The Armourer's House Read online

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Piers, just as grave as Uncle Gideon.

  ‘And so you rescued Ned Buckle. I think I saw him being carried past just now?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir; and then the law students joined in, and a real mix-up started, and Timothy laid out a beadle–laid him out flat. Otherwise we’d have been home long ago.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Uncle Gideon. ‘I imagine that was when you got that split lip.’

  Piers smiled, slowly and rather carefully. It hurts to smile with a split lip. ‘No, sir,’ he said; ‘that was on the way home. We met Toby Meredith with a few friends, and he said his father made better armour than you did. But I do really think I made a worse mess of his face than he has of mine.’

  ‘Piers,’ said his father, more solemnly than ever, ‘I am grateful to you for your championship.’ Then he looked from Piers to Timothy and back again, and said, ‘You should both be thoroughly ashamed of yourselves, but obviously you are not ashamed of yourselves in the least. Perhaps we had better consider the matter closed.’

  ‘Thank you, sir!’ said Piers and Timothy at the same moment, and Giles, who had been staring at them in great admiration all this time, said suddenly, ‘I say, Piers, I didn’t think you could fight. I say, I’m sorry I said you couldn’t hit anybody.’

  At the same instant Beatrix cast herself down at Piers’ feet and cried, ‘My Heroic Brother!’ in her best Catherine of Aragon manner.

  ‘Get along with you,’ said Piers, ungratefully.

  But Beatrix didn’t. She was enjoying herself. ‘I scorned you,’ she announced. ‘I said it was mortifying to have a brother who stayed at home when the other prentices were out fighting the Watch, and Tamsyn said she’d hit me with her sugar pig if I said it again. And all the time you were being a hero!’

  All at once Aunt Deborah, who had been standing quite still, just looking on, sat down in her big carved chair and laughed and laughed as though she never meant to leave off, while everybody watched her in a rather surprised sort of way. But she did stop at last, quite suddenly, and said, ‘Oh, Piers, your poor face! I’ll have to bathe it. Timothy, go and change that jerkin; you’re not fit to be seen, and bring this one down to me and I’ll mend it tomorrow. Then you shall both have some supper–though indeed you don’t deserve it.’

  So Timothy took himself off to change his jerkin, and Aunt Deborah was just going to shoo Piers down to the kitchen to have his face bathed, when Littlest appeared in the staircase doorway, looking such a nice compact little cherub in his white night-rail, with Lammy clutched to his chest, but a rather sorry little cherub all the same. He trundled forward into the room with his lower lip trembling a little, and his eyes still full of sleep.

  ‘Mammy,’ said Littlest to Aunt Deborah, reproachfully, as though he thought it was her fault, ‘Littlest has had a bad dream.’

  ‘Oh, my poor Littlest!’ said Aunt Deborah, dropping on her knees and holding out her arms to him. ‘Come to Mammy! There now, everything’s quite all right, my precious, my honey. Mammy will take you back to bed.’ And above Littlest’s head she looked at Piers. ‘You’d better go down and ask Meg for some warm water, my dear, and I’ll come down to bathe your face as soon as I can. Don’t let Meg touch it; she’s so clumsy.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Mother,’ said Piers, smiling even more carefully than before, because his lip was beginning to stiffen. ‘I can quite well clean it up myself.’

  ‘No, just ask for the water. I won’t be long,’ said Aunt Deborah over her shoulder, as she began to lead Littlest upstairs.

  ‘I’ll come and help you,’ said Beatrix. ‘I’ll do anything for you, Piers.’

  ‘Oh no, you won’t,’ said Piers, very firmly. And then he looked at Tamsyn. She had been standing quite still on the edge of the crowd all the time, with her eyes fixed on his bruised face, feeling so proud of him that it hurt like having something hard and bright in her inside, and hoping and hoping that he would notice her.

  And when Piers looked at her, she took a deep breath and screwed up her courage, and said, ‘Per-lease, I would like to come and help you bathe your face.’

  ‘Would you?’ said Piers. ‘Come along, then.’

  The Almost-Twins started to say that it wasn’t fair, but Piers took no notice of them. He held out a hand to Tamsyn, and they went downstairs together. And Tamsyn was very happy.

