Tidelands

TIDELANDS, OCTOBER 1648

Even with both of the women spinning, and both of them picking the last of the herbs that were still growing in the late October sunshine, even with Alinor selling her oils from the summer, attending every birth, and drying the herbs that were still growing green, even with Alys working all the hours they would pay her at the Millers’ farm, the money was slow to come in and hard to keep. The little household had always lived off its own—growing their own food, brewing their own ale, fishing, making and mending and never buying new. But as winter came closer the price of everything went up: tallow for soap and candles, meat of any sort, cheese and milk, wheat or rye. Even the things that they foraged—the teazels for felting, the willow twigs for sweeping—took longer to find. Alinor spent more and more time picking up driftwood for her fire, walking on the shore, which started to crackle with freezing dew, as the wintry days grew shorter, and the nights dark.

As if winter did not bring trouble enough, Alinor was ill, exhausted before she started her day, sick before she got out of their shared bed. She could not eat before midday, she could not bear the smell of cheese or bacon, and when Ned brought a boiled lobster over one evening, a payment for ferry fees from one of the Sealsea fishermen, she could not even sit at the table while he and Rob and Alys feasted.

“What’s wrong with you?” Alys asked irritably, her mouth full of lobster meat. Ned sat opposite Rob, who had come from the Priory to visit and had brought a loaf of white bread with compliments from Mrs. Wheatley. Alinor, opposite Alys, had a slice of the bread and a cup of small ale. Red, the dog, under the table, fixed his brown gaze on her, as if he thought she might slip him the crust.

“I don’t know,” Alinor said. “I thought it was the quatrain fever but I have no signs; I expect it will pass. Perhaps it was something that I ate.”

“It’s been weeks,” Alys pointed out. “Surely it’d be over by now if it was rancid cream or spoiled meat.”

“Don’t,” Alinor said, the back of her hand to her mouth. “Don’t even speak of them.”

Ned laughed shortly. “She was always sickish,” he said unsympathetically. “You should’ve seen her when she was breeding you.” He bent his head and cracked one of the claws. “Here, Rob,” he said. “Try this.”

The young man and his uncle picked at the meat. “It’s good,” Rob said. “The claw’s always the best.”

“D’you get lobster at the Priory?”

“No,” said Rob.

“Folk look down their noses at it, as poor man’s meat, but I like it better than beef,” Ned said, his speech muffled by a mouthful.

Alinor heard them as if they were far away. Her brother’s careless words echoed again and again in her head. She heard a noise in her head like the rush of the waters in the millrace as she looked up and saw Alys’s dark blue eyes on her, and heard a distant voice say: “Ma?” as she went down into the darkness.

She woke on the bed in the cottage, Alys at her side. She raised herself on her elbow and Alys held a glass of small ale to her lips. “Where’s Rob?”

“Uncle Ned’s walking back to the Priory with him. I said that you’d be fine. I said that you’d send to tell him tomorrow. I said it was women’s troubles.” Alys scrutinized her mother’s face. “It is, isn’t it?”

Dumbly, Alinor nodded.

“The worst kind? You’re with child?”

Alinor swallowed. “I think so.”

“You think so?” Alys was pale and furious in a moment. “You must know if you laid with a man or no. Or are you going to tell me you were forced by a faerie lord? God save us, have you been dancing with the faerie lords again?”

A deep shamed flush rose from Alinor’s belly to her hot cheeks. “Of course I know. What I don’t know is if I’m with child. I hadn’t thought of it till Ned said . . . what he said.”

“And you tell me to beware of the gallows!”

“I’ve done very wrong,” Alinor confessed to this new, authoritative daughter. “Very wrong.”

Alys rose from the bedside and stepped towards the door, flinging it open as if she would summon the icy sea breeze to blow the words from the little cottage. “You must be mad,” she said bitterly. “After all you’ve said to me!”

Alinor bowed her head in shame.

“How could you?”

“I know, Alys. Don’t scold me.”

“And you dare to let my uncle tell me that I must wait for months to be married? When you’ve not even waited a year since our da left?”

“It’s a year. It’s nearly a year.”

“Who is it? Mr. Miller?”

“No!” Alinor exclaimed.

“That horrible man who has the physic stall at Chichester market?”

“No, of course not.”

“Mr. Tudeley, who’s getting Rob his apprenticeship? Is that why Rob gets his chance?”

“No! No! Alys, I won’t be questioned like this!”

