Tidelands

TIDELANDS, FEBRUARY 1649

Ned, Rob, Alinor, and Alys walked along the bank at the side of the harbor, past Alinor’s old cottage and net shed, through the quickthorn tunnel, dropping down to the shingle beach, bending their heads beneath the low boughs of the overhanging oak tree, then climbing up the rough steps cut out of the sea wall to the footpath to the church. The rumbling of the millstones across the mire and the rush of the millrace water sounded loud on the cold air, and Alinor glanced back as if she feared that the waters were rising up after them. Ned helped the two women over the stile into the churchyard and they went silently in single file along the path that wound through the gravestones. Ned and Alinor paused before the plain stone that marked their parents’ burial site.

“I wish he could have lived to see this day,” Ned said of his father. “He would never have believed it possible.”

Alinor bowed her head in silence. “I miss her,” was all she said.

The four of them turned and went into church, Alys and Alinor going up the stairs to the wooden gallery where the workingwomen of the parish stood in silence, Ned and Rob stood at the left of the nave where the men of the parish waited bare-headed for the Peachey household to enter and Sir William to take his seat. Only when the nobility arrived would the service to God take place. Ned muttered to Rob that nothing would ever change in the tidelands, no matter what took place elsewhere.

There was only one chair: his lordship’s, placed before the chancel steps like a throne. Walter was in Cambridge, and there were no guests at the Priory to sit in the Priory pews. The household stood behind the empty seats. Alinor, looking down from the gallery on his lordship’s beautiful dark felted hat trimmed with a dark feather and a silver pin, as he processed slowly into church, wondered if he missed his son, or if he had heard anything from his son’s former tutor. She knew that she could never ask him, nor anyone of his household. She tightened her thick winter shawl over her round belly, and watched the minister step towards the lectern, bow low to his lordship, and begin.

The service—the new service, as designed by the parliament and delivered by the Church that obeyed them—went through the usual prayers and readings. But when it came to the sermon the minister looked at the men at the back of the church and said, “Edward Ferryman, are you there?”

“Present!” Ned replied with the promptness of an old soldier at roll call.

“Would you tell us what you have witnessed in London, so that we may all know what has befallen the king who betrayed his people?”

The men either side of Ned parted to make him a path to the chancel steps. He came cautiously forward.

“I was not party to any councils or explanations,” he said. “I can only tell you what I saw.”

“The view of an honest man. The report of an honest man is all we want from you,” the minister assured him, and some of the more godly parishioners said: “Amen.”

Alinor found she was holding her hands tightly under the shelter of her shawl. She did not know what Sir William would make of Ned’s report; she did not know if Ned might, with this encouragement, overstep the line of deference. Rob glanced upwards over his shoulder, to the gallery where his mother stood, and she knew he would be thinking the same thing. His apprenticeship in Chichester did not start till the next day. His chance could be blighted before it had even begun.

Ned walked to the minister and then turned to the people in the church. He bowed slightly to Sir William, who gestured that he should speak.

“King Charles was put on trial for eight days,” he said. “I was present from first till last. I was there on the first day in Westminster Hall, when they brought him in.”

Alinor saw Sir William shift slightly in his seat.

“There were more than sixty judges sitting to hear how the king answered the accusation of tyranny and betrayal of the people,” Ned went on.

The door at the back of the church opened for a latecomer, but no one turned at the gust of cold air. The congregation was completely attentive to Ned’s story.

“The king did not speak as they read the charges, and when he did speak he refused to plead guilty or not guilty.”

“Why?” someone called out. “Why would he not speak up?”

“He spoke,” Ned specified. “He spoke. But he would not plead.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know for certain,” Ned admitted. “It was a lawyer’s argument.”

There was a quiet rumble of disapproval. “But why didn’t they let the king answer?”

“It was he that would not speak to them. They called witnesses against him, in a smaller room, but he did not even attend. Men who had seen him on the battlefield taking arms against his own people. They had many witnesses for that. I saw it myself.”

“May I speak?”

Everyone in the body of the church turned to the doorway to see the latecomer, but he was standing beneath the public gallery and neither Alinor nor Alys could see who it was.

“I, too, was at the trial. I, too, have come directly from London.”

Alinor recognized his voice at once, cramming her fist against her mouth so she did not cry out, biting her fingers against the sudden wave of faintness.

“Who is it?” Alys nudged her mother.

“I don’t know,” Alinor whispered.

He walked up the central nave of the church, the collar of his dark traveling cape set square on his shoulders, the hem of it brushing the tops of his polished riding boots. Alinor, looking down from the gallery, could see only his hat, and when he doffed it, his dark curly head. She could see nothing but his assured stride to the chancel steps and the swirl of his expensive cape.

“Is that you? Mr. Summer?” the minister asked.

James bowed to Sir William and then stood before the minister. “It is I, James Summer, tutor to Sir William’s son, Walter. I was in London for business, and I attended the trial of the king. Now I am here for a brief visit to Sir William. I should be happy to tell you what I understood and add my witness to that of Edward Ferryman’s.”

The preacher made a gesture, inviting James to bear witness. James turned towards the congregation and nodded at Ned. For the first time Alinor saw his face. He was pale. His determined expression made him look older than when she had seen him last, drunk with desire, recklessly in love. She put her hand on her belly and felt the child stir as if he knew his father had come for him.

“It is just as Edward Ferryman says,” James confirmed. “The king would not plead for two reasons. He said that the court was not legally created: there has never been a court commissioned by parliament. There have only been courts commissioned by kings. And he said that no court could try a king who was ordained by God.” James paused. “Legally, I think his argument was good. But it would mean that no king could ever be tried by his people; and the parliament and the judges were convinced that the king should answer.”

“He’d made war on us,” Ned interrupted. “And when he promised peace he broke his promise. He brought the Scots down on us, and he was planning to bring the Irish against us. What d’you think his wife, his papist wife, is doing in Paris, if not trying to persuade the French to invade us? What d’you think his son is doing in The Hague but meeting with our enemies? All enemies of Englishmen! Tell me this: if he was at war with Englishmen, allied to our enemies, commanding our enemies, how was he our king?”

There was a murmur in the church supporting Ned. Everyone had suffered during the wars, many had lost fathers, brothers, and sons who followed Sir William to the disaster at Marston Moor.

“I think it is a tragedy,” James said frankly. “I think he was ill-advised from the beginning, but I wish, at the end, that he would have pleaded guilty and gone into exile.”

“Aye, but would he have stayed in exile?” Ned demanded hotly. “He was in prison for years, and he wouldn’t stay in prison.”

James bowed his head and then looked up to meet Ned’s furious gaze. “Perhaps not,” he said calmly. “But I know that he lost good men, when he lost the loyalty of men like you.”

“Nothing to do with me!” Ned shrugged off the compliment. “It’s nothing to do with what you think of me, or what you think of him. It’s wrong for a king to be a tyrant to his people and we have stopped him. From this day on there will never be a tyrant ruling Englishmen. We will be free.”

James nodded and said nothing. Sir William shifted in his chair and bowed his head, as if in thought.

“Did he make a godly end?” the minister asked.

Ned glanced at James, but answered for both of them. “Aye, he did. There were thousands watching in the street outside the palace, and they told us that he spent the night in prayer. He stepped out bravely enough, put his head on the block, and signaled that he was ready. The public executioner beheaded him with one blow.”

There was a sigh all around the church. Somewhere in the gallery a woman was weeping.

“God will judge him now,” James said. “And that is a court to which we all must come.”

“Amen,” the minister said. “And now I have to call the banns for a marriage for the third and final time.”

The two men, Alinor’s brother and her lover, turned without looking at each other again and Ned took up his place at the back of the church among the workingmen, and James stood beside Sir William’s chair.

“I publish the banns for the marriage of Alys Reekie, spinster of this parish, and Richard Stoney, bachelor of Sidlesham,” the minister said.

Alinor felt Alys’s hand come into hers, and she squeezed it and found a smile for her daughter.

“This is the third and final time of asking.”

There was a little ripple of interest and pleasure from the congregation, and young Richard Stoney, attending St. Wilfrid’s to hear his banns called, craned around and looked up into the women’s gallery and winked at Alys.

“If any of you know cause or just impediment why these two persons should not be joined together in holy matrimony, ye are to declare it.”

“Does anyone ever stand up and declare an impediment?” Alys whispered to her mother.

“No,” Alinor replied. “Who would try to make a bigamous marriage on Sealsea Island where everyone knows everyone else’s business?”

“The marriage will take place next Sunday,” the minister declared.

As they left the church Alinor knew that she must go and pay her respects to Sir William and meet James before the curious gaze of the entire congregation. With Alys and Rob on either side of her, and Ned following reluctantly behind, she walked across the frosty grass and curtseyed to her landlord, keeping her eyes fixed on his expressionless face.