  4

  The Wise Woman

  Piers was just as quiet and just as annoyingly steady as ever next day, and after a little while it was as though he had never taken the largest mallet and gone forth to rescue Ned Buckle from the Watch, except for a small scar on his lip that stayed even after the cut was healed. Still, the Almost-Twins were never again quite so scornful of him as they had been before.

  The days got longer, and the world greener, and the streets of London grew very hot indeed. The little strip of garden between the Dolphin House and the river grew gayer and gayer, with Canterbury bells and pansies and sops-in-wine, so that Aunt Deborah said it had never been so gay before, and that it must be because Tamsyn had helped her grow the flowers.

  Tamsyn and Beatrix went on doing lessons with Aunt Deborah in the mornings, and Littlest began to do lessons too, but only very little ones because of not being very old yet; and in the afternoons, most days they went shopping. All through June the herb market was a mass of gold, piled from end to end with dandelions which children picked in Chelsea Meadows and brought in to be sold to the City folk. When Aunt Deborah saw the herb market golden from end to end, she said, ‘It’s time to make dandelion wine again’ (she made it every year). So next day she and Beatrix and Tamsyn and Littlest and Meg the Kitchen all set out carrying large plaited-rush baskets, because it takes a lot of dandelions to make dandelion wine; and they came back with the baskets piled high with golden flower-heads, so that although it was a grey day the street seemed full of sunshine as they passed.

  On festivals and holidays and every Sunday afternoon, Uncle Gideon and Piers and Timothy took their bows and their quivers of grey goose-feathered arrows, and went off to the fields beyond Temple Bar to practise at the archery butts. You see, in those days England still depended in wartime on her archers, just as she did in the days of Crécy and Agincourt. Yew trees were still planted in churchyards so that there should always be plenty of good, red yew-wood for English long-bows, and each of the grey geese feeding on village greens all up and down the country had six of their moulted pinions taken every year to be used for flighting clothyard arrows. Every Englishman who was over twelve years of age and not too old or sick to bend a bow was supposed to practise at the butts on holidays and Sunday afternoons. Quite a lot of them didn’t, of course, but quite a lot of them did.

  So on holidays, and every Sunday when church was over and dinner was over, most of the men and boys of London, from the richest merchant who was not too old, to the poorest surgeon’s apprentice who was just old enough, went pouring out of the City by all its eight gates, to practise at the butts in Moorfields or Spitalfields or in the meadows north of the Strand; and amongst them went Uncle Gideon and Piers and Timothy.

  One of these archery practice days was Midsummer’s Eve – St. John’s Eve, some folks called it – and on this particular Midsummer’s Eve, just as the Dolphin House family were sitting down to dinner, Aunt Deborah suddenly decided that as it was such a lovely day, she and the children would come too, that afternoon, to watch the archery. Everybody thought this was a lovely idea, including Giles, who had a half-holiday from school (people didn’t work much or go to school much on St. John’s Eve). And so when dinner was over – and it had been a particularly nice dinner, with pancakes and raisins to finish up with – Aunt Deborah packed a basket with little loaves and butter and some more raisins. Then she washed the pancake stickiness off Littlest’s face, and poked and patted Beatrix and Tamsyn to make them neat and tidy, while the menfolk fetched their bows and quivers and buckled their bracers (a bracer was a sort of guard to protect your sleeve from
the bowstring) on to their left forearms. And then they all set out.

  Aunt Deborah walked first, with Uncle Gideon beside her carrying Littlest as well as his bow stave, because it was rather a long way for anyone whose legs were as short as Littlest’s. Littlest had new scarlet hose on, and was cuddling his dear Lammy. Then came Beatrix and Tamsyn, carefully holding up the skirts of their sheeps-russet gowns to keep them out of the dust. Then came Giles with Bunch on a strong leash. In two years’ time Giles would be carrying his bow and going out to shoot at the butts with the other men of the family, and this made him feel very superior as he swaggered along behind the girls. Piers and Timothy came last of all, carrying their bow staves and making sure that nobody got lost in the crowd. It was really quite a procession.

  The Dolphin House doorway was garlanded with St. John’s wort and foxgloves and green birch branches, in honour of Midsummer’s Eve, and so was the doorway of nearly every house they passed, so that all the narrow streets seemed to have been especially decked out for Tamsyn and the others to go by. Of course Tamsyn knew that they were not, but it was nice to pretend they were; so she went on pretending.

