Tidelands

DOUAI, FRANCE, OCTOBER 1648

James spent a week in penitent silence, sleepless with the conflicting sense of guilt and desire. Every day he met with his confessor and step-by-step they went through his first encounter with Alinor, that she had saved him and without her he would have been lost on the unmapped tidelands. She had been a savior to him.

“But she is not your savior,” Father Paul said quietly as they knelt side by side in the chapel and looked up at the altar where the crucified Christ looked down on them, his painted face downcast. “She is no angel. She is an earthly woman and naturally disposed to sin.”

James bowed his head. He could not deny that she was disposed to sin. He spoke of the afternoon in the boat, he spoke of her desire. He spoke of the color of her hair and how a curl escaped from her cap and blew against her face. He spoke of her scarred hands and her rough linen.

“She was born into poverty, set in her place by God. It is not for you to defy God and rescue her. Did she ask to be baptized into the true faith?”

“No,” James said quietly.

“You have nothing else to offer her.”

His voice low and ashamed, James spoke of the feel of her mouth under his, of the strength of her body under the bulky clothes. He spoke of her smile and her little indrawn breath of desire. He said that when he touched her hand, her waist, her breast, he felt that he was, for the first time, a man. That he became himself, in loving her.

“A woman cannot bring insight,” Father Paul corrected him. “You do not know yourself by knowing her. All she taught you is carnal knowledge, that is all she knows.”

“But that was everything!” James said simply. He did not speak of the loft over the stable, nor of her beauty in the morning light when she had been as naked as Eve and as innocent as Paradise. “I love her, Father. Sin or not.”

“It is sin,” the priest steadily replied. “Don’t call it ‘sin or not,’ as if you had not received instruction, as if God had not given you reason. It is sin and you must put it from you.”

James sat back on his heels, his face pale. “To abandon her would break my word. I have asked her to be my wife.”

“You are not free to ask her.”

“And she was not free to consent,” James conceded. “They speak against her . . .”

“What do they say?”

“Nothing, superstitious nonsense, malice, all malice. Her own husband said she was whore to the faeries,” James tried to laugh. “Ignorant nonsense, that foolish countrypeople—”

His confessor did not laugh with him. “My son, you and I, far away from them, don’t know what they are speaking of. You can’t say that it is nonsense, you don’t know what she has done. We would have to inquire. A witchfinder would have to visit and ask questions. This is very serious. Does she have marks upon her?”

“No!” James was horrified.

“Does she fear the word of God in church, or the works of God, like deep water or high cliffs?”

James hesitated, thinking of her horror of water.

“Does she have a familiar, an animal that communes with her?”

He thought of the hens that clucked around her feet and slept in the corner of the little cottage, of Red the dog, of the bees, of the robin in her garden: “But this is her life . . .”

“Is her husband not likely to know better than you, who has been seduced by her? What if she is beautiful because Satan has thrown a glamour on her? What if she makes spells as well as physic? You told me that she expected to speak with the dead? What if this is not a helpless poor woman but an evil one?”

TIDELANDS, OCTOBER, 1648

Alys woke to the familiar sound of the small ale being poured from the jug and the scrape of the wooden spoon in the bottom of the iron pot of gruel. She got up from the bed and pushed her tumbled hair out of her eyes, pulling on her shirt over her head, and stepping into her skirt, haphazard, without looking.

Alinor pulled up her stool at the table and bowed her head in grace as Alys sat down at the other side and said: “Amen.”

They ate in silence and then Alys got to her feet and fetched the comb for her hair. Without speaking she handed it to her mother and sat at her feet as if she were a little girl again. Alinor gently unbraided her daughter’s long fair hair and combed it, gently teasing out every tangle and picking out the occasional twig or piece of straw.

“What on earth have you been doing?” she asked as she tossed a leaf into the fire.

“Picking sloes,” Alys replied. “Since Mrs. Miller learned that Richard and I are to be married, she sends me out over the fields. As if she can stop us seeing each other! As if she gets any gain by putting me to humble work.”

Alinor combed the golden sweep of hair, watching the light fall on the thick waves, and then started to plait, starting from the front, so that it coiled around Alys’s pretty head.

“Have you decided?” Alys asked quietly, looking up trustingly into her mother’s face. “I came home early to help you, and Uncle told me you’d been called to East Beach. But I’ve told Mrs. Miller I was ill. She won’t expect me today. I can stay home today and help you be rid of this.”

“I have decided what to do.” Alinor drew a breath and told her. “It came to me yesterday almost like a vision, Alys, when I delivered Lisa Auster’s baby. I held her in my arms. She was no bigger than a kitten, and I saw how precious she was, such a miracle. Everything about her was perfect; she was a tiny person, her little eyelashes and her nails as small as the smallest shells on Wittering beach, and her eyes were dark blue, like yours were when you were born. I could see the light of the world in her. I can’t destroy such a perfect thing, Alys. It would be like breaking a blackbird’s egg. I understood what is sacred, for the first time in my life. This baby has come to me when I thought I would never have another. And I won’t kill it.”

