Free Death be Not Proud by C F Dunn Page B

the sun, a silver bowl with large, foil-covered penny toffees by his elbow, and a copper ashtray the colour of my hair. An inevitable cigar smouldered, the acrid fragrance spiralling into the rays of morning light. The toffees were his way of cutting back on the last of his vices. When very young and not too heavy, I crawled onto his knees and he would unwrap the gold discs for me which, crammed into my mouth, would keep me quiet as he told me the stories of our past, his bristly chin grazing the top of my head, my ear against the slow beat of his dying heart. When I became sleepy and had stopped listening, my grandfather would continue writing in his book, the movements his arm made as it crossed the page a soothing rocking that lulled me to sleep.
    Tiberius stretched out a paw and padded my arm. I looked down at him and he gazed back with his enormous green eyes as I stroked his warm head. The central heating struggled to heat the top floor and, tonight, frost would line the roof tiles and attempt to seep through the fragile frames of the windows. I tried to remember where I had last seen a fan-heater in the house.
    Nanna and Grandpa shared the room opposite mine in the years before he died. It faced east over the many pitched gables and slates of the old roofs behind our tall house, and the early morning sun would ripen the colours of the faded wallpaper in the summer. It smelled of my grandmother – the clean talc-and-medicine smell that seems to accompany old age. The room was as she had left it when she had been taken ill; I felt at once comforted by her presence but also an intruder in what had been her world. I retrieved the fan-heater from under her bed and retreated to my room, wrapping my blue rug around my shoulders, as much for the memory it brought me as for the warmth it would offer, and started to organize my thoughts.
    Grandpa’s familiar thin, spidery writing in dark-blue ink scored each page in meticulous formations, dates in red and place names in capital letters underscored once for a parish and twice for a town. It was a system I still used. As part of my own research I had read Grandpa’s notes, of course, but they represented nothing more than background information and a short-cut into the world of the seventeenth century. Now that I added purpose to my labours, each word held the potential to transform the mundane into a revelation.
    My grandfather concentrated his research on the Richardson family rather than the Lynes, whom they had served as stewards, so I expected that much of the information he gathered would be largely irrelevant for my purposes. Apparently, Nathaniel Richardson had been the third generation of his family to act as steward. His grandfather – also Nathaniel – had been employed by the Lynes estate after his own land to the east of Martinsthorpe had been enclosed during Elizabeth’s reign. He brought his son – John – and his young family with him. Nathaniel junior had been born sometime in the first decade of the century, and became steward on the death of his father in 1632. None of thiswas new to me, but now I needed to focus on any information that would cast light on the Lynes family itself.
    I leafed through the notebook, looking for significant references, my eyes already tired from deciphering my grandfather’s space-saving script. He had made brief notes on what he discovered about them, followed by a sketchy family tree with bits missing. I squinted at it, his abbreviations not making the tiny print any easier to read.

    It read like a social history. In footnotes, my grandfather had described how Henry Lynes had been knighted by Edward IV after the battle of Losecoat Field in 1470, which explained the advantageous marriages over the next generations to the progeny of local notable families, including – it would appear – our own. I idly wondered if that was why Grandpa had spent so much time researching them, then decided