Tidelands

TIDELANDS, AUGUST 1648

Rob led the chaplain and young Walter to the cottage along the shore path, in the heat of the afternoon, leaping like a goat over the briny puddles and pattering up and down from beach to bank and from tussock of reeds to dry land. Walter, in smart buckled shoes, slipped and slid after him, complaining of the mud and the incoming tide. Father James followed behind. The tide lapped inwards, closer all the time, seeping up the beach so quickly that they had to clamber from the shore to the high path on the bank as they got to the cottage. They could hear the hiss of bubbling water in the hushing well.

Rob exclaimed at the sight of the skiff moored at the end of the rickety pier outside his mother’s cottage, and at his mother coming towards them smiling, a clean white cap hiding the twisted plait of her golden hair, a clean apron around her waist. Rob bounded forward, knelt for her blessing, and then bounced up to kiss her. “You remember Master Walter,” he said. “And this is our tutor, our chaplain, Mr. Summer.”

Alinor bobbed a curtsey to Walter. “How are you, sir?” she asked him. “You look a deal better than in the spring.”

“I’m well,” he said. “Father says I’m as strong as a bullock.”

Alinor made a little curtsey to Father James, but he stepped forward and took her hand and bowed over it as if she were an equal. “I am pleased to meet you,” he said. “I’ve heard much of you from your son, and I have admired your work in the Priory stillroom.”

“Oh, it’s very neglected,” Alinor said. “We’ve done very little there since Lady Peachey’s death.” She glanced towards Walter as she mentioned the death of his mother, but he and Rob were already heading down the little pier to where the skiff was bobbing on the deep water of the channel, nudging the rotting stanchions of wood as the tide pushed it inward.

“Have you been out in the boat? Did you find the courage?” Father James asked her quietly.

“My brother took me the first time. I’d not been on the water since Zachary went missing.”

“Your husband?”

“I used to row for him when he was lobster potting.”

“And do you think you will manage it alone?”

“I can,” she said, swallowing her fear so that her voice was steady. “As long as the water’s not too deep, or the tide running too fast.”

He nearly laughed at her determined expression. “Ah, Mrs. Reekie, even I can see you’re not a natural waterwoman.”

“I’m not.” She smiled back at him. “But I know I can take the boat out with a line and troll for mackerel, and I can use a net, and I can row to the islands where the gulls nest, and take the eggs, so already I’m set to make a better living than before. I have to be brave. This is a great chance for me, for my children. I’ll never go out of the harbor, I’ll never put out to sea, but this is our trade. Everyone on this island is a fisherman. I have to do it too! And if I were to be so lucky as to catch a salmon and sell it to Sir William—well, then I would have paid for the boat with one day’s work.”

“I thought that you bought the boat with the money from one day’s work?” he teased her.

At once her eyes danced. “That was a very fat fish,” she said mischievously, and made him laugh.

They were at the step up to the pier and, without thinking, he put his hand under her arm to help her, as if she were a lady and he were courting her. She felt the warmth of his hand on her arm and she did not draw away but they both looked studiously at their feet until she had stepped up and he released his grip.

“The lines are in the boat,” she told the boys. “And the bait.”

Rob stepped easily from the rickety pier into the boat, and then held it for Walter, as it rocked against the pier. James hesitated and looked at Alinor. “Will you get in next?” he asked her, offering her his hand.

She sat down on the timbers of the pier so that she could lower herself into the boat without assistance, settling herself on the central seat. James untied the rope, stepped down into the boat, and seated himself beside Alinor, taking one of the oars. “Shall we row together as the boys fish?” he suggested.

She agreed and turned her face away from him, but he could see her color rising as they were shoulder to shoulder, moving together, each placing the oar and heaving gently, moving in rhythm as the boat eased away from the land and into the channel. The water inside the harbor was calm, though they could hear the seethe of the hushing well in the center of the deep waters. The tide was flowing in, the current moving fast, but they rowed easily out into midchannel and then held the boat still, as the boys baited their hooks with earthworms and dropped them over the side.

“Disgusting!” Walter exclaimed delightedly. “Where d’you get worms from?”

“I dug them for you.” Alinor smiled at him. “And if you want to catch fish again, you can dig your own. However disgusting.”

The little boat bobbed as the tide pushed it inland, and Alinor and James held it steady. “Is that the ferry-house?” James asked her, nodding to the low cottage at the far end of the harbor.