“Mrs. Reekie.” He nodded at her and at Ned, but had a smile for Rob. “How now, Robert?”

“I’m well, sir. Going to Chichester tomorrow.”

“All arranged, is it?” Sir William looked over his shoulder to Mr. Tudeley.

“Yes, the boy’s expected, and I will go myself to pay his fee tomorrow, when his mother signs his articles.”

“We’re very grateful,” Alinor said.

“And here’s your patient. D’you think he’s looking well?”

Alinor dropped a curtsey to James and finally turned towards him. She felt physically shocked by the warmth of his smile and the intensity of his gaze. She felt frozen as if she could not step towards him and fall into his arms, nor could she run away. She swallowed, but she could not speak. She felt his baby heavy in her belly and could not believe that he did not know that he had fathered the child that she carried. She wrapped her shawl closely about her as if to shield her swelling belly, and said, “I’m glad to see you look so well, Mr. Summer.”

“Hello, Mrs. Reekie,” he said. “I am glad to see you again. And how is my pupil?”

Rob grinned. “Keeping up my Latin,” he said. “Sir William lets me borrow books from his library. Have you seen Walter, sir?”

“He’s very grand now that he’s at Cambridge,” James laughed. “But I hope to visit him after term starts.”

“And you’re to be married?” His lordship nodded at Alys. “Young man from Sidlesham parish?”

Alys turned and beckoned to Richard, and he came up and made a respectful bow to Sir William. Alinor noticed the carefully graded deference: Richard Stoney was the son of a freeholder, not a Peachey tenant, and he would never forget the difference.

“Wish you happy,” Sir William said without much interest. He nodded to Mr. Tudeley to give Alys a shilling, and then turned back to Rob: “You can come for dinner.” Pointedly he did not extend the invitation to Alinor or Alys, who were out of favor as the women in the household of a roundhead. Clearly, he was not going to even acknowledge Ned, who stood to one side, hat in hand, stubbornly not bowing.

“Thank you,” Rob said easily. “And I will write to you, sir, when I start work at Chichester.”

His lordship nodded and turned away, ignoring Ned. James glanced back for one look at Alinor, and then followed his lordship, while the congregation, released from deference, crowded around Ned to ask him more about the trial, about the execution, and about the parliament, and what about London itself, now that it was a royal city without a king anymore?

Alinor and Alys walked back to Ferry-house along the bank of the harbor with Ned following behind them, accompanied by people walking part of the way, to ask for more details of the trial and execution. Ned answered everyone patiently. His own sense of pride in having been a witness to great events made him glad to tell his story over and over again. Nothing had ever been heard like it in the tidelands. Nothing like it had ever been heard in England. It was the end of one sort of world and the start of another.

The sea was coming in, so the people from the mainland, who had earlier walked across the frozen wadeway to church, now wanted the ferry across the rife, and Alys let Ned take the fees and pull the ferry across.

“D’you remember how to do it?” she taunted him. “Haven’t your hands gone too soft for the rope?”

“I swear I’d forgotten how cold it is,” he replied.

He came into the house blowing on his fingers and stood by the fire as Alinor raked the embers and put on a big log of driftwood.

“Before I went away,” he said quietly so that Alys, upstairs in the bedroom, would not hear, “you said that you would need my help and you would tell me when I returned.”

Alinor did not know what she should say. Clearly, she must speak to James. They would decide together what to do, and how the news should be announced.

“It’s Alys,” she said. “She’s with child.”

Ned was not shocked. In the country, especially in areas as remote as the tidelands, many couples married in the old way: a promise to marry, and then a long time of courtship and lovemaking while finding a house or saving for marriage. Many brides carried a big belly on their wedding day. Some had a child or even two walking behind them to the altar.

“Did they promise to each other before God? They hand-fasted and prayed together? It’s a godly union? She’s not been light or wanton? He didn’t force her?”

“Oh, no,” Alinor assured him. “They’re sure of each other, fully betrothed. And he’s given her a ring. It’s the dowry that they’re waiting on. That’s my worry. The parents insist on it. That’s why we’ve been scraping around in such a rush.”

“Why the hurry?”

“Alys wants to have the baby in the Stoney farmhouse that he’s to inherit. She’d like him to be born into the family, with his father’s name.”

“I’m sorry I’ve not come home any richer,” Ned said. “It’s a place of terrible expense, London. But she’s had the fees from the ferry. She can add it up and tell us if she’s short. I’ll come with you to Stoney Farm tomorrow and talk with them, if you need me. And didn’t young Richard promise his inheritance?”

“Yes. I’d rather we didn’t take it, but, she says Richard will see us right.”

Ned chuckled. “Lord! That girl! She’s borrowing her dowry from her betrothed?”

“It’s the only way she’d find it. They asked for a fortune. We’ve earned all we can. He’s making up the difference. She’s determined that the wedding goes ahead next Sunday.”

He smiled. “Well, it’s good that we have a new life coming into the new world that we’re making. If it’s a boy she could call him ‘Oliver’ for old Noll!”

“She could,” Alinor agreed, thinking that James would never allow it.

“D’you like living in your old home again?”

“Of course,” Alinor confirmed. “But if you ever find a wife you want to bring back here, I’ll be happy to go back to my cottage. Or somewhere else.”

He laughed at her. “Not I. And anyway, where else would you go?”

Alinor smiled. “Oh, I don’t know.”

James thought that the easiest way to see Alinor would be to walk back with Rob after dinner on the hidden tracks through the harbor, as the sky darkened to the early dusk of winter. He said that he needed herbs against the return of his fever.

“She won’t sell herbs on a Sunday,” Rob reminded him.

“I can tell her what I need, and she can bring them to the Priory when she is passing,” James invented.

Overhead, above the thick gray clouds, he could hear the flocks of winter geese coming in to roost on the shingle beds out in the harbor, and once, the unearthly creaking noise of swans’ wings. It was too dark to see anything but the track beneath their feet and the occasional glimpse of a slim moon between the raveled clouds. Rob went sure-footed on the well-known twisting paths but James had to follow him carefully. He could not even see the route that the boy was taking.

“And your mother is well?” he asked, trying to keep up.

“Winter’s always hard on the mire,” Rob answered. “And Alys had to work on the ferry every day, even on the coldest days, and my mother was afraid every moment that she was out on the rife. When I went over to take a turn it was even worse for her. She’s terrified of deep water. But she’s well enough. It’s more comfortable living in the ferry-house, than in the old cottage.”

“They’re in the ferry-house? Why did they move from the cottage?”

Rob looked away from his tutor, ashamed of his father’s desertion. “We’re going to tell everyone that we think my father is dead,” he said. “After Alys’s wedding. But for my mother to keep her work and her good name, she can’t be seen as a woman living alone.” He stumbled and stopped and turned to his tutor. “It’s better for her to be thought of as a widow, under the protection of her brother, especially when Alys and I leave home. I am sorry to lie, sir. But we really have to.”

James dropped his hand on Rob’s hunched shoulder. “You’re doing the right thing,” he said. “It’s no shame to you, nor to her, that your father chose not to come home. It’s no lie to say that you don’t expect him. And I’ll tell no one that I saw him in Newport. He’s dead to me, too.”

Rob visibly brightened. “It’s such a little island. She can’t live here without a good name.”

“And Alys is to be married?” James turned the conversation from the boy’s discomfort, as they started to walk again.

“Next Sunday. She’s had to save every penny for her dowry.”

“Your mother must be happy for her.”

“It’s taken all of her savings.”

James thought he was a fool not to have sent money. But how would she have explained it? And he would have been stealing money that had been given for his work for the king. He had no money of his own. How could he have robbed the cause he was sworn to, for the woman that he was forbidden to love? But the thought of Alinor in hardship made him flush with shame.

“Your uncle Ned should never have left her for so long,” he said irritably.

“It was Alys that did the ferry. Ma wouldn’t touch it. D’you really believe that my father isn’t coming home, sir?”

James was glad to climb the bank that led towards the rife and see the looming darkness of Ferry-house. “It’s what he said. And better for your mother if he does not, don’t you think?”

“Better for Alys too. The Stoneys would never have her if my da was still here.”

“And better for you?”

Rob flushed. “The apothecary wouldn’t have me as an apprentice if he met my da.”

“Your mother will be a free woman in six years,” James said.

“That’s such a long time,” Rob said, as a young man will say, and James—a young man only twenty-two years old himself—could not disagree.

They reached the ferry-house door. Rob turned the latch and the door yielded. “Mr. Summer came with me,” he said as he went in and James stepped in behind him.

After the darkness of the harbor, the room was bright, though it was only lit by firelight and rushlights. Ned was seated at the table, sharpening a pocket knife, Alinor and Alys either side of the fire, spinning, with their distaffs propped beside them and their spindles whirling at their feet. As James came in, Alinor jumped up with a gasp, her spindle skittering away under the settle.