“But you do know how?” Alys persisted.

“I know how, yes,” Alinor said quietly.

“Did your mother ever do it?”

“Yes, she did. When she judged it was best for the mother, or best for the child, poor thing, misconceived, miscarried, miserable. She would do it to spare suffering. I would do it, to spare another’s suffering. I believe it is right to do it—to spare pain. If I had my way a woman would be able to choose—whether to conceive, whether to labor, whether or not to bear a child. Men should not rule this, it is a woman’s own life and that of her child. But I won’t do it to my baby. I would rather have the pain than lose the baby.”

“Is it herbs?”

“Herbs first, and if the baby does not come away, then you take a spindle or a tanner’s needle, a long thin knife or a bodkin, and you pass it up inside the woman to stab the baby as it lies, curled inside,” Alinor said steadily as Alys listened horrified, her hands over her mouth.

“Six times you push the needle up, and you don’t know whether you are piercing the baby’s head, going through an eye or an ear or a mouth, or stabbing right through into the woman’s body. It is as savage as butchering a calf. Worse. You’re completely blind: you don’t know what you’re doing. The woman can bleed to death inside, or the baby can die but not come away and rot inside her. Or she seems to miscarry, but dies in fever. It is death for the baby and sometimes death for the mother. Do you wish that on me?”

Alys leaned against her mother’s knee and closed her eyes. “Of course not.”

“D’you want to take a tanner’s needle and stab your unborn sister in the face as she grows inside me?”

“Of course not,” the girl whispered as quiet as her mother.

“Neither do I,” Alinor said. “I can’t do it. I can’t bring myself to do it.”

“But what are we to do, Ma? This will ruin me, and you, and Rob.”

“I know,” Alinor said. “And it’s my shame, not yours nor Rob’s. I’ll think of a way that I can take it, all to myself.”

Alys leaned back against her mother’s knees. “There’s no way. Unless you go away, right away, right now, before anyone knows, and then what will become of Rob and me? We’re too young to lose both mother and father. You’ll make us orphans. And where would you go? And how can I be married without you? How can I have my baby without you?”

“I’m so sorry,” Alinor said, humbled before her daughter. “I really am, Alys. I will pray for guidance, and I’ll do anything that I can. Anything but killing this baby.”

“Whose baby?” Alinor turned and looked up at her mother. “Whose baby is it? Is it Sir William’s? Because he can pay for you to go away. Everyone knows he—”

“It’s not Sir William’s,” Alinor interrupted her. “And I can’t say whose it is. It’s not my secret, Alys. I’ve done very wrong, but I won’t make it worse by betraying him as well as myself.”

“It’s he who has betrayed you,” the girl said resentfully. “He’s ruined all three of us. He’s no better than my da.”

She stopped as she saw her mother flinch.

“Don’t say that, Alys. You don’t know—”

“He is worse than my da,” she persisted. “We’d have been less hurt if he had beaten you, like my da used to do. You protected Rob and me from our da. I’ve seen you take a beating that I thought would kill you. You stood between Da and us. But you won’t save us from this. What does it mean—if you won’t save us from this?”

DOUAI, FRANCE, NOVEMBER 1648

James felt that he walked everywhere under a glass bell jar, observed but silenced, an echo in his head, breathing a strange air of faithlessness. He prayed that something pure and rare and potent was being exhaled from his constant daily ordeal; but he did not feel he was being purified; he felt he was being distilled into nothing.

One morning Dr. Sean came to him in the little side chapel where James prayed after confession, and said: “I bring you news that will lift a burden from you, Brother James.”

“I should be glad of that,” James replied, rising from his feet.

“The king is to escape from his keepers. The proposals that the parliament has put before him are too small for his divine greatness and the pardons for his followers are too mean. He has told them that he cannot agree with them, and he has written secretly that he is ready to join the queen and his son Prince Charles in exile.”

James felt the familiar sense of dread. “Do you want me to go to him?” he asked. “Am I to go again, and bring him away?” His voice did not falter, but he thought they would be certain to send him to his death this time.

“No, no, a local man is to get him away. A man from Newport. The king is allowed to walk out, to take the air, even to go riding. They suspect nothing. They think he is considering their offer. But riders will meet him and gallop with him to the coast. A ship will be waiting for him. He will get to sea and sail to Cherbourg. With God’s grace he may be there already. My letter is days old. God have mercy on us, we might even see him here.”

James crossed himself. “Amen,” he whispered. “Amen.” He was ashamed to find himself dizzy with fear. “But it’s not that easy. Are they sure of the ship? With a safe master? And will he take it? How many people has he told about the plan?”

“The local man has made all the arrangements,” the professor repeated. “Thank God that the king is ready to leave at last.”

“But they have to get a reliable ship and a safe meeting place at sea. It’s not easy to—”

“The king has commanded it. He has chosen his ship’s master. God will guide him.”

“Amen,” James said again, silencing his own doubts, knowing that his own fears were born from his own experience. Perhaps someone else would succeed where he had, so miserably, failed. Perhaps this time it would be quite different. “Amen.”