“Yes, my family home, where my brother lives now as ferryman. There’s the pier before it, and the ferry is moored on the other side. And see? Just across the rife, on the mainland, that’s the granary store on the quay, and the tide mill and the miller’s house.”

“Will he be milling today?”

“No, he mills when the tide goes out. The tide comes in and fills up the millpond and when it ebbs he opens the sluice, the water pours into the millrace, and turns the wheel. He was milling on the afternoon ebb. I was in their dairy today, churning butter. Alys, my daughter, is there every day, she works in the house, and mill, and farm.”

“I’ve got a bite!” Rob said suddenly. He pulled up his line and there was a writhing shiny-scaled mackerel. Confidently, he unhooked it and dropped it into the woven reed basket in the bottom of the boat.

“Is that what they look like?” Walter demanded, peering in. “I’ve only ever seen them cooked.”

“There’s bound to be more,” Alinor assured him. “They travel together, like scoundrels. Bob your line up and down, Master Walter.”

James watched her as she feathered her oar to keep the boat steady, copying her, so the push of the inflowing water did not force them into the deep channel that ran towards the ferry-house.

“Now you can see my brother’s ferry,” she said, nodding towards the channel before them and the big raft moored before the ferry-house. “And farther up the channel, inland, is the wadeway. It’s underwater now so you can only see the cobbled bank that runs down to it.”

He saw the swirl and rush as the river flowing out past the ferry-house met the incoming sea.

“Is it very deep?”

“It rises more than six feet, and it’s fast. Everyone can cross at the lowest point, and people drive or ride. But everyone takes the ferry at high tide, or goes all the way round inland. You have to take the horses from the traces and take them across on the ferry and then take the coach across separately, so it’s a lot of work.”

“I’m surprised his lordship does not build a bridge.”

She shook her head and a lock of golden hair fell from the modest cap. “There’s no good ground for building,” she said. “It’s all sand till you get to the tide mill quay. And the mire moves in every storm. The wadeway gets washed away every spring tide, or in the winter storms. Master Walter’s father spends all his time rebuilding it, doesn’t he, sir? We’d never keep a bridge up. It’s all sand and silt.”

“So your brother is the gatekeeper to the entrance to the island?” James remarked. “Like a porter on a drawbridge to a castle.”

She smiled. “Yes. And our father before him, and his father before him.”

“Since when?”

“Since the Flood, I suppose,” she said irreverently, and then exclaimed: “Oh! Excuse me . . .”

“You don’t offend me,” he laughed. “I’m honored to be rowed by a daughter of Noah.”

“I think I’ve got one!” Walter exclaimed. “Like a pull?”

“That’s it,” Alinor confirmed. “Pull it out gently, gently, and swing it into the boat.”

He pulled too hard and the fish came flying out of the water, swinging into Alinor’s face.

“Watch out!” Father James said, catching the line and holding it away from her as the boy reached out to take the fish, and then flinched, as it writhed on the hook.

“I can’t . . .”

“If you want to eat it, you take hold of it,” Alinor advised him.

The tutor laughed. “She’s right. Take hold of it, Walter, and unhook it.”

Grimacing, the boy unhooked the fish and gasped as it wriggled from his hand and dropped into the basket, as Rob exclaimed: “Another! I have another!”

They were in the middle of a shoal of fish and as soon as they baited their hooks they were pulling them from the water. James and Alinor kept the boat in the middle of the channel as the boys fished, exclaiming at their catch and counting as the basket filled up, until Alinor said: “That’s enough, that’s all that you can eat today, and all that I can dry.”

“Don’t you sell them fresh?” James asked her.

“If my husband had a big catch on a Friday I would take it to Chichester Saturday market, but it takes two hours to walk there, and two hours back again. You can’t sell fish in Sealsea village—everyone catches their own—though I sometimes sell them at the mill. The farmers’ wives buy fish when they come to get their corn ground, or if a grain ship comes in they’ll buy some. Mostly, I dry them for sale, or salt them down.”

“Shall we row back in?”

“Can’t we go out to the hushing well?” Rob asked her. “Walter has never seen it.”

Alinor shook her head, and she and James timed their strokes together and rowed back to the pier. She shipped her oar and stretched out her hand to the pier timbers to pull the boat in, while Rob stood to drop the looped mooring rope over the worn pole.

“You’ll have to wait till you can row yourselves to go there,” she told Walter.

“Why won’t you go there, Mistress Reekie?” Walter asked her.