  The little party went out through Ludgate with a stream of other people who were going to shoot at the butts like Uncle Gideon, or watch their menfolk shooting, like Aunt Deborah and the children. The sun shone yellow as a dandelion in a sky of milky blue, and the cuckoos called from the distant woods where the King’s Grace rode amaying in the spring and hunted the red deer in the autumn. The gardens were full of roses and the hayfields spangled with tall golden buttercups; and people had put on their gayest doublets and kirtles of green and saffron, pink and purple and azure, as though they wanted to be as brilliantly coloured as the summer’s day. There were people sprinkled all over the meadows in ones and twos and little merry companies, all strolling along in the direction of the butts; and Uncle Gideon and his family strolled with them.

  It was nice in the meadow where the straw targets had been set up. Aunt Deborah and the children found a sloping bank and settled themselves comfortably at the foot of it, while Uncle Gideon and Piers and Timothy went off to join the archers who were stringing their bows and gossiping among themselves. There were quite a lot of other people sitting on the grass, and before long Littlest trundled off to play with a little boy with curly black hair who belonged to another family farther along the bank. It was a nice bank, covered with warm, springy turf and starred with eyebright and tiny yellow clover, and the Almost-Twins and Tamsyn scrambled up to sit on top of it, where they could look all round them; and the meadows were so flat that the top of the bank was like the top of a little hill. London Town was behind them, and far away in front, shimmering in the sunlight like a fairy city, was Westminster. The tall, fretted towers of the Abbey, and Whitehall Palace, where the King’s Grace danced with the Lady Anne Boleyn in the evenings when the candles were lit in the Hall (when he was not at Greenwich, that is), and the warm, huddled roofs of ordinary houses, and the green gardens of the old Palace stretching to the river, all so tiny that by holding out her hand and shutting one eye Tamsyn could make it look as though she was holding the whole City in the palm of her hand.

  Then the shooting began. Some of the targets were four hundred paces apart, and all the full-grown men shot at those, because everybody over twenty-four years old had to be able to speed an arrow that distance. But Piers and Timothy went to shoot at targets a little nearer together, because they were not grown up yet. The afternoon wore on; the arrows droned ceaselessly as they flew, a warm, drowsy sound; the archers crossed and recrossed the meadows as they shot, and went to pluck out their arrows, and turned to shoot back; and Tamsyn began to get very sleepy, sitting there in the sunshine. She shook herself every now and then, and sat with her eyes very wide open, especially when Piers was shooting. Piers was a good bowman; he laid his whole body to the bow, instead of only pulling with his arms in the foreign way, as Master Roger Whitcome’s prentice did, and his loose was beautifully smooth, and his arrow nearly always hit the straw target quite near the peg in the middle. Tamsyn was very proud of him, so that it made her feel quite pink inside. Still, she went on feeling sleepy.

  Then the mother of the little boy with the curly black hair came and sat beside Aunt Deborah and began to talk about making dandelion wine, while the two little boys and Bunch tumbled over and over each other at the foot of the bank, playing queer, complicated games of their own.

  ‘I say, I’ve had enough of this,’ said Giles suddenly. ‘Let’s go and do something interesting.’

  ‘If you had your bow you could shoot an arrow in the air, and we could notice where it fell, and walk on and on in that direction until we found an adventure,’ suggested Beatrix.

  ‘Well, I haven’t got my bow,’ said Giles; and he thought for a bit. Then he said, ‘I know, we’ll go down there to the hedge and get a straight hazel twig and throw it in the air, and then we’ll notice which way it points, and walk that way – just as though it was an arrow.’

  Tamsyn pricked up her ears, and stopped feeling in the least sleepy. Oh, if only they would let her come too!

  Giles thought deeply for a little while, in case he got a better idea, but as he did not, he said, ‘Yes, that’s what we’ll do. Midsummer is a fairy time and hazel is a Fairy Wood, so it’s bound to bring us an adventure. Come along, Tamsyn,’ and he slid down the bank. Beatrix and Tamsyn slid after him, picked themselves up and shook down their full green skirts.

  ‘Where are you off to, my poppets?’ asked Aunt Deborah, breaking off the discussion about dandelion wine.

  ‘For a walk, please,’ they said.

  ‘Very well,’ said Aunt Deborah; ‘but don’t go too far, and don’t do anything dreadful.’