“You will be!” The girl rounded on her mother. “This is nothing! Don’t you think the parish will question you like this as soon as your belly starts to show? Don’t you think you’ll have to name the father and then stand before the congregation in your shift, in your shame? Don’t you think Mr. Miller will ask you, all the churchmen will ask you, they’ll demand that you say, and they’ll bring in a midwife from Chichester to put her dirty hands all over your belly, and peer at your privates like you were a whore suspected of the pox?”

Alinor shook her head, her golden hair falling around her white face. “No, no.”

“They’ll go on and on and on at you until you give them his name and then they’ll find him and make him pay his fine to the parish. And you’ll go to the workhouse, and when the bastard is born they’ll take him off you and send you back here as a named whore.”

“No,” Alinor said. “No, Alys, don’t say such things.”

“Back here!” Alys gestured wildly at the interior of the little cottage and the vast desolate mire outside. “Back here, as a named whore. Who’s going to give Rob an apprenticeship then? Who’s going to marry me? Who’s going to buy anything from you but magic and love potions?”

“I’m going to be sick,” Alinor announced. She stumbled to her feet and got to the open front door. She vomited on her own doorstep, sobbing at the pain of her empty belly heaving on nothing.

Like a blessing, she felt a cold cloth scented with lavender oil laid gently on the back of her neck. “Thank you,” she said, and wiped her face and hands. She stepped back and sat on the bed, looking up at Alys as if her daughter were her judge.

“Were you forced, Ma?” the young woman asked more gently. “Is that what happened?”

Alinor turned from the temptation of a lie. “No.”

“They won’t stop asking. You’ll have to tell. Did you not think of this?”

“I didn’t think . . . till this very moment . . . that I was with child. I hadn’t thought—” She broke off. There was no way to explain to this new challenging Alys that she had thought her sickness was heartache, that her inability to eat was pining for the man she loved, that she had embraced it, like a penance, as he too might be fasting as punishment for his love for her. She had thought the two of them were working their way to be together, he fasting in Douai, and she here, on the edge of the mire, aching for him too, eating only bread and small ale, sick for love.

“Well, think it now!” Alys flung at her. “Think now that you’re ruined. And I’m ruined too. You’ve ruined me. For Richard can’t marry me if my mother is a named whore. They won’t want our money, if they think you earned it on your back behind a haystack. They won’t stand for a missing father and a mother of shame. A deserted wife was a long stretch for them; a pregnant whore will be too much. You are ruined and I am ruined, too.”

“Alys, I would never do anything to hurt you,” Alinor said.

“You have destroyed me! You could have done nothing worse.”

“I won’t let this happen.”

“It’s happened already.”

“Alys, all my life I have lived for you.” Alinor stumbled over her words. “I tried to keep Zachary from you and Rob. I took blows so that he wouldn’t raise his hand to you. I wanted nothing but a good life for the two of you. I’ve done everything I could do to raise you up from this life. I’d never bring you down.”

“Well, you’ve brought me down.” The girl slumped on the foot of the bed, facing her mother, panting and desperate. “It’s even worse than you know. For I am with child, too. Unlike you, I can name my lover, and we are betrothed to marry. We did not lie together until we were handclasped. But that’s why I’m determined that we marry in January before the baby comes in May.”

“In May?” Alinor asked, shocked.

“Yes. There’s no shame in being with child at the altar. We were betrothed. We were going to tell his parents and the minister next month. But if you’re proved as a whore then Richard won’t be allowed to marry me, and his family will never accept me! Then I’ll be ruined, too.”

“Alys!” Alinor reached out to her beloved daughter, but Alys slapped her hand away and threw herself down on the bed, turned towards the wooden wall, and would not speak.

Alys cried herself to sleep as Alinor lay sleepless, the cottage door wide open to the clear night sky, the stars sparkling like ice. The tide was coming in with an east wind behind it, the coldest wind of all. The sound of the lapping water filled the cottage as if the tide would climb the bank, wash them both away, and make the whole world into tidelands.

At midnight Alinor got up, wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, ignored the protesting cluck of the drowsy hens, and went outside to sit on the rough bench against the cottage wall, closing the door on her sleeping daughter. She watched the moon high in the sky, shining a silver path on the water of the harbor, until she thought it was an invitation to her, a message from the old gods of the Saxon shore, who did not fear death but embraced it as their last voyage. She thought that perhaps the best thing she could do for her daughter, for her son, for herself, and for the man she loved was to walk down to the shore and fill her pockets with stones and follow that gleaming path, colder and colder, wetter and wetter, until the icy waters closed over her head and the sound of rushing water in her ears muffled the cry of the sleepless seagulls.