“You’re very welcome,” she said, recovering.

“I thought I’d walk over with Robert,” James said awkwardly. “I thought I’d ask you for some herbs against my fever . . . if it comes back again. I didn’t mean to disturb you all.”

Ned barely raised his eyes from his work but bobbed his head in a nod.

“Will you take a glass of ale?” Alinor asked. “Please, sit.” She gestured to her stool at the fireside.

“Thank you, and then I’ll walk back by the road.”

“Dark night,” Ned observed.

“Yes indeed.”

There was a silence as Alinor went to the cool buttery at the back of the house and drew a glass of ale each for James and Rob, and then brought another for Ned. Rob sat beside her on the bench against the wall.

“Is it strange to be home?” James asked Ned.

Ned shrugged. “It’s not the life I’d have chosen, but none of us can live the life we’d have chosen.” He paused. “Maybe you can,” he said. “Maybe his lordship does.”

“Not anymore,” James said honestly. “I never thought this would happen, and I never thought it would end this way.”

Ned put his knife carefully in the worn leather sheath and put the whetstone to one side. “Pity that you didn’t,” he said gruffly. “Could’ve been stopped years ago.”

“I agree,” James said, trying to find some common ground. “I have thought for a long time that we should have found a way ahead without going to war. That we should have made an agreement so that we could find a way to end our differences and live together.”

“Well, now we have,” Ned said with a little smile. “Though p’raps not the agreement you’d have wished. Can you live in this new England?”

“I hope to,” James said. “I hope to regain my home, and I hope to live there, with my family, and help . . .”

“Help what?”

“The ruling and governing of the kingdom . . . of the country.”

Ned raised his head and stared at James as if he could not believe the quiet words. “And why should you, and the likes of you, rule and govern us, when you’ve disturbed our peace for nearly ten years?”

James swallowed. “Because I am an Englishman and I want to live in peace.”

“I’m sure we all want peace,” Alinor interrupted.

Ned smiled at her. “Aye. I know you do, Sister. And I hope that we’ll have it now. What’s your opinion on how the country should be run?”

Alinor flushed a little. “Ah, Ned, you know I only know my trade. I think midwives should be licensed, and women should be churched after their confinement. For the rest—how would I know?”

James had a sudden sharp memory of his mother’s astute vision, which had guided their family through years of change; she knew the world as well as her husband, and could calculate political advantage quicker than any man.

“Are you in favor of petticoat government?” James asked Ned, trying to smile.

“I’d rather be ruled by good-hearted women than by all the cavaliers who will be turning their collars, and flocking back to their houses, now they’ve lost.”

James flushed with anger. “I can’t agree with you,” he said shortly. “I think we’ll have to differ.”

Ned rose from the table. “Have done,” he advised James. “It’s as I thought. You’re what I thought. If you weren’t on cavalier business, or papist business, it was secret business and bad business. As for me, I don’t care what you did, as long as you cease doing it now.”

“Mr. Summer was my tutor,” Rob spoke up for him. “I’d not have had a chance at an apprenticeship without his teaching.”

Ned nodded, and put his hand on the seated boy’s shoulder. “I know. I know he did well by you.” He paused. “I’m going to bed,” he said. “Some of us have to work early in the morning. And this lad has to start at Chichester tomorrow morning, and that’s a great beginning for him. He should be early to bed and early to rise.”

“Yes.” James got to his feet. “I’m going. I just came for some herbs, for fever. I’m sorry we can’t agree.”

“I’ll see you out,” Alinor said, quickly going to the front door. “I’ll walk you round to the road.”

“Don’t let him fall in the rife and drown,” Ned remarked with such a bitter smile that his words seemed more of a threat than a joke. “That’d be a loss to the future government. Good night, Mr. Summer. Or will you go by another name when you take up your lands? Was that ever your name at all?”

James turned back towards Ned and stretched out his hand. “I will have another name, and I am sorry to have sailed under false colors with you. I lost my faith some time ago, and we were both a witness to the death of my king. I have been waiting to make my peace with all my countrymen and with you. I hope you will, one day, forgive me for my sins as I forgive those you have done unto me.”

Ned was surprised into taking the man’s hand and shaking it. “Aye, very well,” he said. “And no false dealing in future?”

“None,” James said. “The war is over for both of us, and for the king.”

“Aye,” Ned said with quiet satisfaction. “It’s surely over for him.”

Alinor was waiting at the front door with a shawl over her head. “I’ll shut up the hens,” she called back to the firelit room.

As they stepped out into the still cold air James could see the pale outline of her face and her dark eyes in the light of the sickle moon. He thought that he had never seen anything more beautiful in his life than this woman in this bleached and blackened landscape, with the harbor water shining like a sheet of pewter behind her, and the sliver of an ice-white moon in the sky above her.

“Aren’t you cold?” he asked, and put his arms around her as if he would straighten her shawl, but found himself holding her, as easily and naturally as if they had never been parted. She came into his arms but at once he felt a difference in her. Through the layers of homespun he could feel her body but it was strange to him. Something about her touch horrified him, as if she was a shape-changer in a frightening story, and he flinched, stepped back, and looked at her. He saw that the pallor of her face was not just moonlight.

“J-James,” she said, stumbling over his name.

“My love?”

“You came back for me?”

“As I promised, the minute that I could.”

She sighed, and he realized she had been holding her breath from the moment he had stepped over the threshold. Her anxiety only alarmed him more. He glanced back at the darkened doorway, and she took him by the hand and led him around the corner of the house and through a gate into the vegetable garden that ran alongside the deserted road.

“I have to tell you something,” she said.

At the sound of her voice, the hens, warm in their house, clucked sleepily to her. She bent, and latched the door of their house, bolting it at the top and at the bottom.

“I have to tell you something first,” he said rapidly. “I met with my parents, with my mother and my father. I told them of you. I told them that I will pay my fine to parliament and regain our house. I will take you there, and in six years’ time, when you are declared a widow, we will marry.”

He saw her blanched lips tremble and he was afraid that she was about to argue. But, to his surprise, she consented at once: “Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, I will marry you and live wherever you wish. Yes. And I have something to tell you.”

“You will come with me?” He could hardly believe her words.

“I will. But I have to—”

“My love! My love! You will come with me!”

“I have to tell you something.”

“Anything! Anything!”

The hens clucked again at the voices. “Hush,” she said, drawing him away from the henhouse. “I have to tell you . . .”

He took her hand. “Of course. What is it, my love?”

She drew a breath again, as if she could not speak. Then her words were so soft he had to lean towards her to catch them. “I am with child,” she said.

For a moment he did not understand what she was saying; he could not hear the words. Each single word made sense, but together they made no sense at all and he could not understand it—coming from her, to him.

“What?”

“I am with child.”

“How?” he asked stupidly.

She found a ghost of a smile. “The way it usually happens. When we were in the hayloft together.”

“But how?” he asked again. “How could it be?”

“What should prevent it?”

“I thought you would prevent it!” he retorted, too loudly for caution.

“Hush,” she said again, and led him farther down the path to the bottom gate, so that they could not be heard from the house.

Irrelevantly, he suddenly thought how much he hated a winter vegetable garden, so dark and muddy and nothing growing. He thought how poor it was, and how ugly. He thought how much he disliked it that the hens recognized her voice and clucked back at her. The future Lady Avery should not pull turnips and feed her own hens; and her hand in his was rough. “Are you sure?”

Now she smiled. “Of course I am sure.”

Her smile infuriated him, as if she thought him a fool. “I do understand well enough,” he snapped. “It’s not that I know nothing. It’s just that I thought that you—a married woman, a wisewoman—would have made sure that it did not happen.”

She shook her head; she was maddeningly serene. “I don’t do that sort of work.”

“It’s not work when it is for yourself!” he argued like a Jesuit. “It would be work, and a sin, if you were preventing the child of another: a sinful woman, or an adulteress. But for yourself there is no sin in a woman choosing to eat some herbs, or drink some drink, as soon as you knew. Or better still, before you did the act!”

“Did the act?” she repeated, as if she could not understand his words.

“Then it would be no sin at all as there would be no intent. D’you see? If there is no evil intent then there is no sin. Why did you not take the herbs the morning that we parted?”

“I was thinking of nothing but us, nothing but us and the hayloft as if it were a time outside time,” she admitted. “I was longing for the evening when I would see you again. Then you were gone, and I was just longing.”

She tightened the shawl across her rounded belly. “Of course, once I knew, I thought what I should do. I thought about it all night long. It was a long night, and a cold one . . .” She trailed off. She wanted to tell him how bright the beach of shells had been in the moonlight, the heavy stones that she had chosen, the thought of walking into the mire, the certainty of death by drowning, and her revelation that the life of their baby was a joy to her.

