimson wings spread round to keep off the cold. And so they kneel down.’