Quietly, she got to her feet and went through the garden gate, her hand lingering on the worn gatepost. She looked back at the shabby little cottage and then climbed the bank to the high path. Through the tunnel of thornbushes, she walked in moonlight and shadow, along the bank until she came to the white shell beach under the down-swinging branches of the oak tree. The bank had been built as a sea wall years ago, centuries ago, and the sea had worn it away at the foot and tumbled the foundation stones—river stones, rounded by water—on the white shell shore. Alinor lifted one and slid it in the pocket of her gown, and another, for the other side. She felt their weight drag her down. She picked up another—the biggest, the heaviest—to hold it tightly and walk into the icy water that lapped closer and closer. She thought that all her life she had been afraid of deep water and now, in her last moments, she would face that fear and not fear it anymore. She thought that it would drag at her poor skirt, chill her warm body, lap against her belly, her ribs, that she would shudder when it reached her warm armpits, her neck, but that finally she would dip her head and taste the brackish salt of it and know that she would go down into the muddy depths of it, without protest and without fear.

She did not move. She stood at the edge of the sea, the stone heavy in her grip, and watched the moon’s dappled reflection, silver on the dark water as the waves crept up the shore, closer and closer. She heard the water lap at her feet and she stood still as the tide turned, and listened to it recede. But she did not move. She did not step along the silvery path of the moon, she did not walk into the water. She stood silent among the quiet sounds of the night, and certainty came to her.

She did not weep for herself, not for Alys, not even for Rob. She did not yearn for James to rescue her, she did not think of him with anything but love. She had loved him and lain with him, she had trusted him and she believed in him still; but she did not expect him to help her in this dark night. She did not think that anything would be illuminated by the dawn, she did not pray to a forgiving God, for she did not expect Him to listen to a woman like her, in a place like this.

She had no faith in her purpose or in her courage. She had no faith in herself as the cold murky waters lapped at her feet. But slowly she found that she had one belief—only one belief: that she would last through this night, that she would last through any night to come. She knew that she would not drown herself. She knew that she would not be broken by this terrible misfortune any more than she had been broken by the cruelty of Zachary or by the loss of her mother. She thought that the one thing that she had learned in this life, which had so many troubles and so few joys: she had at least learned to survive. She knew she could endure. She thought that all her life—raised by a courageous woman in hard circumstances, abused by a violent husband, loving two children and bringing them up in poverty—had taught her this lesson: to survive. She thought it was the only thing that she truly knew to do. She thought that she had found, embedded in her heart, like a drowned field post in a mudbank, a great determination to live.

Alys woke in the morning, as fresh-faced as a child, her eyes clear and her beauty undimmed by the night of crying. She found her mother making gruel and setting out the bowls on the table as if it were an ordinary day.

“Ma?”

“Yes, Alys?”

“What are you going to do?”

“I am going to eat my breakfast and so are you.”

“But—”

“Eat first and then we’ll talk. You have to eat. Especially now.”

Alys pulled out her stool and sat at the table and ate as she was bidden. When she had finished and pushed back her bowl she said: “And now, tell me what you’re going to do. You can’t let anyone know your sin.”

“But you can?”

“It’s not the same. Richard and me were handfasted in the sight of God. He’s going to marry me. His parents will have no objection to me coming into their house with a new son and heir on the way. They’ll welcome me. In the old days half the girls in the parish used to be married with a big belly, you know that yourself. And only the strictest people mind, even now. Everyone’s glad to see that a bride is fertile. There’s no comparison to you and your adultery.”

Alinor bowed her head. “You know for sure that his parents won’t object?”

“They’re not puritans, and they know that I’m not loose. We were both virgins when we lay together and we were betrothed. They know we’ve been courting for months. My baby will have a good name and a beautiful farm for his home.” She broke off. “At least he would have done. Until now. Until this. Now, God knows what’ll happen. Nobody’ll let you work for them, nobody’ll dream of having you as a midwife. You’ll never get your license and no respectable place would have Rob as an apprentice.” She dropped her face into her hands and rubbed her eyes. “Ma! Think! Not even Uncle Ned will stand your friend or be your brother when he knows. He’ll deny you. And how will you manage here without his kinship? How will you even eat if you can’t use the ferry-house kitchen garden?”

Alinor was silent.

“You won’t be able to stay here! They’ll torture you. Mrs. Miller and all her friends, the parish council, the church court . . .”

“I know,” Alinor said quietly.