She steadied the boat as the boys got ashore, and Father James followed them. Then she stood up and handed them the basket of fish, balancing easily against the rocking of the boat.

“I am a foolish woman and I have a horror of deep water,” she told him. Father James put out his hand to help her onto the pier and she took it.

“But you’ve lived all your life on the water,” Walter remarked.

“All my life on the mire,” she corrected him. “Tidelands: neither land nor sea, but wet and dry twice a day, never drowned for long but never drying out. I never go out to sea; I don’t even go out to the deep heart of the harbor. My work has always been on the land with the plants and herbs and flowers. I’m only recently a boat owner, thanks to your father hiring Rob.”

Rob tied off the boat loosely so that it could fall with the tide.

“And now, shall I cook your fish for you?” she asked the boys.

“Can we cook it? On a fire with sticks?” Rob begged.

“Oh, all right.” She smiled, and James could see the love she had for her son. She turned to him. “Will you eat with the boys?”

“If I may,” he said. “Shall we all dine together?”

“You may not want to. Rob hopes to eat like savages around a fire.”

He had to stop himself tucking the tumbling lock of hair behind her ear. “Let’s be savages.” He smiled.

Rob and Walter gathered driftwood and Alinor brought the embers from the damped-down fire in the cottage. James, going to help her, looked around the single room, the bed that she shared with her daughter, the stools where they sat, the table where they ate. It was a typical cottage for a poor working family, and he was struck how the bleak poverty strangely contrasted with the sharp and sweet smell of the place. It smelled of lavender and basil, like the Priory stillroom. Usually a hut like this would stink of old food and excrement, the heavy scent of unwashed people sleeping in their working shifts, but here the salt air blew in through the open door and the room was filled with a grassy smell of drying herbs. In one corner of the room there were cords strung from beam to beam, festooned with posies of herbs. Beneath them, a corner cupboard held a collection of glass jars, and on either side were shelves holding metal trays filled with wax for extracting perfume.

“Your stillroom?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “My corner. I have more room in the ferry-house. I use my mother’s stillroom there, as I used to do with her. This is just for the things from my garden here, while they’re fresh.”

Under her direction James sliced bread from the big loaf under the upturned pot on the table, and carried out four slices to serve as trenchers for the fish. The little fire was burning brightly.

“Will your daughter come home in time to eat with us?” he asked.

“No, she works late in summertime,” Alinor replied. “She won’t be back till sunset. I’ll cook her a mackerel and save it for her.”

Alinor cut and cleaned each fish, throwing the entrails into a pot for later use as bait, but leaving the heads and tails on. She gave the gutted fish to Rob, who skewered each one on a stick and handed them round. Alinor went to the house to wash the scales and blood from her hands and came out with four cups of small ale. Rob watched her give his missing father’s cup to James, but he made no comment.

When the skin on the fish was burned to a blackened crisp and the flesh inside was moist and hot, Alinor told the boys: “That’s done. You can eat them.” Walter nibbled his from the charred stick, but Rob put his between two hunks of bread and took mighty bites. When they had all finished eating they sat in silence, looking at the fire as the sun lay on the horizon, and the tide seemed to stand still, lapping at the pier but rising no higher. The hens came running up from the shoreline and rushed towards Alinor, confident of their welcome and hoping for crumbs. She greeted each one by name and gave each a little piece of her bread, and they pecked around her feet and clucked softly.

“We have to go,” said Rob. He looked to his mother and was surprised to see her gaze turn from him to his tutor.

“Oh, do you?”

James rose to his feet as if he did not know what he was doing. The hens scattered from the stranger; but he did not see them. “Yes, yes, I suppose we do. That’s sunset now. We should go.”

“I’ll lead the way back to the Priory,” she offered.

James wanted to agree, but there was no reason that she should guide them when her son was there.

“I can show the way,” Rob said, puzzled.

Slowly she rose from her fireside seat, and her boy came into her arms. She hugged him, and when he knelt for her blessing she put her hand on his head, whispered a prayer, and bent and kissed him. She dipped a little curtsey to Walter. “I’m glad you came,” she said to him. “You can come anytime, for your mother’s sake as well as your own, you know.”

He flushed. “Thank you,” he said awkwardly, for she was a Peachey tenant and they were, in any case, his fish. “Rob and I will come again.”

The two of them started down the path to the Priory, side by side, companionably silent. Alinor was left alone with James.

“Shall you come again?” she asked him, her tone carefully neutral.

“Yes,” he said, rushing into speech. “Yes. I want . . . I really want . . . May I come again? May I come back now, as soon as I have taken them home?”

