The Armourer's House

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘It is the King’s Grace,’ shouted Giles. ‘The King’s Grace coming up from Greenwich.’

  ‘Help me up, please. Help-me-up-quick-this-minute,’ gabbled Tamsyn, bunching her skirts higher still, and beginning to scramble on to the turf seat against the wall.

  Piers swung her up and set her on her feet. ‘Don’t fall in the river,’ he said, and dumped Beatrix beside her, and Giles scrambled up on his own.

  The noise and shouting and the music were much closer now, and Tamsyn was so excited that she almost forgot to breathe. The flash and flicker of the river seemed to grow suddenly brighter, as though the hurrying ripples were excited too, because they were carrying the King’s Grace through his City, between banks crowded with people who loved him, to his great palace of Whitehall.

  ‘Why does the King’s Grace live all the time at Greenwich, when he has such a lovely palace at Westminster?’ shouted Tamsyn, above the noise of cheering.

  ‘Because it’s half-way between Deptford and Woolwich,’ Piers told her. ‘The King’s ships are built there, in the Royal Dockyards, and he likes watching them being built.’

  Then the noise and cheering suddenly swelled into a roar, and Piers shouted over his shoulder, ‘Littlest! Hi! It’s the King’s Grace! Run!’

  Littlest came out of his dream with a jump, and he bundled to his feet and came rushing down the garden, waving the peacock’s feathers above his head and shouting joyfully, ‘Littlest see the King’s Grace! Littlest see the King’s Grace!’ and Piers caught him and swung him up to his shoulder, just as a great barge full of musicians came into sight. It was rowed by eight watermen, and painted crimson and emerald-green and gilded with bright gold leaf that was as yellow as marsh-marigolds; and the musicians in it were playing flutes and recorders and lutes and rebecks, and two in the bows were blowing long trumpets that had square banners hanging from them, blue as the night sky and worked all over with golden Tudor roses. Oh, the musicians’ barge was lovely, but it was nothing compared with the Royal Barge that came behind it.

  A great barge with high gilded prow, and bulwarks hung with tapestries as softly coloured as a pigeon’s breast. Twelve rowers bent to the gilded oars, all dressed in liveries of white and green, for those were the Tudor colours, and all with golden roses embroidered on their breasts and backs; and in the stern, under a canopy of crimson brocade, lounged the fat, jolly figure of the King’s Grace, with the Queen beside him.

  People were hanging out of windows and swarming along wharves and down river stairs, to shout for bluff King Hal, God bless him! And the six crowded together on the turf seat at the bottom of the Dolphin House garden cheered and shouted with the rest, all except Bunch, who barked instead; but Tamsyn noticed that none of them, not one person in all the crowds that thronged the water-side, seemed to be shouting for the Queen.

  The barge was almost opposite the foot of the garden now, and quite close inshore, and Tamsyn could see both the King’s Grace and the Queen quite well. King Hal looked jolly and kind, and he was laughing, with his plump face crinkled up into merry lines under his jewelled bonnet, while he beat time with one fat hand glistening with rings to the tune the minstrels were playing. But Tamsyn was not sure that she liked the King’s Grace, although she knew that he was a very good King and that his people loved him and she ought to love him too, because he was building a Navy for England and making England great among the nations of the world. So she looked at the Queen instead. People still called the Queen just Anne Boleyn, or ‘The Lady’, because they didn’t like her. But Tamsyn liked her. Tamsyn thought that she was lovely in just the same way as the music floating back over the bright water from the musicians’ barge was lovely. She was not pretty, exactly, but she had a laughing face, and her head was set on her long, slim neck as a flower is set on its stem. She was wearing the Royal colours: a gown of white over a kirtle of softest green – just the green of young beech leaves when they first uncurl in the spring and the sun shines through them – and her great, filmy, bell-shaped sleeves were green, too, and all webbed over with gold. Her black hair was gathered into a jewelled net in the newest French fashion, and there were milky pearls in her ears and about her long throat, and her skin seemed to Tamsyn to be as white as the pearls, so that the only things about her that were not white or gold or green were her red, red mouth and her black, black eyes. And her mouth was laughing, but her eyes were terribly unhappy behind the laughter.

