Tidelands

DOUAI, FRANCE, NOVEMBER 1648

James tapped on the door of the guest room in Douai College and braced himself when he heard his mother’s voice call “Entrez!” and then correct herself: “Come! Come in!”

He went in as she was turning from the window that overlooked the market square outside, and she hurried towards him with her arms out. “My son!” she said warmly. “My son!”

James knelt for her blessing and felt her hand on his head, and then rose and kissed her on both cheeks. She smelled of perfume and clean silk. His father got up from his chair at the table, where he had been turning the pages of a beautiful illuminated manuscript, and James knelt to him too. He rose up and the three of them stood looking from one to another, as if they could hardly believe they were reunited.

“Hear you’ve been home?” his father said shortly, his piercing glance taking in his son’s bleak appearance: from his pale face to his sandals.

“Yes,” James said. Out of habit he glanced behind him to see that the door was closed. “To England . . . not . . . not to our own home.”

“I heard there were problems.”

The young man nodded, and his father seated himself at the head of the dark wood refectory table, and gestured that his son should sit. His mother took her place at the foot. James thought that it was three years since they had been seated at the head and foot of their great table in their own home, three years of living on what rents they could collect from their English estate, three years of living off the hand-to-mouth royal courts, three years of exile from home.

“How do you hear?” James asked. “For really, no one should hear anything at all.”

“It’s this damned country,” his mother said wearily. “Everyone knows everything. Nothing is ever private, no one is discreet. Everyone gossips and makes things up.”

“It puts me in danger,” James pointed out. “And everyone who goes to England to serve the faith, or the king. Don’t people realize that? And it puts our cause in danger too. Don’t they understand they must serve in secret? Keep silence?”

“Were you in danger, cheri?” his mother asked.

“Yes,” James said flatly. “Of course. Every day.”

His mother blanched. “But you are unhurt?” She put her white hand over his and scanned his face, as if she might see a hidden mortal wound.

“Did you see His Majesty?” his father asked him. “Are you allowed to say?”

“Yes, I saw him. I had organized an escape for him, as I imagine you know, since the queen’s court knows, I suppose all of Paris knows. But he didn’t come. He wouldn’t come.”

“He refused rescue?” his father asked incredulously.

“Didn’t the gossips tell you that?”

“I only heard that it miscarried. I am sorry, I thought it was—”

“Me that failed?” James interposed bitterly. “No. It’s true to say that my rescue failed. But it was because he would not walk out of the open door, to the boat that I had waiting, to the men risking their lives to guard him.”

“Was it not safe?”

“Of course it was as safe as it could be! I would never have taken him into danger,” James said angrily. “I had arranged it, but he wouldn’t come. He believed he could outwit parliament. Play them off against the army. Threaten them with the Irish, or with an invasion from France.”

His father made a quick gesture with his hand. “There will be no invasion from France. There’s no money, and God knows . . .”

James looked at his father. “God knows . . . ?” he asked.

Now it was the older man who glanced at the door to see it was tightly closed. “No leadership,” he said quietly. “No common sense at the queen’s court, no discipline at the court of the prince. No one you would trust with a spaniel, let alone an army. A court of favorites and backbiting and endless gossip, quarrels about nothing, and scandals. Good men throwing what’s left of their fortunes away on desperate plans. People dreaming of a future and swearing they will have revenge. Nothing reliable. No one to rely on. Rewards promised, bribes handed out. It’s sickening.”

James’s mother rose from the table and looked out of the window again as if the little market square in the small provincial town had anything to interest her. “Don’t speak like that,” she said quietly. “Not while James is risking his life.”

“Has he escaped?” James asked his father very quietly. “I heard he was to ride away, that there was a ship waiting for him. Is he safe?”

His father shook his head. “It didn’t happen. The plot was discovered.”

“Hardly surprising,” James said sourly.

His mother turned back from the window. “Don’t be bitter,” she said quietly. “Don’t let these times spoil you.”

“They have spoiled me,” James confessed. “I have lost my faith. Lost my faith in the cause, and lost my faith in God, too. But I suppose you know that? I suppose Dr. Sean sent for you? That is why you are here?”

His father was too honest a man to lie to his only son. “They sent for us the moment you came in,” he said. “They said you had been brought very low. Is it your faith in the king and God that is troubling you? Or is there a woman in it too?”

James hesitated, as his mother came to the table and rested her white hand on it, the beautiful lace from her cuff reflected in the polished wood. “You can speak in front of me,” she said. “I’m very sure I have heard worse over the last few years. We have been in a ragtag court in exile, with the morals of stable cats for long enough for me to hear everything.”

“Are you spoiled?” James asked her with a crooked smile.

“I’m hardened,” she admitted. “You can’t tell me anything new.”

“There is a woman,” he confessed. “A workingwoman, not a lady, but she is very beautiful and very brave and very . . .” He tried to think of a description that would do justice to Alinor. “Interesting,” he said. “She’s interesting. She is a herbalist, but quite uneducated. She is a simple woman but she has her own mind, her own thoughts. She lives—” He broke off, thinking that he could not describe the hovel at the side of Foulmire, and the ferry-house and the army brother. “She lives very simply,” he said, avoiding a description of her poverty. “But she saved my life the night that she first met me, and took me into hiding.”

“Her family?” his mother prompted.

“She has two children: a boy and a girl.”

