The Armourer's House

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Littlest never played with the others. He withdrew into a corner with his beloved Lammy, the white woolly lamb with gold spangles on its fleece and sharp tin legs, which Piers had brought him from last St. Bartholomew’s Fair, to do strange and complicated things with bits of twine and twigs and scraps of pasteboard. Nobody ever knew what Littlest was doing, unless perhaps he was having battles; but whatever it was, it interested him very much, and he always kept the tip of his little pink tongue stuck out of the side of his mouth while he was doing it. Bunch generally sat by him, blowing his cheeks in and out and thumping his tail gently on the floor, and watching very carefully. There was only one thing Littlest would rather have had to play with than his twigs and bits of twine, and that was the bundle of peacock’s feathers out of the play-chest. He wanted and wanted those lovely jewel-bright feathers to play with, but the Almost-Twins would never let him have them, so that was that.

  Beatrix and Giles did all sorts of interesting things up in Kit’s Castle, and made all sorts of exciting make-believes; but at first Tamsyn found it very hard to join in, although they were quite willing to have her (in a condescending sort of way, that is). She had never played with other children before, and she didn’t quite know how; besides, she always had to be the villain. She got rather tired of always being the villain, and once she actually said so; but Beatrix said scornfully, ‘Don’t be silly! You can’t possibly be anything but the villain; you’re too dark.’

  And of course it was quite true, really. She was so very dark, with black eyes and a cloud of black hair and a berry-brown skin, and all the best villains are dark. And then Giles said loftily, ‘Never mind, you do it quite well, considering. At least, you would if you’d only put a bit more heart into it.’ So Tamsyn went on being the villain, and did her best to put a bit more heart in to it.

  Every morning after six o’clock breakfast, when Uncle Gideon and Piers had betaken themselves to the workshop, and Giles, with his dinner in one hand and his slate in the other, had gone dashing up the street to St. Paul’s School, Beatrix and Tamsyn did lessons in the parlour with Aunt Deborah. They each had a horn-book tied on to their middles. This was a square of parchment sandwiched between two squares of horn to keep it clean, and it had a wooden handle to hold it by, so that it made quite a good battledore when you were not using it for lessons. At the top of each horn-book was writting in large black letters:

  ‘Christ’s Cross be my speed

  In all virtue to proceed.’

  Then there were the numbers 1 to 10, and then the Lord’s Prayer, and then the alphabet. They learned to spell from it, and did sums, and then they each wrote a copy, and after that they learned to play simple tunes on the clavichord; it had yellow ivory keys and a hawking scene on the back, and Aunt Deborah sometimes played on it to Uncle Gideon and the children in the evenings. Last of all, they did a little fine sewing, while Aunt Deborah read to them from the great Bible. They enjoyed that part of lessons very much, because Aunt Deborah had a lovely warm voice and always added little bits out of her own head to the Bible stories as she went along, so that afterwards one knew exactly the colour and trimmings of Noah’s Sunday doublet, and what David had had for breakfast on the morning he went out and killed Goliath.

  After lessons they generally went out shopping, each with a basket on one arm and a little posy of herbs to sniff because the streets of London did not smell at all nice. Sometimes they did their shopping quite near at hand, but at other times they went right away past St. Paul’s, whose spire was so high that it looked as though it must prick the floor of heaven, until they came to Cheapside. Tamsyn was always glad when they went to Cheapside, because it was so full and gay and busy. There were stalls all down both sides of the street, with awnings of blue and scarlet and emerald to shelter them from rain or sun, and inside, under the brilliant awnings, were everything from silver hawk-bells to copper preserving pans, and larded guinea-fowls to frilly double primroses in pots. Cheapside was always full from end to end of people, gossiping, bargaining, counting their change or shouting that they had been robbed, or laughing at a friend who had slipped on a cabbage leaf; housewives and shopkeepers, country folk with shoes made of plaited straw, hurrying prentice lads, sailors from Billingsgate with gold rings in their ears, merchants bustling along in their furred gowns, children and dogs playing and fighting and stealing things off the stalls and sleeping in odd corners. All the hustle and noise and colour somehow comforted Tamsyn deep down inside, so that when she was there she forgot to feel homesick.