Then she saw his face, closed and angry. “But I would never have done it. I wouldn’t use herbs to poison any baby. I certainly wouldn’t poison my baby. And I’d rather die than poison a baby of ours.”

She saw his shoulders hunch with an instant revulsion. “It’s not a baby yet,” he said. “Not in law. Not till it quickens. Not in the sight of God. Has it quickened yet? No?”

Wonderingly she looked from his scowling eyes to his hardened mouth. “Yes,” she said quietly. “Of course. We conceived him in September. I felt him move at Christmas. I know there is life in him. He sleeps and wakes inside me, I can feel him. Perhaps he dreams.”

“It’s not a boy child!”

Again, she looked at him with her steady dark gaze. “Of course, no one can say for sure. But it is a child, and I believe it is a boy.”

“It’s not. It’s a nothing. It’s not too late . . .”

“Too late for what?”

“For you to take the herb or the drink or whatever it is that you know. Not too late for that.”

“Not too late for me to push a bodkin into my belly to kill it in the womb,” she remarked.

He gulped. “Of course, I wouldn’t want you to do that. But, Alinor . . .”

“Yes?”

“Alinor, I want to take you to my home, I want you to live there as my wife. You will be the next Lady Avery.”

At once she was diverted. “Is that your name?”

“Yes, yes, what of it? That’s not the point. What I am saying is that I cannot take you to my mother and my father if you are big with a child and you are still another man’s wife. If you allow it to be born, it will take Zachary’s name. I cannot raise a child named Reekie in my own home! Bad enough that my mother will have Alys and Robert as her grandchildren! I cannot, Alinor. You must understand, I cannot. It would be to shame you, and shame me and my name.”

“I didn’t know that was your name,” she repeated. “Avery! Are you Lord Avery?”

“No. My father is a baronet. Not that it matters.”

“But I’ve thought of you all this time as James Summer. Is your given name not James? How shall I call you anything else?”

She was so ridiculous, so frivolous, that he grabbed her by the shoulders and at once, she jerked back to avoid a blow, following an old lesson that a shaking was followed by a blow, and if she let herself be knocked to the ground she would get a kick to the belly or in the face. At once he released her, horrified, dropping his hands from her shoulders and spreading them wide as if to show that he had no weapon.

“Don’t!” he said. “For Christ’s sake, don’t! I’m not that brute. I wouldn’t hurt you. Forgive me, forgive me! But I can’t make you hear me! Alinor, you must listen to me.”

“I’m listening,” she said, recovering herself faster than he could do. “I’m listening. But I can’t do what you ask.”

“Forgive me . . .” He was trying to calm the furious thudding of his heart. “It has been a terrible month, a terrible year. The very moment that I met with my parents—and they were so angry—we learned of the arrest of the king. So I couldn’t leave my seminary, as I was preparing to do, but had to go back into royal service. Since then I’ve been in London and The Hague, and then to London again, trying desperately—you have no idea—meeting with men who had no hope, asking for money from paupers, asking for them to act when they dared not, sending messages and getting no reply and now—God forgive us—now he is dead, and it is all over, and we have lost worse than we ever lost before, and I have to listen to your brother taunting—”

“Ned didn’t taunt you.”

“He did. You don’t understand. It was between men. It was about our country, our war.”

“My war, too,” she observed. “My country, too.”

He took a swift step away from her to the gate as if he would fling himself out of the gate and down the road, in a rage. “This is not the point! You aren’t listening to me!”

She stood as still and silent as a deer when it scents danger but does not know what is coming. She stood as innocent as a deer, as intent as a deer scenting the wind. He stepped back towards her, his fists clenched at his sides, and fought to find the words to explain. “You have given me a terrible shock. I don’t know what to say.”

A barn owl with a great spread of white wings flew along the hedgerow of the lane towards them, lifted clear of the bushes, and disappeared into the field on the other side of the garden. James saw how she watched it, as if it was warning her of something, and he thought that it was impossible for a man like him—an educated man, a spiritual man—to understand a woman like her, in a place like this.

“What?” he demanded, and she turned her gaze back to him.

“I was just watching the owl,” she said quietly, knowing that he was irritated but not knowing why. “I was attending to you. I was just watching her.”

“You’re cold,” he said, but it was he who shivered. “And Ned will be wondering where you are.”

“He knows where I am. I told him I was shutting up the hens.”

He had to bite his tongue on his irritation. “What I mean is, we can’t talk now. We can’t talk here. We must talk tomorrow. We must meet tomorrow somewhere and talk. Where will you meet me?”

“I have to take Rob to Chichester tomorrow.”

Again, he bit the inside of his mouth and tasted blood. “Can’t Edward take him?”

“Oh, no!” She was shocked that he would suggest it. “I want to see Rob’s master and his home, and where he will work. Mr. Tudeley will pay over the money. I have to sign Rob’s indentures. They will accept a woman’s signature. I have a good name in Chichester.”

He tried to be calm. “Yes, indeed. Then I will come to Chichester and meet you there.”

She nodded without speaking, and opened the garden gate for him to leave. He was astounded by her calmness.

“Alinor, we must be together, we must be lovers again. I will make you my wife. I will give you my name—my real name. You will become accustomed! I love you, I want you. More than anything in the world. You are all that I have left! I have lost everything else. You are all that is left for me.”

She nodded, saying nothing.

He thought her unnaturally serene while he was sweating with a mixture of anger and frustrated desire. “Where shall we meet?”

“The Market Cross?” she asked. “Before noon?”

“I’ll be there. Nobody knows of this, do they?” He jabbed towards her belly with his hand. “You’ve not told anyone?”

She lied to him, for the first time, before she had even thought of it. “Nobody,” she said.

“Then it will be all right,” he tried to reassure her, though it was he who looked panicked. She was as cool as the sickle moon.

“It will be all right,” she agreed through pale lips, and she closed the gate on him and turned back to the frozen garden. As he walked away he heard her speak softly to her hens, in the same gentle tones as she had used to soothe him.

Alys wanted to walk to Chichester with her mother and Rob, see Rob’s new employer, collect some more wool for spinning, and perhaps even buy a ribbon to trim her wedding dress.

“It’s only the Monday market,” Alinor said discouragingly. “The ribbon stall is far better on Saturday. And the wool merchant is bringing wool and leaving it here, when he comes next week.”

Alys made a face. “Anyway, I suppose I should go to work at the mill,” she said.

“You should,” Alinor agreed.

“I’d almost rather work the ferry than spend the day with Mrs. Miller.”

“You could ask your uncle Ned to take his turn in the dairy?”

Unwillingly, Alys laughed.

“Ah, she’s not so bad,” Alinor told her daughter. “And it’s baking day today. The other women will be there for the firing of the oven and you can bake us a loaf.”

Alys wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and tightened her apron at her broad waist. “I’ll go to Stoney Farm when I’ve finished work. I’ll have my dinner there, and walk back here later,” she said.

“Yes, yes,” Alinor said absently. She went to the foot of the stairs and called Rob and heard his answering shout.

“Help me with the copper into the scullery for Rob.”

The two women slid the pole through the carry rings and lifted the copper filled with hot water to the center of the room, then Alinor kissed her daughter and saw her out of the front door, turned to the foot of the stairs, and shouted for Rob again.

He came downstairs in his shirt and stripped naked, and washed himself, using the gray soap as Alinor poured jugs of hot water over his shoulders and over his head.

He stepped, long-legged as a calf, out of the water onto a little mat that Alinor put before him, and rubbed himself down with a linen sheet. He sat, wrapped in the sheet on a stool before the fire, as Alinor trimmed his thick brown hair and rubbed it dry with her own mixture of olive oil and apple vinegar and then combed it through with a lice comb. Rob dressed himself in the clean linen that they had given him at the Priory, and a pair of breeches belonging to Walter Peachey.

“Eat some breakfast,” Alinor urged him, and put some bread and small ale before him on the kitchen table.

When he had finished, he lifted the copper with her and carried it back to the scullery. “Shall I pour it away?” he asked her. “It’s heavy for you.”

“I’ll wash down the floors with it later,” she said. “Leave it there.”

Alinor had bought him good secondhand hose in Chichester market and he could still get into the shoes they had given him for Christmas at the Priory, though they were tight across the toes. He had a secondhand jacket which once belonged to Walter.

Alinor stroked the thick wool of the sleeve. “It’s very fine,” she said.

“It’s nothing. It’s his old one, his second-best. He wore velvet to go to university.”

“I am sorry . . .” she started to say.

Rob grinned at her. “Sorry that I don’t have a velvet jacket? Sorry that I can’t eat my dinners at Cambridge? Ma, it is me that’s sorry that my earnings are stopped from the Priory, and Alys can’t get enough for her dowry, and you have to work all the hours of daylight. I know how lucky I am. I know how blessed we’ve been. And as soon as I earn my first wages you shall have them all.”