“Nobody will buy your herbs. They’ll come to you for nothing but love potions and poisons.”

“I know.”

As if Alinor’s stillness made Alys more determined, she rose to her feet and looked down at her seated mother. “It’s not possible for you to bear this child,” the girl said quietly. “You know the herbs to use, you know how it’s done. You’ll have to get rid of it. You know how. You’ll have to get rid of it.”

Alinor looked up into her daughter’s stern face.

“It’s not been long, has it?” asked the girl. “You’ve only been sick for a few weeks?”

Alinor nodded. She found she could not speak.

“Then it can be done and no one the wiser. I’ll go to work at the mill now. I’ll come home this afternoon early, saying I’m ill. You can take whatever you need to take at noon, and I’ll care for you. I’ll do whatever you need. I’ll look after you, Ma, I promise. You shall tell me what you need to eat and drink, and I’ll not leave you till it’s over. I’ll change your linen and care for you as it happens.”

Alinor said nothing.

“You have to be rid of this,” Alys pressed. “Richard can’t marry me if you are shamed, and that would break my heart and his, and our child would be born out of wedlock. You’ll have a bastard child, and a bastard grandchild. We can’t survive that. Your child is the ruin of us all: you, me, and Rob. You have to end it. I’ve never asked you for anything, Ma, but I am asking you for this.”

Her mother sat silent, her face white.

“Your shame is my shame,” the girl repeated. “When the Stoneys hear you’re with child they’ll throw me off. I’ll never see Richard again. Then we’ll both be stuck here, both of us, with our bastards, without husbands. Don’t you think they’ll turn us out, with our big bellies on us? Don’t you think Mrs. Miller, and all the goodwives like her, will have us out of the parish before we can make a charge on it? And every husband shouting that we should go, to show that it wasn’t him?”

“Two babies,” was all that Alinor could say.

“Two bastards,” her daughter corrected her. “Pauper bastards. They’ll die in the poorhouse together. No one will let us raise them.”

“I’ll think about it.” Alinor drew a breath. “I will think about it today and tell you tonight.”

“You should have thought before,” her daughter said crudely.

Alinor flinched as if she had been struck. “I know,” she said, her voice very low. “I know how grave this is.”

“If you don’t finish it here, today, then my life is ruined. Rob’s, too,” Alys loaded her mother’s guilt. “Nobody will take him as an apprentice if his mother is a bawd who keeps a bawdy house on the mire. Nobody’ll ever marry me with a bastard child and my mother with hers. We’ll be ruined whores. My uncle Ned won’t even let us on his ferry. We’ll never get off the island at high tide. And when they come to drive us out, nobody will save us. Rob will have to watch them throw stones and mud and fish guts at our backs.”

Alinor nodded. She could imagine the reflection of torches in the water as the good people of Sealsea Island gathered at dusk to rid themselves of two friendless sluts. “I know.”

“Get the herbs ready,” Alys ordered. “I’ll come home early and we’ll do it this evening.”

She pulled on her jacket, and she took her distaff, her hank of fleece, and her spindle and she walked out of the door, spinning as she walked up the bank towards the ferry, to go to the mill where she would work as hard as any man, to earn the money for her dowry for the marriage that she was determined to make.

Left alone, Alinor started work on the daily tasks: shooing the hens out of the door, picking up the eggs, sweeping the floor, washing the two wooden gruel bowls, and rinsing the ale mugs. She swept the embers under the earthenware fire guard and made the marks against fire in the ashes of the hearth. She tied her cape around her shoulders, and went outside to gather firewood. And then she stood, looking at the harbor as if she had never seen it before, gazing at the gray horizon, wondering if she would ever again see a ship coming up the deep-water channel and hope that it was bringing the man she loved.

She had been so long in such a daze of missing James, and trusting him to return, that she could not now change the rhythm of her thoughts. She could not understand that she was no longer patiently waiting; now she was in crisis. She could not bring herself to face the problem and solve it. She sank down on the bench and, as the sky overhead darkened with a great flock of wintering geese and she heard their loud complaining cries and heard the beating of their great wings, without knowing it, under her cape her cold hand crept to her flat belly as if she would hold the tiny baby safe inside.

Later that morning Alinor was raking over the barley in the malthouse at Ferry-house. As she leaned on her rake and inhaled the warm scent of the barleycorns, a young lad put his head in the door and said: “Are you the wisewoman?”

Alinor, feeling far from wise, replied: “Yes. Who asks?”

“An oyster fisherwoman,” he said. “Down at East Beach.”