  One morning, about three weeks after Tamsyn came to live in the Dolphin House, she and Beatrix went shopping with Aunt Deborah as usual. It was a blustery end-of-March day, with little patches of golden sunshine and little scurries of grey rain; and they put on their frieze cloaks (Beatrix’s was dark green with a pale-green lining because of her red hair, and Tamsyn’s was deep blue with an orange-tawny lining, rather like a kingfisher), and pulled the hoods well forward over their heads. Then they took their flat baskets in one hand and their posies of bee-balm and rosemary in the other, and went downstairs into the workshop. It was as nice as usual in the workshop, with its lovely smell of hot metal and oil and engraving acid, the ring and rasp of tools, and the forge fire filling the whole place with leaping shadows and red, flickering light. Timothy squinted at them in the most delightful way, rather like a bullfrog, when Uncle Gideon was not looking; but Piers was not there at all, because he had been sent on an errand to the other end of the City. Then Aunt Deborah came downstairs with her basket and posy, and they all went out into the street.

  As soon as the door was closed behind them, Aunt Deborah stopped and looked at her list. ‘Cloves,’ she said, ‘saffron for a cake, fine linen thread to mend father’s best shirt; it must be because he’s so thin that all the nobbly parts come through so quickly; other people don’t wear out their shirts like that, I’m sure. Where was I? Oh yes, ginger, and fish for supper. That’s all.’ And she set off up the street, with Beatrix and Tamsyn following close behind her because there was not room to walk three abreast in the London streets without blocking the way and getting mixed up with the crowds of people all coming and going about their business in a great hurry. They went to the mercer’s first, for the linen thread, then to the spicer’s for the cloves and saffron and ginger. The spicer’s little dark shop smelt lovely: a sort of dark-brown smell made up of cloves and nutmeg, cinnamon and ginger, and sweet dried fruit and hundreds of other things. It came on to rain quite hard while they were there, and the spicer said they must wait until the shower was over, and his wife gave Beatrix and Tamsyn each a dried fig to eat while they waited. Tamsyn had never tasted a dried fig before, and she liked it very much.

  Quite soon the sun came out again, and all the world sparkled silver-gilt, and the puddles in the street reflected joyous patches of blue sky until the wind ruffled them up into shivering silver ripples that could not reflect anything at all; and there was a rainbow curving above the far end of the street as they scurried along it towards Billingsgate to get the fish for supper, which was the last thing on Aunt Deborah’s list.

  Billingsgate was just as crowded as Cheapside, only here, instead of all the different things you could buy in Cheapside, were gleaming silver fish, with the spring sunshine turning them to gold: fish lying in piles on the cobbles, fish in great baskets, fish being loaded into carts, and the russet sails of the fishing-smacks and oyster-boats rising above the edge of the quay, and gulls everywhere, wheeling and crying above the heads of the people.

  They went right along the quay until they came to the place where Aunt Deborah always bought her fish, just where Billingsgate suddenly stopped being a fish market and became a quay for shipping. That was the part of London that Tamsyn liked best. The tall warehouses reared their pointed gables against the sky, and the smell of fish faded into the mixed smells of rope and pitch, salt water and timber. There were crowds of seamen in red stocking-caps, and merchants, and bales of merchandise and
coils of rope; and the tall ships of London Town were made fast alongside the wharves and jetties, or rode at anchor out in the stream. It was a little like being on Bideford Quay, although it was all so much bigger; same sort of ships, same sort of sailormen, same cobweb rigging high overhead, same flash and flicker of the river running by. Only this was the Thames instead of the Torridge; and when Tamsyn turned round and looked westward, there was London Bridge, with houses and shops built all along it, so that it was like a street on arches, instead of the narrow pack-bridge across the Torridge; and instead of the little bridge chapel where the yellow wagtails scuttled up and down the roof in summer, there was the tall spire of St. Mary of the Ferry standing up like a pointing finger above the higgledy-piggledy roofs of Southwark.