Alinor reached for him and he bowed his head and allowed her to embrace him, but he no longer clung to her as he used to do, when he was her little boy.

“You’re growing up,” she said mournfully.

“I’m an apprentice lad!” he said proudly.

“I feel like I’m losing you,” she said. “Like you’re slipping away.”

“It’s Chichester,” he reminded her. “I’m not going to sea.”

“No, and I thank God for that at least,” she said. “I’ll look in to see you when I come to market, and you’ll come home for Alys’s wedding on Sunday, and then Lady Day.”

Gently he detached himself from her embrace. “Of course. You’ll see me within the week.”

“Are you ready to go?” she asked him, half hoping he would say no and they would have more time together.

“I’ll get my sack,” he said.

He ran up the ladder to his loft bedroom and came down again carrying his little sack with some clean linen, his spoon, his cup, his knife, a change of hose and—a gift from Sir William—a notebook with blank pages for him to start his own book of recipes and remedies that he would learn from the apothecary. He had his own pen, a knife to trim it, and a small pot of ink from the Priory schoolroom.

“Everything?” Alinor asked him.

“Yes.”

“Well, if you need something, you can always send a message.”

They went out of the house, closing the door carefully behind them. Ned was rehanging the horseshoe that served as a chiming bell on the far side of the mire, but when he saw them he pulled the ferry over and held it steady as Alinor got on board.

“All ready?” he asked Rob. “You’re the first of us Ferrymans to have an apprenticeship. The first to be headed to clean work. The first to work indoors.”

“I’m ready,” Rob said.

“Our mother would have died of pride,” Ned said to Alinor. “Just shows you what study can do . . . and favor,” he added.

“Rob was always bright, even as a baby,” Alinor said. “Mother saw that in him, though she would never have dreamed of today. And he’s earned the favor of the Peacheys, fair and square. He learned enough at school to be able to study alongside Master Walter. And they made friends, real friends.”

“Born to be a lord?” Ned teased her, as he made the ferry fast and took her hand to help her out.

“Of course not,” she said. “But it tells you something that he and Master Walter were studying side by side and now Walter is fit to be a lawyer, or at any rate a gentleman.”

“It tells you that there are always places for placemen, and nothing changes,” Ned said.

“Everything is changing,” Rob said surprisingly, leaping from ferry to pier and helping Alinor to dry land. “Everything is changing. We have a parliament instead of a king. We can speak to our masters on our own two feet, we don’t have to kneel. I am going to earn a wage, not be paid in pennies. We’re never going to go hungry again.” He turned to his uncle and the two men embraced. “Thank you, Uncle Ned,” Rob said. “I’ll be back on Sunday.”

“Have this in the meantime,” his uncle said, pressing a sixpence into his hand. “Take it, you might need it. They might not feed you well and then you can buy yourself a pie or a loaf of bread. And if they don’t treat you well, you must tell us, you know. You’re right: we aren’t so poor that anyone can do anything to us. And we don’t take a beating from anyone.”

“I’ll be fine,” Rob promised.

Alinor took his arm and they started up the road together, turning away from the mire and the road to the mill, and heading towards the Chichester road.

“Godspeed, Nephew,” Ned called. “God speed you.”

They took a lift with a charcoal burner who worked the Sealsea Island forest, on his way to deliver to the kitchens of Chichester. He let the two of them sit on the wagoner’s bench beside him, rather than spoil their clean clothes on the sooty sacks. He let them off at the Market Cross and went to Eastgate for the needlemakers’ furnaces.

Alinor and Rob walked up North Street to the apothecary’s house. Like many of the tradesmen he used the front room of the house as his shop, with wooden shutters on the windows that were propped up to serve as an awning when the shop was open. At the back of the shop, behind the counter, he had a few little flasks, distillation glasses, and a drying oven for the herbs and spices. His wife, smart in a white coif and apron, served customers, calling her husband forward for consultations, and wrapping pills and pouring drafts herself. She made the cordials and dispensed drams. In a brewhouse in the backyard she made special flavored ales, brewed with herbs and spices to aid digestion, to increase heat, or prevent fatigue.

Alinor tapped on the door and stepped inside. Rob followed her, blinking as the interior of the house was so dark compared with the brightness of the street outside.

“Ah, Mrs. Reekie,” said the apothecary.

“Good day, Mrs. Reekie,” said his wife. “And this is your boy?”

Alinor stepped back, but she did not have to push Rob forward as she would have done last year. He stepped forward himself with the confidence that he had learned at the Priory and made a little bow to the mistress and to his new master. “I’m Robert Reekie,” he said. “Thank you for accepting me as your apprentice.”

Alinor saw Mrs. Sharpe smile at Rob’s good looks and manners as Mr. Sharpe stretched his hand out for Rob to shake. The shop doorbell tinkled and Mr. Tudeley, the steward from the Priory, stepped into the shop.

“Ah, good day, good day,” he said. “Glad you are punctual, Mrs. Reekie, Robert. Good day to you, Mr. and Mrs. Sharpe. Do you have Robert’s deeds of apprenticeship?”

“Right here.” Mr. Sharpe produced an apprenticeship deed from his guild, with Robert’s name and his own already written in clerkly script. He weighed down the corners of the parchment with the brass weights from the dry goods scale, so they could all see the imposing document, with red seals and ribbons at the foot. Rob stepped up to the desk and took the quill. Alinor watched, loving him as he signed his name without hesitation or a blot of ink, not scratching an “X” on the page like his illiterate father. Then Mr. Tudeley made his signature as Robert’s sponsor, and Mr. Sharpe signed his name as his master and the guildsman who would introduce Rob to the Apothecaries’ Guild of Chichester, when he had served his time.

Alinor stepped forward and signed her name as Widow Reekie, Rob’s parent and guardian, and signed her occupation as a midwife.

“It’s done,” Mr. Tudeley said. “Robert, I expect you to be a credit to the Priory and to your mother.”

“I will, Mr. Tudeley,” Rob said. “Please thank his lordship for giving me such a chance in life.”

“You’ll want to see his room,” Mrs. Sharpe said to Alinor.

“I’d be grateful,” Alinor said.

The mistress led Alinor and Rob up the staircase to the two rooms over the little shop. From the landing there was a loft ladder, which led upstairs to where the maidservant slept on one side, and the little room that Rob was to have, under the eaves on the other side.

The three of them crowded into the little space and Alinor bent down to look through the window to the street below.

“He’ll eat at our table,” the mistress said. “And one Sunday a month he has the afternoon off.”

“And may I come and see him?” Alinor asked. “When I come to Chichester for the market?”

“You can come in the shop if he’s not busy serving. But he can’t come out to meet you. We’ve had apprentice boys before. They’ve got to settle.”

“He’s lived away from home,” Alinor reassured her. “At the Priory for the last two quarters. But I’m grateful you’re letting him home this Sunday, for his sister’s wedding.”

“She’s to marry the Stoney boy, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” Alinor said.

“Mr. Tudeley told me, when he came for Rob’s apprenticeship. You must be proud of both your children!”

They went down the ladder, then down the stair and back to the little shop. Mr. Tudeley had already left, with a sachet of rose petals as a gift. Alinor curtseyed to Mr. Sharpe and kissed Mrs. Sharpe on both cheeks, and Rob went with her to the shop door and stepped outside to say good-bye.

Alinor faced her young son. His head was up to her shoulder, now. She thought that he was still her little boy, tied to her apron strings, wrapped around her heartstrings, and at the same time he was near to a young man: she could see the broadness of his shoulders and the confidence of his stance. Already he had book learning that she would never know, already he had manners that no one had taught her. He would rise in the world, away from her, and she should be glad to see him go. Her task as a mother now was not to keep him safe and hold him to her heart, but to release him and let him fly, as if she were a falconer, hacking a beautiful hawk into the wild.

“God bless you, Rob.” Her voice was choked with emotion. “You know to be a good boy, and let me know how you are. Send a message that everything’s all right?”

“Don’t you worry about me,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll be home on Sunday for the wedding!”

Rob was waiting and the Sharpes inside the shop were waiting for her to leave. Alinor knew she could do nothing but walk away. Still, her feet did not move.

Rob kissed her. “Go on,” he said, more like a man than her boy. “Go on, Ma. It’ll be all right. You’ll see.”

Alinor smiled shakily and turned and walked away.

The Market Cross was at the center of the town and the streets were crowded with townsmen and women, people delivering goods, and traders setting up stalls or just standing with baskets on their arms or pedlars’ packs at their feet and shouting their wares. Alinor, with her hood pulled up over her head, hiding her face, went to the steps of the cross and found James Summer at her side, appearing as if from nowhere.