She had a dizzy sense of the world turning too fast around her. She looked up and felt a jolt of desire as his brown eyes met her dark gray gaze.

“You can’t come through the mire on your own.”

“I’ll come the long way round. I’ll follow the road,” he said.

“Yes, you can come back tonight,” she agreed, and as if to deny her words she turned from him and kicked the embers of the fire so they were darkened and cool, and then she went along the bank towards her cottage without looking back at him.

The waxing yellow moon had turned the water of the mire to a yellowy shine, and the land to tarnished black as James turned off the main road at the ferry-house, walked quietly past Ned’s back garden, and then loped along the sea bank to Alinor’s cottage. He had left the boys in the schoolroom, evening prayers done, tasked with reading and completing some mathematical exercises, and putting themselves to bed. James did not know what was ahead of him. He did not know if he would find Alinor alone, or if her daughter would be there. He did not know, if he found her alone, what he should say, or what he should do, nor what she might allow. He could not imagine how he had dared to ask to return, nor why she should have consented. He knew that he must not break his oath of celibacy. He was sworn to the Church; he could not consider a woman as a lover, he should not even be alone with a woman outside of the confessional. But, at the same time, he knew he could not stay away.

As he walked along the path from her brother’s house, ducking below the blackthorn boughs, the high tide licking the raised bank, he did not think what he was doing, only that he could do nothing else. He thought he was a fool to run through the dusk to see a woman who was little more than a cottager, a poor woman, a woman far beneath him in the eyes of the world. But he knew that he could not help himself, and he was reveling in the sense of his own helplessness. Promised to God, engaged in a conspiracy for the King of England, he should have no time to fall in love. But as he ran, he knew very well that was what he was doing: he was falling in love. He could not stop himself feeling a leap of joy as he recognized that he was falling, unstoppably, in love with a woman as if he were an imaginary knight in a poem and she the greatest of ladies in a castle.

She was waiting for him. As he saw her slim silhouette at the outermost end of the rickety wooden pier, her dress gray against the gray waters, her white cap pale against the night sky, he knew that she had gone out to the end of the pier so that she could watch the bank path and see him walking towards her. Instead, she had seen him running like a lover to his love. He skidded to a walk at the sight of her as she came down the pier, stepping carefully over the rotting planks, so that as he arrived where the steps met the bank and held out his hand to help her, they were handclasped before they had even said one word.

At the touch of her hand, her scratched rough palm, he could not help himself: he drew her closer towards him and put a hand around her waist, feeling the warmth of her body through the homespun cloth. She did not resist him but stepped into the circle of his arm and raised her face to look at him. They gazed at each other silently and then, as if the exchange of looks had been an exchange of vows, he dropped his head to hers and their mouths met.

She was willing. Years later he would remember that, as if it absolved him from guilt. She was longing to be loved, she was longing to be loved by him.

Her kiss was sweet. It was the first time in his life that he had kissed a woman and he felt desire rush through him as if his knees would go weak beneath him. He felt her relax against him as if she too were feeling a wave pass through her, as irresistible as the flow of the tide.

“I should not,” she said when she took a breath. “I don’t even know if my husband is alive or dead.”

“I should not,” he said, finding the words awkward in his mouth as if he had no speech but only the power of touch. “I am an ordained priest.”

She did not move from him, she did not take her eyes from his face, his mouth, his dark gaze.

“Kiss me again,” she said quietly, and he did.

They stood enwrapped in each other’s arms, his body pressing against her, his mouth on hers, his arms tightening around her, and then she moved a little away from him and at once he let her go. In silence, just a halfpace apart, they waited to see if they would move together again, if he was going to take her hand and lead her into the little cottage to make love in her missing husband’s bed. She shook her head, as if he had said words of desire out loud, but she did not speak.

“I will come to you again next month, in the evening at this time,” he said as if a month apart would teach him what to do and what to say to her, while today each was dazed by the other’s closeness.

“Next month?” she queried, as if it were a year away. “Not till next month?”

“I have to go away tomorrow,” he said.

She made a little gesture as if she would take his hand and delay him. “Not back to France?”

“No, no. But I have to serve . . . I have made a promise . . . I will go and I will return.”

She guessed at once it was the secret business of his Church, and the king imprisoned on the Isle of Wight. “Into danger? Are you going into danger?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “But I hope to be back with you within the month.”