  Tamsyn wondered if she was unhappy because the people were not shouting for her at all, but only for the King’s Grace; and Tamsyn thought it was horrid of them. At that moment Anne Boleyn looked up and saw the six of them crowded on the turf seat, Beatrix and Giles and Tamsyn, and Bunch wagging his tail and barking, and Littlest sitting on Piers’ shoulder and flourishing his bright peacock’s feathers above his head. And Tamsyn took a deep breath, and shouted as loud as ever she knew how, ‘God save the Queen!’ The Queen should have one person to shout for her, anyway!

  And next instant Piers took up the cry, his voice cracking in the middle because it had not finished breaking yet, ‘God save the Queen!’

  So the Queen had two people to shout for her after all.

  She must have heard them, because for a moment she looked up straight at Tamsyn, and though she was laughing still, her laughter was quite different – warm and gentle and sweet, so that Tamsyn thought what a lovely Mammy she must be for the little year-old Princess Elizabeth to have.

  Then the Royal Barge had swept by, and the joyous lilting music was growing fainter and fainter, and other barges were following in its wake, not so fine as the Royal one, to be sure, but very gay all the same, bringing the Lords and Ladies at the Court back to Westminster.

  ‘I say, didn’t the King’s Grace look jolly,’ said Giles, jumping down from the turf seat.

  ‘I liked the Queen best,’ said Tamsyn, very softly, still looking after the gay barges that were shrinking to be as small as water-beetles in the distance, and listening to the last faint whisper of the lovely music.

  Beatrix tossed her red hair back over her shoulders, and said in a pleased sort of voice, ‘People say she’s a wicked woman.’

  ‘They only say that because they loved Queen Catherine, and the Lady took her place,’ said Piers, setting Littlest on his own short legs once more. ‘And that is not her fault. The King’s Grace got tired of Queen Catherine and wanted Queen Anne instead – and he always has what he wants, no matter who gets hurt by it.’

  Giles said, ‘If you go round saying things like that, you’ll get your head cut off one day, I shouldn’t wonder. And anyway, I shouldn’t have thought you’d find any fault with the King’s Grace, and him building three ships at a time in Deptford.’

  But Piers only said quietly, ‘I’m going back to work now, or I shall get a hiding.’ And he went.

  Tamsyn never forgot seeing the Queen go by from Greenwich to Westminster. In after years, when the King’s Grace had got tired of Anne too, and she had gone, laughing still, with her proud head very high, to her death on Tower Green, and people said more than ever that she had been a wicked woman, Tamsyn remembered her always as she had seen her that summer’s day, in her white gown with the winged green sleeves, looking up at her with lovely, kind laughter, before the barge swept her on and away. She always remembered, too, the desperate unhappiness in the Queen’s eyes. And she never believed a single word against the Laughing Lady.

  6

  Tall Ship Magic

  One day in September Aunt Deborah and the children had an invitation to spend the afternoon with Mistress Whitcome, and they all went, except Tamsyn. Tamsyn had a really dreadful cold. She had had it for days, and Aunt Deborah had given her red-pepper lozenges and doses of honey-and-vinegar, which was so horrid that she would rather have had the cold, but she was still sneezy and coldy and slightly cross when the day of the invitation came, and as it was a grey, raw, drizzly afternoon, Aunt Deborah said she must stay at home.

  ‘We shall be back
by Littlest’s bedtime,’ said Aunt Deborah. ‘Meg will give you your afternoon bread and raisins, and you may go up and play in the attic if you like, but you are not to go into the garden, because if you do your cold will fly straight to your chest, and then I shall put you to bed with a fennel poultice on it – the chest, I mean, not the cold, though of course it comes to the same thing really – and you will not like that at all.’

  And she gave Tamsyn another red-pepper lozenge, with a dried apricot for afterwards to take the taste away, and several of Uncle Gideon’s largest kerchiefs, and went away with Littlest and the Almost-Twins.