He took her hand without saying anything and drew her into the front room of the nearby inn. She hesitated at the door.

“I can’t come in here,” she said, shocked. “What if someone saw me?”

“It’s not a tavern,” he corrected her. “It’s an inn. Lady travelers can dine here and drink. It’s perfectly—”

“Nobody would take me for an honest woman, seeing me in here with you.”

“Not at all! Look . . .” A family party climbed down from their traveling coach and walked through the hall to their private dining room, without glancing at her. “My own mother dines at inns,” he told her. “It’s perfectly all right.”

“I’ve never set foot in such a place,” she resisted him.

He realized that a poor woman from the country would never have seen the inside of a coaching inn, would not understand the distinction between a grubby village alehouse and the respectable coaching inn of a small town like Chichester. He realized that he must learn to be patient with her—and introduce her slowly to his world. “Alinor, please, we have to go somewhere that we can talk. Come. I promise you that nobody will see you, and it is quite all right if they do. You have to trust me. I will judge for you now, and in the future.”

He took her by the hand and led her to where he had reserved a table in the corner of the dining room, with a jug of mulled ale for both of them and a plate of bread and meats.

She sat nervously on the edge of the chair that he drew out for her and peered around her. He repressed his irritation that this Alinor was not the fey stranger that he had met in the churchyard, nor the free countrywoman who had cooked fish on sticks. Here, she was a poor woman afraid of the judgment of others.

“Has Robert started work? Were you happy with his place?” He realized he was speaking loudly as if to someone hard of hearing, or simple.

She took the cup of warm ale and wrapped her cold hands around it. “Yes, yes,” she said. “I think he’ll do very well there. They’ve a good trade and the mistress brews her own . . .” She trailed away as she saw the darkness in his face and realized that he had no real interest in Rob’s work. “You don’t want to know about that.”

“We have to decide what we are going to do.”

She nodded, put down her cup, and folded her hands in her lap. She had not taken so much as a sip, and he thought his indifference about Rob had hurt her, and now she was putting on serenity as if she were drawing a cape around her shoulders.

“You are determined not to be worried?”

“Of course I’m worried.” She found a faint smile. “I’ve been thinking of you day and night. If I could’ve sent you a message, I would’ve done. I’ve been sleepless wondering what you’d think. I didn’t mean to spring this on you, but what else could I do? I’ve been waiting and hoping that you’d come back.”

“My love, beloved . . .” Now that he was faced with her luminous beauty, shining against her poor clothes, as out of place here as in the tidelands, he lost the words that he had assembled overnight, in the sleepless hours when he had prayed for guidance, knowing that his own prayers were a sin. “I can imagine my future with you; but not with a child. It can’t be.”

He saw her slowly inhale the meaning of his words. For a moment she made no answer. Her dark gray gaze went down to her worn shoes and back to his face. “No child? Then what would you have me do?”

He felt strangely awkward. “Is it not possible for you to take something that would make it disappear?”

“No,” she said simply. “There is nothing in the world that can make a baby disappear.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know I won’t pretend with words.”

He took up his cup of ale and took a sip of the hot sweetness to hide his rising temper. “I don’t mean to pretend with words. It’s just—”

“It’s a terrible thing to speak of. Worse to do,” she said, as if agreeing with him.

“But it’s not too late to do something?”

Gravely, she shook her head. “It’s never too late to do something.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Some women smother the baby as it’s born and say it was a stillbirth. Is that what you want me to do?”

“No!” He had raised his voice, and he looked around, embarrassed. Nobody had noticed them. “But would you do something now? For us? For our life together?”

“If I did it, we would have a life together?”

He could not believe that he had won so quickly. “I swear it. I will go with you now into the cathedral and swear it.”

“You want it dead.”

He looked at her set face. “Only so that I can be with you.”

She drew a shuddering breath, and then slowly she shook her head as if her pale lips could not speak. “That is a terrible bargain. No. No. I could not.”

“Because you think it is a sin? I can explain—”

“No,” she interrupted him. “Because I could not bear it. Whether it’s a sin against God or not. Whatever you could say. It would be . . .” she sought for the word “. . . it would be an offense to me.” She shot him a swift glance. “It would be a deep offense to me, against myself.”

“It doesn’t matter—”

“It matters to me. I matter: in this, I matter.”

“We will have other children.”

“We would not,” she contradicted him. “No child would come to my womb if I had poisoned his brother.”

He tried to laugh. “This is superstition and nonsense! This is folly!”

His barking laughter died away when she did not reply, and they sat in silence, waiting for the other to speak.

Then, he used the worst threat against her that he could do: “You know what you’re saying? You will not come to me, and be my love and be my wife? You chose this—this nothing—over me? Over the life we would live, and what we could do for Rob and for Alys? You will let them be spoken of as children of a missing father, or worse. When they could be stepchildren to a baronet? You favor this nothing over them? As well as over me?”

He thought she would faint, she had gone so white, but he thought he must be cruel to her, to save them both.

He underestimated her. When she spoke, her voice was steady, she was far from fainting: “Yes, if I have to.”

They were both silent at the enormity of what she had said. He thought that not even when the king had died had he felt this disbelieving misery. “Alinor, I cannot take a child that goes by your husband’s name into my honorable home. Even if I wanted to do so. I could not own you as my wife.”

She nodded. He saw her reach for the cup of ale and realized that she was blinded with tears, but she kept her head down so he could not see. Her grief only made him harder.

“I will regain my home, and go and live there without you, and I will never see you again. You condemn me to being alone, where I had thought we would be happy together. Where you should be my wife.”

Her hand found the cup and she held it. Even her scarred fingers were white.

“I have loved you more than anything in the world and I will spend the rest of my life without you,” he said.

Speechlessly, she nodded.

“And I will marry someone so that my name continues, so that I have a son. But I will never love her as I have loved you, and I will spend the rest of my life missing you.”

Her hand was shaking so hard that the warm ale spilled onto the skirt of her gown.

“Is this your wish?” he asked incredulously. “Is this what you want for me? This misery?”

The maid of the inn came up to them. “Everything all right here?” she asked very loudly, breaking into the spell he was weaving around her. “Want another jug of ale?”

“Nothing, nothing,” James said, waving her away.

“Tell me that you will marry me,” he whispered. “Tell me that you love me as I love you—more than anything else in the world.”

Finally, Alinor looked up at him and he saw that her eyes were darkened with unshed tears. “I wouldn’t stoop to marry a man who’d kill his own child,” she said simply. “It’s not an honor that you offer me. If you’re the man who’d destroy his own baby in the womb then you’re not the man that I thought you were, and you’re not the man for me.”

He was as shaken as if she had slapped his handsome face. “Don’t you dare to judge me!” he burst out.

She shook her head, quite unafraid. “I don’t judge you. I’m just telling you that I agree with you. You won’t have me with the baby that I carry; I won’t come to you without it. We’re both losers, I think.”

She rose from her chair, and at once he got to his feet and put his hand on her arm. “You can’t go like this!”

“I can’t stay,” she replied quietly.

“I mean . . .” He meant that he could not believe that she could defy him, that she could turn down his wealth and name and love. He could not believe that she could refuse him, and prefer such a little thing—not even a baby yet—a homunculus that had barely quickened. It was a nothing, it was a nothing, less than a hen’s egg that he might eat for his breakfast, and yet she was putting it between them. It was not possible to imagine that she should choose a life of poverty and shame with a fatherless child over the comfort and wealth that he could offer her, and his name, his pride and his name.

“But I love you!” he burst out.

There was a world of sadness in the smile that she turned on him. “Oh, I love you,” she replied. “I always will. And I’ll take a comfort in that, when you’re gone away to your beautiful house and I’m here alone.”

Without another word, she turned and walked away from him, just as if he were not a young gentleman, and the son of a great man, just as if he were not the greatest prospect of her life: a husband of unimaginable wealth and position, and her savior from shame. She walked away from him without looking back. She walked away from him as if she were never coming back, and she left him alone at the table laid with breakfast in the best coaching inn of Chichester.

Alinor went home in a dream, setting one foot before the other. She did not hail any passing cart for a lift. There was only one that went by her, and she did not see or hear it. As she walked, it started to snow, little specks of white snow like a dust that whirled around her, and she pulled up the hood of her cloak and let it settle on her head and her shoulders. She could not feel cold; she did not know that it was snowing.

She watched her feet in her worn boots going steadily south down the road, through the village of Hunston, through Street End, and she felt the familiar rub of the ill-fitting left boot against her heel. She held her cape tied tightly around her waist and changed her basket from one frozen grip to another, hardly noticing the weight on one side or the other, nor how her back ached.