“Did her husband send for me?” Alinor asked, shoveling the barley grains rapidly into a pile so that they could continue heating.

“He’s at sea. His mother sent me for you. She gave me this.” The boy handed over a silver sixpence.

“I’ll come at once,” Alinor said, reassured that there would be money to pay her fee. East Beach fishermen were notorious: on a poor island they did poorly. “I’ve got to fetch my things.”

“I’m to come with you and help carry,” the youth said. He was pale with fright at having to serve a wisewoman. Alinor was known on East Beach to be a mistress of unknown arts. The fishermen of East Beach had drunk with Zachary when he had boasted about his wife’s strange powers. And then Zachary was gone, and his ship was gone, for no reason, on a clear day, and one or two said that she had sent him down with his ship and her faerie lover had danced like St. Elmo’s fire, in the rigging.

“We’ll walk across the mire to St. Wilfrid’s and then to East Beach,” Alinor decided.

He gaped. “Through the waters?”

“It’s low tide. I know the paths.”

The boy gulped down his fear and followed in her footsteps as she closed the door on the malting floor, shouted an explanation to Ned, who was plaiting a new rope for the ferry on the pier, and headed along the bank to her own cottage to collect the herbs and oils that she would need, putting them in the bag that she always took for childbirth. Alinor walked ahead of the boy along the bank, down to the white shingle shore, and then deep into the harbor, following the hidden paths, hearing him pattering along behind her, sometimes splashing in the puddles left by the receding tide.

They cut the corner by the church, crossing through the churchyard, and went past the big iron gates of the Priory. Alinor, glancing down the drive, saw Rob and Walter riding up the broad sweep. She waved at them but did not check her stride, and was pleased when Rob clicked to his horse and rode up to catch her up.

“Ma!”

“God bless you, my son.”

“Are you called out?” he asked, recognizing her sack of goods and her determined march.

“Yes, to East Beach.”

“We can take you up,” he said at once. He looked at Walter. “Can’t we? We can take my mother and this lad to wherever they need to go?”

“Why not?” said Walter easily. “Here, Mrs. Reekie, will you come up with me?”

Alinor was reluctant to ride with Walter, but her son was already pulling up his horse and putting a hand down to the boy.

“I don’t know that I can get up there,” she said, looking at Walter’s hunter.

“I’ll come over to this wall here,” he said. “And if you will climb up to the top, then you can step on. He’s a good horse, he won’t shy.”

Alinor could not say that she did not want to jolt the child in her belly. “I’ve got my bag of physic. Is he steady?”

“I promise you he has smooth paces. You can come behind me and hold tight to me.”

Alinor clambered up and then balanced on the top of the knapped flint wall as Walter brought his horse alongside. She stepped into the dangling stirrup and swung a leg over, to ride astride behind him.

“All aboard?” Walter asked as Alinor gripped his waist, the precious sack of oils held tightly between them.

“Yes.”

“And now we can go onward,” he said, and put the horse into a gentle walk.

“Do you want to go faster?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Not too fast,” Alinor said nervously.

Walter put the horse into a smooth controlled canter. Alinor clung on as the big-boned hunter plowed up the lane, onto the track to Sealsea, and then turned a sharp left down a sandy stony path to the hamlet of East Beach.

“You can put me down here,” she said breathlessly. “The lad’ll guide me to the cottage.”

Walter pulled up his horse, jumped down, received her into his arms, and set her on her feet.

“Shall I come with you and see if you need me to fetch anything?” Rob offered.

“If Master Walter can spare you,” she said.

“Oh, we do nothing but amuse ourselves now,” Walter said. “Our tutor, Mr. Summer, has gone away and will come back to take me to Cambridge in the Lent term.”

“Gone?” Alinor asked with painful interest. “Is he not coming back before then?”

She realized that she was looking earnestly from one boy to another, that she was far too eager for the reply. Lent was dangerously late for her. She would be nearly six months pregnant by then.

“No,” Walter said lightly. “Not till February.”

“Are you all right, Ma?” Rob asked, looking at her pale face. “Are you ill again?”

“Oh, I have a touch of tertian fever,” she said carelessly. “But I’m well enough to care for a good woman in her time. Will you wait here, Rob, and I’ll send . . .”

“Jem,” he volunteered reluctantly as if he did not want this strange woman and these horsemen, who had appeared from nowhere, to know his name.

“I’ll send Jem back to you, if I need anything. If he doesn’t come within minutes you can go on with your ride.”