She heard, as a woman in love will always hear, the promise of love more than the meaning of the sentence. “Here, with me,” she repeated.

“Without fail.”

“Can’t you refuse to go?” she demanded. “Can’t you say you’ve changed your mind?”

He smiled. “But I have not changed my mind,” he said. “I think as I did about everything, and I cannot break my word. There are men depending on me; there is a great man depending on me. Nothing has changed . . . except . . .”

She was silent, while she waited for him to say what had changed.

“My heart,” he told her.

TIDELANDS, AUGUST 1648

Alinor worked as usual, through the next weeks of summer storms and sudden days of heat, which made a haze on the mire that looked like palaces and streets and warehouses. The visions made her wonder what James was seeing, if he was admitted into great buildings or was walking down beautiful streets, far bigger and cleaner than Chichester, far grander than anything she had ever seen, if the gates of palaces opened for him, if there were garden doors into beautiful houses.

She walked to Chichester market and at the secondhand clothes stall she bought Alys a pair of boots, hardly worn and with a good sole that would keep her feet warm and dry through the coming autumn and winter. She bought linen shifts and caps for both of them, and a new petticoat for Alys. She bought a ribbon to trim it, since Alys had so few pretty things. It was too hot to imagine that winter would ever come, but the secondhand clothes were cheapest in August, so Alinor bought her daughter a winter shawl and a cape of waxed cloth that would keep her dry when she had to go out across the ferry to the tide mill or work outside.

Alinor attended church and saw Rob, she picked fruit in the ferry-house garden, she worked in the Mill Farm dairy. She delivered hanks of spun wool to the wool merchant and received, in return, her pay and a bale of fleeces for spinning. She went through every day, her eyes down, her behavior demure, as if she were not burning up inside, white cap on her feverish forehead, gray dress wrapped as tight as an embrace around her waist. She took the boat out on a turning tide at slack water and laid four lobster pots, holding her nerve, though the boat rocked as she leaned over the side. She drew them in again next day, heaving against the weight of the pot and the rope, with two snapping monsterlike lobsters inside. She baited the pots again with stinking fish, threw them out, then rowed to the mill quay with her catch, and sold it to a couple of farmers’ wives for fourpence each.

“You look well,” Mrs. Miller said, staring at Alinor’s flushed smiling face as she pocketed the pennies.

“I’m just the same,” Alinor said, though her heart pounded too fast.

“I don’t know how you can bear the work.” Mrs. Miller looked disdainfully from Alinor’s soaked hem to the stinking bait jar. “Especially this work. In this heat.”

“Oh,” said Alinor, as if she had not noticed.

She went to her beehive and watched the bees coming and going with their determined purpose from the little doorway at the foot of the skep. “Something has happened to me,” she told them. “Something very important.” She listened to the warm comforting rumble of the hive as if the swarm was agreeing that it was important to them too; but she did not tell them what it was. She weeded her vegetable bed on her knees with her little hoeing stick, the sun hot on her back. She stood up, suddenly dizzy, her hands empty, as if she were walking in her sleep, and remembered the morning when she had looked through the cottage door at the unearthly whiteness of the sky and thought herself enchanted.

The wheat in the harborside fields was a rippling sea of gold, ready for harvest, the miller more and more fearful of a summer storm in this year of terrible rain. Finally, Mrs. Miller declared that they would start the harvest, and all the poor cottagers nearby were summoned to Mill Farm for the work.

Alys was one of the binding gang that followed the reapers, picking up the cut wheat, binding it into a stook, and loading it into the wagon. It was painfully hard work and when Alys came home, her arms were scratched by the stalks and her back was aching from bending and lifting and throwing stooks into the wagon. She worked from dawn—harvest days were long days—and her face was white with exhaustion. She was paid for extra hours with a small loaf of wheat bread baked in the mill’s big bread oven, in the harvest bake—one for each reaper and binder on top of their daily pay. It was a luxury that the Reekies only tasted at harvesttime. The rest of the year they baked their own coarse bread of mixed grains.

Alinor bathed Alys’s arms and face with elderflower water. She fed her nettle soup to ease the stiffness in her back and arms. Alys drank her soup and ate her bread in silence.

“I’m fine,” she said, as soon as she had finished, pushing back her stool and heading for bed, pulling off her skirt and filthy shirt. “It’s only as bad as always. I forget how vile the work is. The fields go on forever.”

“Soon be finished,” Alinor reminded her, picking up the bowls. “I’ll wash your gown and linen overnight. You can wear your new shift tomorrow.”