Her aghast face told him of his mistake.

“I didn’t mean that! I meant to ask: is she of a good family?”

“She has children? She’s a widow?” his father asked.

James answered his mother first. “She has a little standing in her village, with her neighbors. There’s gossip—but there’s always gossip in these poor little places, you know that! Her husband has gone. He’s probably dead. They are poor people.” He hesitated, looking from one to another. “I’m not explaining this well. They don’t have land, or a family, or a name.”

He looked at his mother, as if willing her to see the mire as he saw it, a place of eerie beauty, and Alinor as a woman of the place, strange and beautiful too. “They are not people like us,” he tried to explain.

“But she did at least have a husband? She was married once? She’s not a—”

“No! Her parents are dead but she has a brother. He’s a good man.”

“Did her husband die in the war?” his mother asked. “On our side?”

“Er, no . . .” James said awkwardly. “He’s just missing.”

“She’s a deserted wife?” his mother asked. “Abandoned?”

“Yeoman stock?” his father asked hopefully. “This brother? Has he got his own land? Or is he a tenant farmer?”

James shook his head, forcing himself to be honest. “He keeps the ferry. They have the tenancy to the ferry and the ferry-house, and they grow vegetables and trees and keep hens in an acre behind the house. They sell ale out of the window. They’re poor people, sir, on poor land, on the very edge of England as it turns into sea. It’s marshland, tidelands, neither one thing nor another. And it’s true to say, she owns almost nothing. She was given a few shillings for bringing me to safety and she used it to buy a boat.”

He did not know that he was smiling at the thought of the boat and the courage of the woman he loved. “It meant everything to her. She fishes from the boat, and sells her catch. She said—” He broke off as he realized that he could not tell them of her joke that saving him was of the same value as catching a fat salmon. “She grows herbs and makes physic. She’s a healer and a midwife in the little village. It’s a little fishing village, very poor.”

His mother was blanched with horror. “A fisherwoman?” she repeated. “A midwife? Like a cunning woman?”

“Yes,” he said steadily. “She’s no grander than that.” He turned to his father. “But she saved me when I had nowhere to go. And then, later, she nursed me when I was near to death, when anyone else would have locked the doors and abandoned me, for fear of plague. But she chose to stay with me, and be locked up with me. And I have asked her to marry me.”

His mother gave a suppressed moan and put her hand over her mouth, closing her eyes.

His father’s face was dark. “This is not what we planned for you,” he said shortly.

“Sir, I know it. But we did not plan a world like this.”

“We are exiles and all but penniless. We’re defeated in this world, but we have not sunk so low that you can break your vows to the Church to marry a village midwife with a brace of lowborn children.”

“I am sorry, sir. I am sorry, Lady Mother.”

She shook her head, her hand shading her eyes, as if she could not bear to look at him.

“We allowed you to go to the Church,” his father said begrudgingly. “That was not easy for us. We gave up all hopes of grandchildren and a daughter-in-law then. That was your choice. You said you had a calling and we believed you. That was the hardest thing I ever did—to give up my only son to the Church. And now you tell us that was for nothing? And we are to give you up again? But this time, for something of no value at all? For a woman who—by your own description—is valueless?”

James heard the rising volume of his father’s anger. “I know. I know. You were good to let me go to the Church. I longed to be in the Church then. I was certain. But . . . going back to England, and seeing the defeat of everything that we believe and the king so—”

“The king so what?” His mother rounded on him in a cold fury. “Is all this—all this!—because you have discovered that the king is a fool? I could have told you that ten years ago!”

Her husband moved his hand to silence her but she went on. “No! I will speak. The boy should know. He knows already! Yes! The king is a fool and a cat’s-paw, and his son is two parts a villain. But still he is the king. That never changes! And you are a priest, and that never changes. Whether he is a good king or a bad one, that never changes. Whether you are a good priest or a bad one, that never changes! Just as your father is and always will be Sir Roger Avery of Northside Manor, Northallerton. It never changes. Whether we live there, in our house, or not, whether it is overrun with rabble or not, whether you live there or not. It is still our name, it is still our house. England never changes and neither will you.”

There was silence in the little room. Sir Roger looked from his son to his wife.

“Did the woman accept you?” he asked as if it were a matter of secondary interest.

“Whyever would she not?” Lady Avery demanded angrily. “D’you think she would prefer to stay where she is? In nowhere? Half drowned in the tidelands?”

James raised his head. “No, she did not. She said it was not fitting.”

“She’s right!”

“Did she really say that?” his father asked, interested.

James nodded. “Yes, I told you she was unusual. But I said that I would be released from my order, that I would ask you if we might pay the fine to parliament and return to Northside, and that I would ask your permission to marry her, and bring her to our home as my wife. She has to wait until she can be declared a widow.”

“Pay the fine to parliament and live beneath their rule? Deny our service to the king?”

“Yes,” James said steadily. “He does not want my service. I don’t want to offer it ever again.”

“Betray your oath of loyalty to him?”

“Break it.”

Lady Avery took an embroidered handkerchief from her lace-trimmed sleeve and put it to her eyes. Her husband looked steadily at the down-turned face of his son.

“Does she even know your name?” he asked.

The young man looked up and for the first time his father saw his boyish smile. “No,” he said. “She knows me as Father James. I pass as a tutor called Mr. Summer. She has risked everything for me and she doesn’t even know my name.”