  Tamsyn watched them go from the parlour window, Aunt Deborah in her best blue damask gown and Beatrix in her best leaf-green, Giles with his red hair newly brushed until it shone, and Littlest with Lammy in his hand and a jaunty feather in his cap, all looking very festive. Tamsyn did not particularly want to spend the afternoon with Mistress Whitcome, who was stout and stately, and a bit dull, though kind; but it was lonely after they had gone, and her face ached and her nose was sore and her head felt stuffy, and altogether she was miserable and forlorn and coldy. Besides, she had a loose tooth, the sort that gets pushed up by the one underneath, so that it wobbles about and hurts, without being loose enough to come out. Of course the sensible thing would have been to tell Uncle Gideon about it, so that he could pull it out; but Uncle Gideon was one of those people who pull out teeth scientifically, with loops of thread round them. People who do it like that always say that it is the best way; but Tamsyn had seen him pulling out one of Beatrix’s teeth only a few weeks ago, and she didn’t want it to happen to her. So she hadn’t mentioned her tooth to anybody, in case Uncle Gideon should get to hear about it. She poked at it hopefully every now and then, to see if it had got any looser since the last poke, but it never had, and it hurt worse when she poked it. Even Bunch had deserted her and gone to spend the afternoon with Meg the Kitchen. Everything was perfectly horrid.

  Tamsyn took out the red-pepper lozenge which she had been sucking and glared at it. Then she dropped it into the back of the hearth, and ate the dried apricot, to see if that would make her feel more cheerful, but it didn’t much. So she drifted across to the window again, and looked at her precious tulip. She had brought it out of the dark cupboard nearly a week ago, and put it there, because it had begun to shoot, just as the Wise Woman had said it would. There was a thick, pale-green snout sticking up through the brown soil, and Tamsyn touched it very gently with the tip of one finger, wondering what it would be like when it flowered at Christmas: cup-shaped or star-shaped or bell-shaped? Blue or yellow or crimson? That did cheer her up a bit, just for the moment, because it was a very satisfying little green snout, and she loved it dearly.

  She sat down on the broad sill, with the tulip snout for company, and curled her legs up under her, and began to watch the street. People came and went past the Dolphin House: sailors and craftsmen and merchants, a lady on a white mule, with a footboard for her feet and servants running ahead to clear the way, a red-faced man with a couple of hounds in leash, a black-robed friar from the nearby monastery, shuffling along in his flapping sandals, a strolling ballad-monger with a rose in his cap.

  From the workshop below came the clash of the great sledge and the ring of the light hand-hammer, where Uncle Gideon and his men were at work on a suit of tilting armour. Tamsyn would like to have gone down to watch them, but one of the very strictest rules of the Dolphin House was that none of the children was allowed into the workshop but by special invitation – except, of course, to pass through it to the front door or the kitchen. Just once or twice she had been allowed into the workshop, and once Uncle Gideon had opened the great chest carved with coats of arms and Tudor roses where he kept the finest of his swords, and shown her a sword which he had not made himself at all, but which was his greatest treasure. It had a hilt of gold and age-darkened ivory, and a slender curved blade of blue steel on which the light played in a queer, streaky way, as it does on watered silk, and the grip was so small that it almost fitted Tamsyn’s hand, and no grown man could have used it comfortably. Uncle Gideon had told her that it had been forged in Damascus two hundred years ago, for an Arab master, and that the grip was so small because Arabs had narrower hands than Englishmen. He had told her, too, that only the swordsmiths of Damascus forged blades of that strangely watered steel, which was why they were called damask blades. ‘Damask blades, and the damask roses in the King’s garden, and the damask silk of your Aunt’s best gown, they all come from Damascus in the first place,’ he said, wrapping his treasure in its silken case and putting it away again in the carved chest.

  Tamsyn had loved that sword, and she would like to have gone downstairs to ask if she could see it again. But she had not been invited. Aunt Deborah had most particularly said to Uncle Gideon just before she went out, ‘Now don’t have that child down in the workshop; it’s very hot and draughty down there, and she has got such a cold.’

  So there was nothing for poor Tamsyn to do but sit on the parlour window-sill and poke dismally at her loose tooth, while her cold got worse every moment, as a cold always does when you are bored and miserable; for the cheering-up effect of the tulip snout had worn off after a little while.

  But quite soon Meg the Kitchen came thumping upstairs with Bunch at her heels, and carrying a platter which she put down on the table beside the bowl of walnuts that always stood there in the walnut season. ‘Here’s your afternoons,’ said Meg, ‘and I’ve let you have it on the Bow Plate, so don’t you break it!’