  Tamsyn looked at London Bridge, and she looked at Aunt Deborah, and she looked again at the crowding masts and furled sails of the shipping, and she longed with a homesick longing to get near those ships. Aunt Deborah was busy choosing her fish, and Beatrix was helping her. They would never notice. She gave a little gasp of determination, and hitching up her basket and taking a firm hold of her posy of bee-balm and rosemary, she went boldly forward into the jostling crowds of the broad quay.

  It was just after high tide, and one great ship was casting off from the quay-side with her sails already loosed, and Tamsyn squirmed and dodged and darted through the throng until she got close alongside, where she could watch all the lovely heartstirring bustle of departure as the ropes that held the great ship to the shore were cast off. Only one rope remained, made fast to her stern and to the quay quite near to her bows, so that as the helm was put over, the current would carry her out into the stream; and even as Tamsyn watched, the rope began to swing out, and the ship to drift away from the quayside. Soon the sails would fill and she would drop down-river with the tide. Tamsyn wondered where she was going; to white ports along the coast of the blue Mediterranean, perhaps for ginger and silk and sandal-wood; or just across the narrow seas to bring back the red wine of Gascony; or even westward to the Golden Indies, as the Joyous Venture would sail in a year’s time.

  ‘Oh, if only I was a boy,’ thought Tamsyn desperately. ‘Then I could have sailed westward one day, too. Oh, if only –’

  And then suddenly she saw Piers.

  He was standing quite close by, but he had not seen her. He seemed to have forgotten the crowds coming and going all round him, and appeared to see nothing at all except the lovely ship swinging away from the quay as the last rope was cast off He was watching her as though the only thing he wanted in the whole wide world was to be sailing with her.

  Tamsyn had never seen anyone look quite like that before, and it made her feel queer and screwed-up in her inside, and somehow as though she ought not to be watching, and she was just going to watch the ship again, instead, when Piers looked round and saw her. His face went queer and still, and for a long moment they just stared at each other; then Piers shook his head in a way that she knew was meant to warn her against calling out to him, and next instant he had turned and plunged away into the crowd.

  Tamsyn stood quite still, while you might have counted five, with her mouth and eyes very wide open, staring at the place where he had disappeared. Then she shut her mouth tight, and took one last look at the tall ship that was drifting farther and farther from the quay, and went back to Aunt Deborah and Beatrix.

  They had finished buying the fish for supper, and were coming to look for her.

  ‘Tamsyn,’ said Aunt Deborah the moment she saw her, ‘where have you been, you bad poppet? I thought you’d stolen off and run all the way back to Devon.’ But she said it quite comfortably, as though she did not mean it. Aunt Deborah hardly ever did mean it when she said things like that. It made her very poor at scolding, though she could smack quite well when necessary.

  ‘She was watching that ship,’ said Beatrix officiously; ‘the one that’s just setting sail. I saw her. I expect she’s queer about ships, like Piers used to be.’

  But Tamsyn didn’t say anything at all, and all the way home she was very thoughtful.

  When she saw Piers again that evening at supper, she looked at him very carefully, to see if he looked just as usual; and he did. And he never said anything about having been at Billingsgate that day, so she didn’t say anything about it either; but she went on being thoughtful.

  2

  The ‘Dolphin and Joyous Venture’

  Every year, about Easter, Uncle Gideon Caunter gave his craftsmen a day’s holiday, and he and his family went down by the river to Chelsea Meadows, and took their dinner with them. Tamsyn had been told all about it quite soon after she came to live in the Dolphin House, and as the day for the outing drew nearer she was just as excited as the others. For days beforehand she and the Almost-Twins spent their time hanging out of the windows to make sure that it was not going to rain, and Aunt Deborah and Meg the Kitchen spent their time in baking pies and pasties, and Uncle Gideon spent his time just as though nothing stupendous was going to happen, and said that bread-and-cheese was all they needed, which exasperated Aunt Deborah so much that she gave him boiled mutton without prunes for supper two evenings running, because that was his least favourite supper.