She sat on a milestone to catch her breath after an hour’s walking, and watched the snow fall on her gown, a speckle of white against the brown wool. When she got to her feet she brushed herself off and shook out her cape, gathered it around herself again, and walked on. She did not notice that her hands were so cold that they were white as the snow and her stubby fingernails were blue.

Ned’s ferry was tied up on the far side of the rife, outside the house, so Alinor clanged the dangling horseshoe with the new bar and saw him open the top half of the ferry-house door and then come out, a piece of sacking over his head and shoulders. He went hand over hand till the ferry was at her side and held the raft against the ebbing tide as she stepped in.

“You brought the snow with you,” he remarked.

“All the way,” she said as she stepped into the gently rocking ferry.

He noticed that she did not grasp his hand or cling to the side as she usually did. He guessed that she was distressed at Rob going away.

“How’s our lad? Was it all right there?”

“Fair,” she said. “They’re good people.”

“Did you leave him gladly?”

“Fair,” she said again. She gave him a small rueful smile. “He didn’t cling to me and beg me not to go.”

“Good lad,” he said. “He’ll do well.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

Hand over hand on the frozen rope, Ned pulled the ferry back to the island side and held it against the pier as she stepped lightly out of the boat. He tied up, and together they went through the half-open door. She took off her cape and shook the snow and the wet out of the door, and then hung it on the peg. She put down her basket and warmed her hands before the little fire. Every action was so familiar that she moved without thinking, as if she had decided not to think.

“Shall I mull you some ale?” he asked, looking at her composed face, and wondering if she would break out in tears, or if she was truly as serene as she seemed.

“That’d be good,” she said. “I’m chilled through.”

“Could you not get a lift?” he asked, thinking she might be exhausted by walking.

“No. I saw nobody going my way.”

“You’ll be tired then.” He invited her to comment, but still she told him nothing.

The poker hissed as he dipped it into the jug of ale, and he poured her a cup and took one for himself. “This’ll put some color in your cheeks,” he said uncertainly.

She did not reply, but wrapped her cold hands around the cup and took a sip, her eyes on the leaping flames of the fire.

“Alinor, is anything wrong?” he asked.

She sighed, as if she would tell him everything. But all she said, as she smiled at him through the steam from the ale, was: “I’m well enough.”

Richard and Alys walked home late Monday evening from Stoney Farm, and on Tuesday morning Alys was sleepy when Alinor called her. She sat in silence, her head bowed over her bowl of gruel at breakfast time and scowled at her uncle when he said that he hoped she had not missed the early tides when she had been ferryman.

“Are you coming with me to the mill today?” she asked her mother. “She’s doing the laundry.”

Laundry days at the mill were notorious for Mrs. Miller’s bad temper. “Lord,” Alinor said smiling, “I’m not surprised you want a companion.”

“Also, she’ll pay us for eggs. She’s not got enough. Not even her hens can bear her.”

Ned sat down on his stool at the head of the table. “And do you have your dowry?” he asked.

“Most of it,” Alys said.

“I have the five shillings I promised you,” he offered. “And I’ll add another.”

“I’ll take it!” she smiled. “And on Saturday we’ll have this week’s wages.”

“You’re taking your mother’s wages as well as your own?”

“Uncle, I have to,” Alys said seriously. “And besides, she’ll get it back. When I am Mrs. Stoney of Stoney Farm I’ll give her a present every day.”

“Oil of roses,” Alinor named the one ingredient that she could never afford to buy from the herbalist at Chichester market. “I shall bathe in oil of roses.”

“Ah, you’re each as mad as the other,” Ned said. “Come on, I’ll ferry you across.”

On Wednesday, the lad who was hedging was taken ill, and the two women clipped and laid the hedge, standing for most of the day in thick mud or in the briny cold ditch, bending and breaking the stubborn stems, their hands bleeding from a hundred scratches.

Alys straightened up, grimacing with pain. “My back aches,” she said.

“Have a rest,” Alinor urged her. “I can finish the last bit.”

“Aren’t you tired?”

“No,” Alinor lied. “Hardly at all.”

“I’ll finish,” Alys said grimly, and bent again hacking and twisting the stems.

Friday was cheese-making day at the tide mill and Alinor spent the day in the icy dairy, churning the butter, skimming the cream, and pressing the cheese while Alys did the hard work outside. Everything was to be ready for Friday night, and Mrs. Miller would take it herself to Chichester market on Saturday morning.

When Alys had finished the morning chores she came inside and worked alongside her mother in the dairy, their hands red and raw with cold. At noon, when Mrs. Miller rang the bell in the yard, they went into the kitchen and sat at the table to eat: bread from the mill oven and curds from the cheese. They both pressed their hands together and tucked them in the warmth under their arms to bring the feeling back to their numb fingers while Mr. Miller gave thanks for his own good dinner. Richard Stoney and the other mill lad sat opposite them, their faces pinched with cold. Mrs. Miller, seated at the head of the table, had fine white bread to eat and soft cheese, her daughter Jane on one side, little Peter on the other. Mr. Miller sat in silence at the end of the table before a solitary leg of ham. He went out as soon as he had eaten to make sure that the outside workers did not take too long over their break. Richard winked at Alys, nodded his head to Mrs. Miller and Alinor, and followed him with the other lad.

“You’ll be brewing wedding ale?” Mrs. Miller asked Alinor.

“I’ll strain it and pour it tomorrow,” Alinor said. “I think it’ll be very good. Mr. Stoney is picking it up when he drives to church on Sunday morning.”

“They set a good table at Stoney Farm. You’re a lucky girl,” Mrs. Miller said to Alys, who forced herself to smile and nod. Mrs. Miller turned to Alinor. “I doubt they’d even have allowed the wedding if she hadn’t worked here so long. They know I’ve taught her well.”

“Never even have met if she hadn’t worked here,” Jane chimed in.

“Yes.” Alinor leaned her shoulder gently against Alys to make her keep silence. “We’re both grateful.”

“The Stoneys wouldn’t have trusted anyone else with their Richard,” she added. “There’s not another mill in Sussex that would be good enough for them.”

“I’ll always remember your harvest home,” Alinor said, turning the conversation. “When the two of them brought in the harvest together? That was a merry day.”

Alinor had meant to divert Mrs. Miller to pride in her harvest home but she had accidentally summoned a vivid memory of James Summer standing before her, and her own flare of temper when he said she must not dance.

She bowed her head as if she were giving thanks for her food; but in reality she was hiding a pain so sharp that she might almost think that her heart was breaking. She took a deep shuddering breath and turned her mind to the dairy and the work they still had to do. She had promised herself that she would not think about losing James, nor about how she would manage without him. She would not think of anything, until after Sunday, Alys’s wedding day. Only then, when Alys was married, and safe, would she allow herself to look clear-eyed at the ruin she had made of her life.

“I always give a good harvest home,” Mrs. Miller said complacently. “Sir William always says so. Says he would rather be at my harvest home than anywhere in the county. D’you remember, he brought the tutor, didn’t he? Mr. Summer?”

“Yes,” Alinor said steadily. “Mr. Summer. D’you want to see the butter before I set it into shape?”

Mrs. Miller rose from the table and left Jane and Alys to clear up. “You can wash the plates,” she said over her shoulder, and went into the dairy with Alinor. She closed the door behind them to keep the dairy cool, though it was already as cold as the ice house at the Priory.

“That’s doing well,” she said, looking into the churn where the butter was pale and creamy and starting to separate from the buttermilk. “It always comes so quick for you, Alinor.”

Alinor smiled. She knew it was because she worked harder and churned faster than Mrs. Miller, but the woman would never say so.

“I tell my husband, you must whisper a charm into the milk,” Mrs. Miller said. “A good charm, of course. I wouldn’t suggest other . . .”

“It’s rich milk,” Alinor said easily. “There’s no need for charming. If you’re happy with this, I’ll make squares for market.”

“Don’t make them too big,” Mrs. Miller said. “One pound each only. No point in giving it away.”

“Exactly,” Alinor said patiently.

“If it’s slightly underweight that’s better than over. They don’t weigh at the market.”

“Certainly. And I’ll wrap them.”

“And you’ll come Saturday morning to pack the cart for me?”

“Yes,” Alinor said. “And Alys will come, too. D’you want us all the day?”

“You can mind the farm and the mill while we’re at market. Low tide at dinnertime, but I won’t ask you to open the sluice and turn the wheel.”

Alinor smiled at the weak joke, as the door from the kitchen opened. “Am I to check the hens’ eggs?” Alys asked.

“Haven’t you done that already?” Mrs. Miller asked crossly. “Go and do it now, lazy girl.”

Saturday morning Alinor was up at dawn to do the final strain and pour of the wedding ale. Alys helped her mother and they both sniffed the rich yeasty aroma.

“It’s going to be good,” Alinor said with satisfaction.

Ned put his head around the brewhouse door. “I hope it’s not too strong?”

