Tidelands

TIDELANDS, NOVEMBER 1648

Alys and Alinor walked together along the bank to Ferry-house, the ground iron hard and icy beneath their feet, and kissed good-bye without speaking at the pier. Ned pulled the ferry over for his niece, his face beaming, his dog standing beside him waving its feathery tail.

“Good day,” he said joyfully. “And a good day it is for me and for all the friends of freedom.”

“What’s happened?” Alinor asked as Alys stepped into the ferry. Alinor shook her head at Ned’s outstretched hand. “No, I’m not crossing. I’ve come to start chitting the barley.”

“The army is going to capture the king, I swear it,” he said triumphantly.

“Why? How do you know?”

“The wool merchant came through—he left you some more wool for spinning; it’s in the store—told me that the news was all over Chichester. The parliament men have got nowhere near agreement with the king. And now it turns out His Majesty was about to break his royal word, break his parole, and run away. The governor of Carisbrooke Castle, Colonel Hammond, is recalled to headquarters to answer for it. The plotters have been arrested. The army has had enough, and now they will take the king for themselves.”

“But how ever does a Chichester wool merchant know that the king was planning to escape?” Alys asked skeptically.

“Who’s been arrested?” Alinor interrupted, breathless with anxiety for James. “Who was caught—helping the king?”

“His guards at the castle; but the whole island knew of it,” Ned said contemptuously. “Half a dozen men were in the plot. He must’ve written a letter to everyone he knew, telling them that he could not agree with parliament and that he was ready to run away.”

Dizzy with fear, Alinor leaned against the mooring post. “It was just his guards arrested?”

“Yes, two of them. Alinor, are you all right?” Ned asked her.

“Uncle, I’ve got to go to work,” Alys said, twitching the guide rope to distract him from her mother’s pallor. “Will you take me across? Ma, see you tonight. We’re baking at the mill today. I’ll bring home a loaf.”

“Yes, yes, God bless,” Alinor said distractedly, and turned from her brother’s scrutiny to the malting house.

The peace of the malthouse steadied her as she took up the barley rake, the handle smooth with decades of use. The low-ceilinged room was warm compared with the wintry chill outside, scented with the sweet smell of barley. The barleycorns were in a steeply shoveled pile, warming through and starting to split. Ned had left a bucket of clean water from the ferry-house dipping pond, out of the way of the overnight frost. She raked the barleycorns flat on the floor and stirred them round, mixing them together. Once they were spread out, she took a brush made from broom twigs and sprinkled them thoroughly with the water, raked them round again, and then took the blunt wide shovel, and piled them back into a heap. There was no way of telling that each seed was bursting with life, but she knew that the miracle of life was here in hundreds and thousands, in millions. Life in secret, a spark so small that it could live in every single barley seed, so powerful that it would split the seed and grow. She leaned on the handle of the shovel and thought that here she was: turning barley, picking herbs, attending a new-born baby, with the miracle of life like a candle flame, hidden inside her; and far away, somewhere, perhaps on the Isle of Wight, perhaps at his college in France, James was thinking of her, coming to her, with the miracle of his passion inside him.

Once she had not known if he was a man to keep his word, if he would come back to her. But now she trusted him; she knew that he would come. And when he came, she would tell him that she was with child, that life was urgently growing inside her. She would not deny him again, she would go with him to his home in the faraway county of Yorkshire, to London, to France, to wherever he wished.

She leaned the malt shovel against the wall, pushed at the door, and swung it open as if she might see the sail of his boat. Before her, the tide was coming in, the seagulls crying over the splashing waves. The water was radiantly blue, the hushing well a familiar distant whisper, the wintry sun hard and bright. Alinor thought that anything in this world was possible: the king might escape, James might regain his home, he would come for her and she would have his child. Why not, in this new world where anything could happen?

“I want to talk,” Alinor said to her daughter, ending days of unhappy silence. They were preparing the little cottage for the night, shoveling the red embers of the fire under the earthenware pot guard, shooing the hens into their corner, undressing to their linen shifts and lastly tamping out the rushlights. The foul scent of tallow smoke breathed around the little room like rancid bacon. The cottage was gloomy, lit by bars of moonlight shining through the shutters.