  On the very last evening grey clouds rolled up out of the west and it began to look like rain, and everyone was in despair; but the clouds passed in the night to rain somewhere else, and when the morning came it was a blue-and-golden one, with no clouds at all except tiny ones like curled golden feathers floating high, high against the blue. Tamsyn got up very early, and dressed herself in a great hurry, and so did Beatrix. They put on their leaf-green gowns that were generally kept for Sundays, with low square necks that showed the gathered and embroidered tops of their chemises, and grey worsted stockings clocked with scarlet, and sensible shoes. Then they dressed Littlest between them, in his russet-brown doublet and hose. Dressing Littlest was rather difficult, because he was so busy all the time and was always wanting to look out of the window or get under the bed or jump like a frog. Before Tamsyn came to live with them Aunt Deborah had dressed him herself because Beatrix could not manage him very well, and his father did not like it if he came down to breakfast with his hose in wrinkles round his sturdy legs and his shirt hanging out behind. But Tamsyn and Beatrix together could manage him beautifully; they hitched up his hose and tucked in his shirt and brushed his red-gold hair into his eyes, and took him downstairs to have his face and hands washed at the well in the kitchen. Then they washed their own, and after that they were ready for breakfast and very hungry. Dressing Littlest always made them hungry – it was such hard work.

  After breakfast there was such a hurrying to and fro and up and down that Bunch thought his family meant to go away for ever and leave him behind; and he sat down in the middle of the parlour and howled and howled and howled, so that everybody had to stop whatever they were doing to comfort him and assure him that they were only going for the day and anyway he was coming too.

  At last everything was ready, and they set out.

  The Dolphin House had a narrow garden behind it, which ended in a wall above the river. But it had not got its own steps down to the water, as some gardens had; and so the family had to go along the street a little way, and down a narrow alley to a flight of river steps at the far end, where the tilt-boat which Uncle Gideon had hired for the day would be waiting for them.

  They went in triumphant procession: first Aunt Deborah in her best blue damask gown, holding Littlest by the hand, and Littlest clutching Lammy to his chest; then Piers and Uncle Gideon in their best broadcloth doublets, carrying the basket with the dinner in it between them. Then came the Almost-Twins side by side as usual. Giles had a tin trumpet, but Uncle Gideon had forbidden him to blow it until they were out of London, so he just strode along holding it to his mouth and breathing carefully through his nose, and only blew two accidental toots all the way. Lastly there was Tamsyn and Bunch. Tamsyn was glad to have Bunch to walk with; it wasn’t quite so
lonely as having to walk all by herself.

  When they came to the river steps they found the tilt-boat waiting for them as arranged; a nice tilt-boat with red and blue paint on the gunwales and two watermen all complete. One of the watermen was young and pink, and the other one was old and hairy, but they both had friendly expressions. The tide was out, and the two lowest steps were wet and green and slippery, with long green weed fanning out on the water like mermaids’ hair; and when Uncle Gideon had settled the dinner-basket with Littlest and Lammy on top of it, and came back for Aunt Deborah, he said, ‘Be careful you don’t slip.’

  ‘You’ll save me if I do, won’t you, Gideon dear?’ said Aunt Deborah, giving him a lovely smile because she loved outings and was sorry about the mutton without prunes two nights running; and she put her hand on his arm, and swept down the steps and into the tilt-boat like a queen entering her royal barge. Piers and Uncle Gideon saw the rest of the family in safely, including Bunch, and then stepped aboard themselves, and the watermen pushed off from the steps, and the outing had begun!