“Can we come out in your boat again?” Walter asked. “That was a merry day, wasn’t it?”

She felt her pale face flush warm at the memory. “It was a good day,” she said, keeping her voice level. “But we can’t go out now till the spring. The wind is up, and most days the harbor is too rough for me. And it’s cold. We’ll go again when it is sunny and calm.”

The two young men waited on their horses, as Jem guided Alinor through the narrow ways between the fishermen’s cottages. Each little home had a net shed attached, some had huts thrown up as sail lofts, some of them had lean-to hovels where a man might smoke his catch, or salt down fish in a barrel. Every now and then a straight track served as a rope walk, filled with cords snaking up and down, tied to a post at each end, being woven into three-strand or five-strand ropes. It was a jumble of dwellings. The houses were walled with driftwood and clay, the roofs a patchwork of old sails and nets thatched with dried bladder wrack. The smell of old rotting fish, the brine of the nets and the occasional foul breeze of a burning midden filled the air. Not even the wind from the sea could clear it. Jem led her to one of the better houses, set sideways to the sea, the waves sucking on the pebble beach below, with a little garden hedged with driftwood. It had a good slate roof and a chimney built of brick, and sturdy white-painted walls made from ship’s timbers and mortar.

“Goody Auster,” he said. “In there,” and pointed to the front door.

Alinor went in. The house had two downstairs rooms at the front, one for eating and all the household work, and the other one, divided from it by a wall of thick decking planks, was the bedroom. A lean-to room at the back was the scullery and a ladder led up to the upper story where other members of the family slept in the storeroom. Coming down the ladder was Mrs. Grace.

“You’re here very quick,” she said approvingly.

“My son brought me on his horse,” Alinor said. “He’s waiting to fetch anything extra that I need.”

“You’ll want to see her,” the older woman said, and opened the little door so that Alinor could go into the downstairs bedroom.

The young woman was leaning against the wall, her hands over her face, her big belly straining against her nightgown. She did not turn her head as Alinor came in, but she winced at the creak of the door. “I want Joshua,” she whispered.

“Here’s Mrs. Reekie come to help you in your time.”

“I want Joshua,” was all the young woman said. “Ma, I feel sick as a dog.”

Alinor felt a reassuring sense of her own competence. Here, she was not a frightened woman who had ruined the lives of her children and herself; here, she was the only one who knew what should be done, who had witnessed and helped at many births. She went quietly up to the young woman and put the back of her cool hand against the girl’s flushed forehead, noting how stiffly she held herself.

“Does your head ache?” she asked her. “Your neck?”

The girl’s eyes with dark dilated pupils flicked once at her and then she closed her eyes, leaning her head to the plank wall. “I can hardly bear it,” she said.

Alinor went quietly from the room and found Jem waiting outside the front door. “Go to my son and tell him to pick me some feverfew,” she said. “A big bunch. And then tell him that I can manage the rest, and he can go.”

Jem nodded and took to his heels down the dirt track. Alinor went back inside, smiled at Mrs. Grace, and took the girl’s icy hands.

“Now,” she said reassuringly. “Let’s get you comfortable.”

All through the day, other young wives and older women came and went with gifts of ale and bread, apples and cheese, with swaddling bands and birth caps that they had laid away in lavender, staying to gossip at the fireside and send in their best wishes to the birthing chamber, each hoping to be allowed inside. Alinor kept the door shut against them and kept Lisa Auster quiet. She gave her sips of tea made from dried raspberry leaves, and salads of feverfew to eat. Only when her fever had cooled and her headache was soothed did Alinor admit the gossips who had come to see her, and then only two at a time until her pains started to come often, and Alinor judged that her time was coming. Then with her mother and her mother-in-law and two best friends to hold her hands and praise her courage, Lisa walked around the room and finally settled on the bed as they lit the smoking oil lights. The heavy stink of fish oil scented the room. Alinor washed her hands.

“Washing?” Mrs. Grace watched anxiously.

“Yes,” Alinor said quietly, and then she came to the girl, who was kneeling against the bed, and persuaded her to squat over the bowl so Alinor could wash her with clean water brewed with lavender and thyme.

“She’s not a heifer waiting to calve!” Mrs. Grace objected.

“If I have to help the baby out, it’s better,” Alinor said quietly.

“She’ll catch her death!” the woman warned.

The young woman was growing uneasy, her moans of pain coming more quickly. “Is it now?” she asked Alinor.

“It’s soon,” Alinor confirmed. “Do you want to kneel up on the bed?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know . . .”