“At last,” Alys said irritably. “I wondered how long it’d take before you spoke. D’you have any idea what you’re going to do?”

Alinor bowed her head. “Alys, all I can say is that I’m sorry. But I do have hopes.”

The young woman sat heavily on the bed. “Name one.”

“The father of my baby is a good man. He asked me to marry him, and when I can, I will.”

“You can’t, you’re married to my da.”

“I can say he’s dead, and six years from now I’ll be free to marry. It’s in the law. When a man has been missing for seven years.”

“Say he’s dead?” Alys was shocked. “Name our da as a dead man?”

“It’s not ill-wishing!” Alinor exclaimed.

“It is! That’s exactly what it is. You’ll tell everyone he’s dead—what? Drowned?—and name yourself as a widow?”

“Alys, your da’s never coming back,” Alinor said quietly. “He told Rob, he met him at Newport. He’s never coming home.”

“What? Rob saw him?”

“Your da ran from him, and missed the next meeting. He didn’t want to be found. He told the tutor that he wasn’t coming back.”

“And nobody told me?”

“No . . . You remember? You didn’t want to know. You wanted to go to the Stoneys’ farm without a lie in your mouth.”

“My da isn’t coming back? Ever?”

“No. He says not.”

Alys put her hand over her eyes. “Just like that? And nobody told me?”

“I’m sorry, Alys.” Alinor spread her work-worn hands. “There’s been so much—” She broke off when she saw her daughter was fiercely rubbing her eyes with her shawl. “I’m very sorry, Alys. He wasn’t a good father to you or to Rob. He wasn’t a good husband. He’s not a good man. You said you didn’t care. You said you didn’t want to know.” She paused. “Are you crying for him?”

The girl showed her a sulky face rubbed dry of any tears. “Not at all.”

Alinor pressed on. “So, you see, I don’t have to wait forever for him to come home.”

“Looks like you didn’t wait at all,” Alys said spitefully.

Alinor bowed her head against the accusation. “But in six years’ time I can marry the father of my child.”

“Who says you can do this?”

“It’s the law.”

“Who says so?”

Alinor’s eyes dropped from her daughter’s demanding glare. “Rob’s tutor told me so.”

“Does everyone know about this but me? Does Uncle Ned?”

“No! Only the tutor, because he met your da with Rob at Newport.”

“And the law says you can marry seven years from my da going?”

“Yes, and I will.”

Alys’s strained face showed no relief. “That’ll be a comfort for your six-year-old bastard. But we’ve still got to get through the six years.”

Alinor gritted her teeth. “That’s why I’ll say nothing, and nobody will know I’m with child until you’re safely married. Then, when you’re happy at Stoney Farm, I’ll go away.”

“Leave me,” the girl said flatly. “And Rob.”

Alinor’s face was as calm as a carved statue of a saint, but her eyes filled with tears. “To spare you both, yes,” she said. “Isn’t it what you want?”

The girl sighed and lifted her head. “No good can come from this,” she predicted. “If this is what comes when a woman is free to make her own choices then I don’t think very much of Uncle Ned’s new England.”

“It’s nothing to do with Uncle Ned,” Alinor said, startled. “Nothing to do with the new England.”

“He says that men and women can choose their destiny, that they shan’t be ruled by their betters. But all that’s happened is that you’ve chosen a terrible mistake and we’ll suffer worse than when you were a poor widow on the side of the sea with a wasteful landlord ruling you and a wicked king over him. Because nothing’s really changed. We might have got rid of the king but not of the rule of men. You’re still ruined and this man is free to come and go as he wants. What if he doesn’t come back for you, ever?”

Alinor shook her head as if to rid herself of the blank misery of her daughter’s face. “The man I love will come back to help me,” she promised. “He’ll marry me when he can. I’ll not be shamed and neither will you. We’ll get through your wedding, and when you’re safely married I’ll go away and have my child, and in six years I shall be safely married too.”

“There’s a lot of hoping in this,” Alys said bitterly. “And we’re not a family that’s done well on hope. If it were me, telling you this, you would beat me.”

For the first time, Alinor smiled at her beloved daughter. “I would never beat you.”

“You would be furiously angry with me.”

“Aren’t you furiously angry with me?”

Alys did not return the smile. She turned her head away.