“It’s wedding ale,” Alinor replied. “It’s as it should be.”

“I want no drunkenness, and no bawdy games,” Ned specified.

“What sort of woman do you take me for?” Alinor demanded.

“You’re one that loves the old ways, and you know it. But this is to be a godly, quiet, and temperate marriage.”

“No wedding ale?” asked Alinor. “Shall I pour this in the rife?”

“Well, no wines,” he specified. “And no strong waters.”

“In that case,” Alinor said regretfully, “I shall have to beg Mrs. Stoney, for once, to stay sober.”

Ned could not stifle a chuckle. Mrs. Stoney had already impressed him with her grim puritanism. “She’s a godly woman,” he reproved his sister. “She shouldn’t be mocked.”

“I know!” Alinor replied, and gave the wedding ale a final stir, before putting on her cape to go to the mill.

When Alinor and Alys walked into the mill yard the cart was at the door and clean straw in the bottom. A sprinkling of snow made it cold enough for the squares of butter to be loaded in their baskets without fear of them going soft. Alinor, Alys, and Jane loaded big round cheeses and eggs in baskets as well, until Mrs. Miller came out of the house, wrapped to her eyes in furs as if she was going to Russia, and took her place on the cart seat. Peter and Jane climbed up beside their mother.

Mr. Miller hurried to take up the reins. He knew that his wife would not tolerate delay. “Good day!” he said to Alinor, with a smile for Alys. “You’re in charge, you know! We’ll be home by dinnertime!”

Working at the mill without the constant critical commentary of Mrs. Miller and the hangdog eyes of her husband was like working in their own yard. Richard and the miller’s lad cleaned out the barn where the plowing oxen were stabled, and Alys and Alinor fed and watered them. The women turned the horses out into the frozen pasture for a few hours while the young men mucked out the stables. Alinor pumped the buckets of water and Alys carried them. They raked out the kennels and the henhouses, the pen for the geese and the cows’ stalls. The two women milked the cows and carried the pails to the dairy. They collected hens’ eggs from the henhouse and looked in the little warm nooks around the barns where the hens sometimes laid away; but Mrs. Miller had gone around at dawn and taken every one she could find to market. Every time anyone went past a fallen branch they carried it back to the yard and piled it up for the boy to break it into kindling or split it for logs.

They fired up the baking oven for those villagers who would bring their bread or homemade dinners to use the big oven at sunset, and Alys kneaded dough for their own breadmaking. They worked all day until the sun started to sink over the western mire and Alinor said with relief, “Time to go home.”

“Not without our wages,” Alys said. “I need them for tomorrow.”

“Alys, how much of your dowry do you have, exactly? Because we can’t be short tomorrow. They won’t call it off for the want of a shilling, but we don’t want to look like we’re robbing them on the church doorstep on the very day of your wedding.”

“Richard will give me whatever is missing. But I’d like to do as much as I can. I want my wages for today, since we’ve worked so hard. And Richard will give me his.”

Alinor was about to reply when they heard a shout from the gate and the rumble of wheels. Alys ran to open it and then she called to her mother: “Look who they’ve brought from Chichester!”

For a moment Alinor’s head bobbed up in the certainty that it was James Summer, come to claim her before them all. “Who?”

“It’s Rob!”

Alinor hurried out to the gate. “Oh, Rob! Oh, Rob!”

“Now then,” said Mr. Miller kindly. “You would think he’d been gone to Afric and back. He’s only been away a week.”

“But I didn’t think he’d come till tomorrow morning for his sister’s wedding!” Alinor exclaimed. “How are you, son? How was your first week?”

Rob, smartly dressed and grinning, bounded down from the mill wagon and hugged his mother, ducked down for her blessing, and kissed his sister. “Mrs. Miller came into the shop and bought some ratsbane, asked them if she could give me a lift home, and they were happy to let me go early,” he said. “I’m to be back at work Monday morning at eight o’clock, so I can stay for the wedding and overnight.”

“How kind of you.” Alinor turned to Mrs. Miller, her face glowing with happiness. “Neighborly indeed. I thank you.”

“Ah well,” the other woman said with unusual generosity. “He’s a fine young man and a credit to you. Is all well here?”

“Oh, yes,” Alinor said. “And we made a meat pie for your dinner. I didn’t know what you would get at market.”

“He dined well enough.” Mrs. Miller nodded towards her husband, whose red face and merry smile indicated a long stay in the market tavern while his wife and children were selling their cheeses, butter, and eggs. “But we shall be glad of something to eat.”

“I shall be glad of one of Mrs. Reekie’s pies,” Mr. Miller said cheerfully. “Nobody makes a meat pie like Mrs. Reekie.”

Alinor shook her head deprecatingly as Mrs. Miller surged past her into the kitchen. Alys and Alinor took the horse from the wagon, led him into the stable, hung up his heavy collar and bridle on the hook while Richard and the lad pushed the wagon into its place and unloaded the goods. Mrs. Miller had bought sacks of wool in the wagon for spinning, a new milking stool, some wooden bowls, and two feather pillows.

“Spent all that she earned,” Mr. Miller confided to Alinor.

“Shame on you,” Alinor said loyally. “Mrs. Miller is one of the best housewives on the island.”

“And what about this girl of yours?” Mr. Miller asked, giving Alys a casual slap on her bottom. “Is she going to make a good housewife to Richard Stoney?”

“I hope so,” Alinor said, drawing Alys to her and detaching her from Mr. Miller.

“Have you put the horse away?” Mrs. Miller bawled from the kitchen doorway.

“Aye!” Mr. Miller hollered back. “I’ve done all my work for one day. And they’ve done theirs. Are they getting paid today?”

Mrs. Miller disappeared back into the house and came out with their wages, a shilling for the two of them.

“Thank you very much,” Alinor said, as Mrs. Miller went back into the house and Alys and Alinor turned towards the yard gate.

“Is that right?” Mr. Miller asked suddenly. “A shilling, for a day’s work when you’ve done everything on the farm today?”

“It’s right,” Alinor said stiffly. She could have added—but hardly generous for a girl getting married tomorrow—but she would not say a word. Rob beside her stiffened, and she put her hand under his arm and gave it a little squeeze.

“It’s not right,” Mr. Miller said with the resentful persistence of a slightly drunken man. “Here! Betty Miller! You come out here!”

“Really,” Alinor said. “It’s right, Mr. Miller. Shilling a day, for the whole day, because we stopped at sunset.” She gave Rob a little push towards the yard gate.

Mrs. Miller came bustling out of her kitchen door. “And who’s shouting me out like I was a milkmaid?” she demanded.

Rob nodded to Mr. Miller. “Thank you for the lift in the wagon, Mr. Miller,” he said. “Good evening to you, Mrs. Miller.” Tactfully, he went to the yard gate and waited for his mother out of earshot as Mrs. Miller surged out and stood, hands on hips, glaring at her husband and Alinor.

“What’s this?” she demanded.

Alinor shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Really, nothing.”

“You’ve underpaid the Reekies,” Mr. Miller said mulishly. “Mother and the maid.”

“Sixpence each, as I always have done.”

“Sole charge!” he said, like a man who has discovered a password. “Sole charge. They had sole charge of the farm today, so that makes them like a yard man. Or like a bailiff. Sole charge. Good as a man. Good as two men.”

“You want to pay a woman and a maid as much as two yard men?” Mrs. Miller demanded scathingly.

“No,” he said, “course not. But they should have . . . and the pretty maid is getting married . . .”

Alinor noted the fatal slip of calling Alys “pretty” to his slate-faced wife.

“Who pays them?” Mrs. Miller suddenly demanded of him, going close and taking him by his linen collar as if she would choke him.

“Why, you do?”

“And who watches them, and keeps them right and clears up after their mistakes, and all the mess they make?”

Alinor let her gaze slip away from Mr. Miller’s crestfallen face to the creamy rosy sky over the harbor, glanced towards her son, Rob, waiting at the gate and wished herself home, with her children at the dinner table.

“You do,” Mr. Miller said sulkily.

“So, I think it’s best left to me and them, isn’t it? Without any man coming in and wanting extra payment for ‘pretty’?”

Mr. Miller had been defeated twenty years ago by the iron determination and chronic bad temper of his wife. “I was just saying—”

“Best not to say anything,” Mrs. Miller advised him smartly.

“Feeding the horse,” he said, as if to himself, and turned towards the stable.

“And we have to go,” Alinor said smoothly.

“Old fool that he is,” Mrs. Miller said.

“Good night, Mrs. Miller. We’ll see you tomorrow at church,” Alinor said.

“Good night, Mrs. Reekie,” she replied, recovering her temper now that she had won. “And God bless you tomorrow, Alys.”

Alinor and her two children walked down the track to the ferry crossing, where Rob ran ahead like a boy to ring the chime.