“You see where you feel best,” Alinor advised her, and watched the girl move around, now leaning over the bed, now lying down. Finally, she settled on the wooden floor, her back against the bed, and the older women gave her a peeled wand of wood to bite and offered her a rope to heave on during the birth. Alinor stood back until they started to speak of the ordeal that was coming and that it might last for hours, even days, and how they had suffered. Then she stepped forward.

“The baby is coming,” she told the young woman. “Just let it come. There’s no need for pulling on a rope. All the work is in your belly.”

Wide-eyed, the girl saw Alinor’s face shining with calm conviction. “This is the best day’s work we will ever do,” Alinor said. “Let the baby come.”

The girl squatted, holding to the post of the bed, her belly standing up, every muscle rigid, and she groaned. Alinor knelt before her, watching her frightened face, calming her with a hand on her shoulder. She could see her belly standing up in a spasm, and urged her to push and then rest.

“I can feel! I can feel it . . .”

The women wailed in a wordless chorus with her. “That’s right,” Alinor said, intently watching the young woman. Then finally she said: “Wait, wait, I can see the head!”

There was a gasp of pleasure and excitement in the room, and everyone crowded closer. “Here you are,” said Alinor, her voice filled with joy as she gently took hold of the baby’s head and slippery shoulders and, moving with the mother’s rhythm, swaying with her, brought the baby into the world. Skillfully she held it by its feet, like a writhing mackerel, and slapped it gently on the back to clear the breath, and then bent her head and sucked the baby’s nose and mouth and spat the liquor and blood on the floor. There was a brief silence, a waiting silence, and they all heard the muffled cough and then the wail as the newborn baby breathed air for the first time.

“A girl,” Alinor said. “A girl.” The cord still pulsed, and the baby opened her mouth and cried. Alinor looked at the perfect hands, the wrinkled skin smeared with white wax and blood, the dark hair plastered on the tiny head, and the small flushed protesting face. She felt the tears rush to her eyes and bit her lip to prevent herself from weeping for pity and joy. “A girl,” she said again. “A precious girl, a gift from God Himself.”

“Mrs. Reekie, are you all right yourself?” someone asked, and Alinor, recalled to her work, turned to the mother and with her hand still on the pulsing birth cord, delivered the afterbirth. Mrs. Grace held out the shawl that she had kept for her grandchild, and Alinor wrapped the tiny baby closely and handed her to the grandmother, as the young mother climbed onto the bed and Alinor sponged her parts and bound them with moss, her hands moving with their skill while her head was dizzy with the realization that this baby was a precious gift of life, that every baby was precious beyond imagining, that no baby should be lost if they could be saved, if they could have a life where they were loved and cherished.

All the women crowded around, passing the baby from one to another, admiring her and cooing over her. When the baby came back to Alinor, she tied off the cord, snipped it neatly, and handed the baby to the mother. “Here,” she said. “Your little girl.”

It was as if the baby had come to Alinor’s hands to bring her a message, like the robin might sing in her hedge or the seagulls cry over her cottage. “God bless her, and make her well and strong,” Alinor said, watching the tiny little head and the way that the dark blue eyes blinked open to see the world for the very first time.

Young Lisa Auster was flushed and proud, leaning back on the heaped bedding, her neighbors crowding round to see the baby and kiss her.

“Let’s put her to the breast,” Alinor suggested, and waited while the young mother and the baby fumbled towards each other, putting one gentle hand on Mrs. Grace’s arm to stop her from interfering.

“Is that right?” the young mother asked. “I don’t know if that’s right.” Then she grimaced as the baby latched on.

“That’s right!” Alinor said, beaming with a sense of inexplicable joy. “And it will hurt more, before it hurts less, but you will feel the foremilk come down and you can see the baby is sucking.”

She watched the two of them for a moment and then she realized that she was standing, smiling in silence, as if she had realized something of great importance at this poor fishwife’s bedside that she had never known before.

“It is a gift,” she whispered. “Life. Precious.”

“I hoped it would have a caul,” Mrs. Grace said. “All of us fishwives would like our babies born with a caul, to protect against drowning.”

Alinor nodded. “I know.”

“If you have a caul or even a part of one, I would buy it from you?”

“No, I don’t trade in such things.”

“I thought you were a wisewoman with herbs and secret things?”

“Just herbs,” Alinor said levelly. “No secret things.”

“Not faerie gold? I heard you had faerie gold.”

“I pick up little tokens and pretty shells when I see them. Nothing more than that. Just keepsakes, nothing with any meaning.”