  ‘We won’t,’ they promised, and they set out for the hazel trees at the far side of the meadow, taking care not to go in the way of the archers. When they got there, Giles chose a nice, straight hazel twig and cut it into a little rod a few inches long, and sharpened one end, and peeled it so that it would show white on the grass.

  ‘This is the most solemn moment,’ he said. ‘We are about to challenge the Fates to lead us to an adventure. I hope you realize that, you girls?’

  They said they did; and Giles stepped back and cried, ‘Fast!’ as an archer does when he shoots an arrow, to warn people to get out of the way, and flung the twig up into the air as hard as ever he could. The peeled wood caught the sunlight, and they watched it shining silver as it turned over and over against the blue sky, soaring up and up; then it plunged down again, and landed in the grass between Beatrix and Tamsyn.

  They looked anxiously to see what direction it pointed in.

  ‘I say!’ said Giles, in an excited voice. ‘It’s pointing straight towards that old windmill on the high ground.’

  And it was. The windmill stood up against the sky nearly a mile away, with its brown sails spread out in a beckoning sort of way.

  They walked on and on across the meadows, the Almost-Twins in front and Tamsyn bringing up the rear, heading straight for the distant windmill. Little streams wandered down from the uplands through the meadows on their way to join the Thames, and among the pollard willows on the bank of one of these they found a very fat toad. They stayed for some while staring at the toad, while the toad stared back at them, with his bulging, diamond-bright eyes, his knobbly sides panting in and out like a little pair of bellows. But the adventure was waiting, and so, after a time, they turned back to the stream. It was much too wide to jump, and as far up or down stream as they could see there was no bridge or stepping-stones.

  ‘We could go back to the Strand,’ suggested Beatrix. ‘The stream goes under the road there.’

  ‘I know that, you zany,’ said Giles. ‘We aren’t going all that way just to find a bridge.’ And he sat down on the bank and began undoing the points that kept his brown hose up. Tamsyn plumped down beside him in an instant, and kicked off her shoes and pulled down her scarlet-clocked stockings; but Bea
trix didn’t like the idea at all, and she didn’t begin to take her stockings off until the other two had finished. But she took them off at last, and bunched up her skirts; and they all slipped down into the stream, carrying their shoes and stockings in their hands.

  ‘O-oh!’ squealed Beatrix.

  ‘Yow!’ yelped Giles.

  ‘Lovely!’ crooned Tamsyn.

  The water flowed cold and bright and shiversome round their legs, and the trout-speckled pebbles at the bottom shifted under their feet, and the white water-buttercups were all about them as they waded through and climbed out, laughing, on the farther bank. The Almost-Twins sat down and dried their feet on wisps of grass, and put on their shoes and stockings again; but Tamsyn was used to going barefoot among the little round hills of Devon, and she stood waggling her toes in the warm grass and watching the bright drops of water sparkling between them, while the others fastened their stockings; and when they all went on again, she continued carrying her shoes in her hand.

  They were still walking straight towards the windmill, but they never got to it. Instead, they came out through a tangle of hazel and alder and rosebay-willow-herb and found themselves on the edge of an unexpected garden. It was a very little garden, but as full of flowers as ever it could be, and at the far side was a cottage with a reed-thatch roof that came down very low, as though it was wearing a brown velvet cap pulled well on to keep its ears warm. It had no chimney, only a hole in the roof through which a blue plume of woodsmoke rose straight into the air, like a jay’s feather in the velvet cap. Two little windows peered out from under the eaves, and the door stood open in a welcoming sort of way. Tall, plumy poplars grew behind the cottage, and there were three reed-thatched bee-hives on a bench against the wall, and all the little garden was murmurous with bees.

  Tamsyn’s heart went out to the garden the moment she saw it; and she climbed on to the lowest bar of a little gate in the hyssop and sweetbrier hedge, and leaned over to get a nearer look. Just at first the garden seemed to be full and spilling over with nothing but roses: little white musk roses, dark-red cinnamon roses, York-and-Lancaster roses blooming red and white together on the same bush, sweet-brier and pink-frilled eglantine. But when she looked more carefully Tamsyn saw that there were plenty of other flowers there too, growing under and through and among the roses – painted ladies and sops-in-wine, pansies and sweetwilliam and snap-dragon, larkspurs as deeply blue as the evening sky, and tall, white lilies of the Madonna. It was like a garden in a fairy-tale, and the Fairy Feel hung over it as strong as the scent of the roses.