  The Bow Plate was a great treasure, and only used for special treats. It had many-coloured flowers painted on it, and a lovely blue and rose and emerald bird in the middle which you only saw after you had eaten what was on the plate. This time the Bow Plate had two green figs on it, and instead of the usual brown bread, a little pastry man. A very smart little pastry man, with currant eyes and currant buttons on his doublet, who was still warm from the bake-oven.

  ‘There!’ said Meg the Kitchen. ‘Now say I never give you nothing!’

  ‘But I don’t,’ said Tamsyn. ‘Truly I don’t! And thank you very much, Meg.’

  So Meg stumped down to her kitchen again, but Bunch stayed with Tamsyn, and she gave him the legs of the pastry man because she was so glad to see him. Then she ate the rest of the pastry man, biting on the loose tooth all the time, although it hurt, because the more you eat on a loose tooth the sooner it comes out. She did try cracking one of the walnuts on it, but that was really too painful, and after a moment or two she gave up the attempt, and put the walnut back in the bowl. The bite-marks did not really show. Then she ate the figs; they were showing bursty-pink through their green skins and beautifully sweet and slishy, only she couldn’t taste them very well because of her cold. And after she had gathered up all the crumbs and eaten them, too, and blown her nose again, she decided to go up to Kit’s Castle for a change.

  She kilted up her skirts, and went upstairs, with Bunch scampering ahead of her, round and round and up and up. At the top Bunch turned, wagging his tail so hard that his head wagged too, and kissed her very kindly with his warm, wet tongue, because he had a soft heart and knew that she had a cold and a loose tooth and was miserable.

  ‘Oh, Bunch, darlin’!’ said Tamsyn; and she sat down on the top step and cuddled him.

  He was warm and wriggly and affectionate, and he seemed to like being cuddled, so she went on cuddling him, and they went on sitting on the top step and loving each other, until after a time they heard Piers calling up the stairs, ‘Tamsy, where are you?’

  Bunch and Tamsyn both pricked up their ears, and Bunch made a little pleased whining in his throat, as well as he could with being so tightly cuddled, and Tamsyn called back, ‘I’m up here, in Kit’s Castle.’

  Then they heard footsteps running upstairs, and Piers’ head came into view round the curve of the staircase. ‘Hallo,’ said Piers, coming to a halt and looking up at the forlorn-looking couple on the top step.
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br />   ‘Hullo,’ said Tamsyn rather dolefully, peering down at him and still cuddling Bunch.

  ‘How’s your cold, Tamsy?’

  ‘Beasterly!’ said Tamsyn.

  ‘Poor old lady!’ said Piers, and he came on up the stairs.

  Tamsyn sat quite firmly on the top step, cuddling Bunch round his soft neck. ‘’Tisn’t time for you to stop work yet,’ she told him dismally.

  ‘Father’s let me off work early, so I’ve come to keep you company,’ said Piers. ‘And if you would just stop roosting on the top step for a moment, I could come up.’

  Tamsyn scrambled to her feet in a hurry, pulling Bunch after her. She had thought that Piers had only come to inquire for her cold, and that when he had inquired he would go away again; but if he had come to keep her company, that was quite different. So Piers came up the last three stairs, and Tamsyn stood and watched him, forlorn, but not quite so forlorn as she had been before he came.

  ‘I have a loose tooth, too,’ she said. ‘It hurts.’

  Piers said, ‘Well, I’m afraid I can’t do much about the cold, but I think I might be able to do something about the tooth. Come over to the window and show me.’

  Tamsyn had a sudden sinking feeling in her inside. She did not want anyone to do anything about her tooth, she wanted it just to come out of its own accord as quickly as possible. But she never thought for an instant of disobeying Piers, so she took a deep breath and squared her shoulders, and followed him over to the window.

  Piers turned her round to face the grey, drizzly light, and said, ‘Open your mouth, Tamsy.’

  Tamsyn opened it.

  ‘Which tooth is it?’

  Tamsyn pointed out the tooth. ‘This one,’ she said – at least she tried to say ‘this one,’ but it is not easy to speak clearly with your mouth wide open, and so it sounded more like ‘ich ung’.