“I thought a woman might come to you for all sorts of needs?”

“I’ve got a need. You could give my old man a potion!” someone interrupted, to bawdy laughter.

Alinor smiled as if she thought it was funny, though she was tired of the question. “I’m sorry, but I only have herbs for illnesses. I sell herbs and attend births, and sometimes I do nursing. I have to take care, Mrs. Grace. You will understand. I have to take care of my good name.”

The woman nodded, disbelieving. “But they say you can do all sorts of things. They say you speak to the other world. And they help you.”

Alinor shook her head. “I can do nothing better than this,” she insisted, looking once again at the girl lying back exhausted in the bed, her face alight with joy, and the baby suckling at her breast. “I think there is nothing finer than this in the whole world. This world—I know nothing about any other.”

“Is she well?” Lisa asked. “She’s feeding well, isn’t she?”

Alinor smiled at her. “She’s very well, and when your husband comes home, he will love you both. And now . . .” Alinor started to collect up the bottles of oil and the box of dried moss, and pack them in her sack. “Now I’ll go home to my cottage. And if you wish, I’ll come back tomorrow to see how you do.”

“Jem can go with you with a lantern,” Mrs. Grace offered, producing a sixpence. “And I will pay you another shilling when you come tomorrow. I am grateful, Mrs. Reekie. We both are. I hope we have your goodwill? I hope the baby has your good wishes?”

“It is my joy. Praise God,” Alinor said, hardly hearing the odd question. She said good night to the other women, hefted her sack, pulled her cape around her and put her hood over her head, and followed Jem’s wavering light up the narrow lanes of East Beach.

It was too dark to go across the harbor with the tide coming in, so they went the long way, up the Chichester road, north till they saw the light from the window of Ferry-house. Jem went all the way ahead of her, lantern held high at his side to light her path, as if he was afraid to walk abreast with a wisewoman. He only paused when they got to the brink of the rife and the reflection of the moon, silver on the water, made his lantern seem yellow and weak.

“I’m safe from here,” Alinor said. “I know the way, even in the dark. You can go home.”

He ducked his head and though she held out half a penny to him, he turned away.

“Here,” she said. “This is for you. Thank you for bringing me to Mrs. Auster and home again.”

“I don’t dare to take it,” he said, stepping back, whipping his hands behind his back.

“What d’you mean?” Still, she held out the coin.

“It’s faerie gold, I know it!” he burst out. “I’m glad you were pleased with my service, your ladyship. I’ll go now, if you will release me.” He looked ready to run.

“What did you call me? Boy—Jem—you know that I’m nothing but the widow of the fisherman Zachary Reekie,” Alinor said. “You know I work as a midwife. I don’t do anything else. I have no faerie gold. There’s no call to name me ladyship!”

He was walking backwards, without taking his fearful eyes off her, his face ghastly in the lantern light, hurrying to get away from her. “They told me,” he whispered, “that you know things that no mortal woman knows. That your boy lives like a lord at the Priory, and your daughter is to marry the richest farmer in Sussex.”

“Well, no—” Alinor started.

“Missis, did you whistle up a storm that blew your husband away?”

Alinor tried to laugh, but his fear was infectious. “This is nonsense,” she said, her voice unsteady. “And Mrs. Grace knows it’s nonsense, for she sent you for a good honest midwife and I came.”

“No,” he shook his head. “Not her. They were afraid to send for anyone else in case you ill-wished us. So I fetched you with my fingers crossed, and then you came to her on horseback like a queen, and you sent Sir William’s own son to do your bidding. Good night, Mrs. Reekie, your honor. Good night.”

Alinor let him go, too shaken to press the coin on him, too frightened by his wide-eyed fear to laugh him into common sense. When Zachary had accused her of being in league with powers beyond this earth, she had taken it as the exaggerated language of courtship when he first saw her, and part of his hatred, as the marriage soured. That he should sow such dangerous slander to his drinking companions and that it should flower into these envious fantasies was something she had never dreamed.

Of course, people would wonder at Rob’s good fortune and Alys’s betrothal, but she had not thought that people would weave Zachary’s superstitious hatred and her survival together into a faerie story of Zachary’s doom and her revenge. It was a dark note at the end of a day that had started with thoughts of drowning and dark water. She trudged along the bank, the mud crunching with frost beneath her worn boots, opened the door, and went in.

The cottage was in darkness, the fire under the cover, the candles snuffed out. Alys was asleep on her side of the bed and Alinor felt nothing but relief that she need not speak another word until the morning.