“I swear next year I won’t do it,” Alys said as she rolled into bed, almost asleep. “I swear next year I’ll have work somewhere else: clean work, easy work. Indoor work. You know, I’d sell my soul for indoor work.”

“I hope that you get it,” Alinor said gently; but she could not imagine what work Alys would find that could pay her a wage to live on.

“And that Jane Miller—” Alys broke off, almost too sleepy to speak.

“Jane?”

“Eyeing up the miller’s lads, just because her father owns the mill. Giggling with Richard Stoney. She’s such a stupid whey-faced thing . . . I’d like to push her in the millpond.”

Alinor smiled. “You go to sleep on a pleasant thought,” she counseled. “And have kindly dreams.”

“I am,” Alys whispered. “That is a pleasant thought.”

Alinor took the washing bowl outside the cottage, and as she was wringing out the skirt and rough linen shirt, and spreading them on the rosemary bush to dry, she saw her brother, Ned, picking his way on the bed of the mire from shingle bank to dry sand on the hidden shortcut from Ferry-house to her cottage. He brought a half round of cheese—a fee for ferrying a wagon going and returning from Chichester market. They sat together, outside the cottage on the bench facing the mire as the low tide ebbed farther and farther away until all around them was dry land, and the water was a silvery line on the horizon at the bar of the harbor. He watched her as she ate a tiny slice.

“Are you sick?” he asked. “Is it quatrain fever?”

All the people who lived on the side of the mire had marsh fever three or four times a year. They were accustomed to the onset of cold shivers and the sweats that would last perhaps a week, and then pass off. Alinor gave her patients willow and mint tisanes for their fever, and grew marigolds and lavender at the door and windows of the cottage to discourage the insects that brought the illness in their bite.

“No, I’m well,” she said, though the high color in her cheek and the brightness of her eyes contradicted her.

Across the mile of mud, they heard the squeal of the sluice gate key opening the millpond, and then the roar of water in the millrace. They heard the wheel creak and turn and the sound of the grinding stones. Then the water poured out into the dry channel in the mire in a sudden deep flood.

“You’ve not heard from Zachary?” Ned asked, thinking that she might have had news of her missing husband. “You look feverish.”

“No,” she said, finding a smile and meeting his eyes. “No. Nothing. It’s just me! I am filled with impatience: I have spring fever in the wrong season. Canterbury tales after Midsummer Day! I think it must be Rob leaving home, and knowing that I can start to save a dowry for Alys, and I have a boat of my own. I feel as if I am young again and free, and could go anywhere or do anything.”

He nodded, putting her rapid speech and the brightness of her eyes down to the wildness that was always a danger, even in the best of women. They could not help themselves. They were like the swallows that were swooping round and round, rejoicing in skimming and dipping in the mill rife, flirting with the warm air, building tiny perfect homes in houses and barns: wild and tame at once, here for summer, gone in winter, perfectly inconstant. He thought his beautiful sister was like a swallow, and that she should never have been tied down to one place. Certainly, she should never have been given in marriage to a man who was so much of the earth that he had probably sunk himself in deep waters and was even now rotting under barnacles on a seabed.

But there had never been a choice for her: she was a woman and had to marry, as all women do, and she was a poor woman who would never go anywhere, however bright her face and breathless she might be. Their mother, knowing that her own death was coming near and nearer, had insisted that Alinor marry, hoping to leave her safe, not knowing that Zachary himself was a wandering haven, no more trustworthy than the shore, vagrant as the tidelands.

“You’ll never get Alys married if she’s inherited your wildness,” he said sternly.

“Ah, she’s a good girl,” Alinor said, immediately defensive of her daughter, sleeping inside the cottage. “She works so hard, Ned. She wants a better life, but you can’t blame her for that! And—see—I only dream.”

“Dreams are worthless,” he ruled. “And anyway, how are you finding the boat?”

The smile she turned on him was so dazzling, it could be nothing to do with the boat. “Rob came over from the Priory two weeks ago with Master Walter and his tutor, and we all went fishing.”

He could see nothing in this to make a woman look as if the world was opening up before her. “Catch much?”

“Yes.” She gestured to the bank. “We made a fire. We ate together. We were just there.” She laughed.

Her joy was a mystery to him. He finished his cup of ale and got to his feet with a grunt at the twinge of pain from the rheumatism that twisted his joints from a childhood of hauling on the damp rope of the ferry and working in all weathers at every high tide.

“Don’t be foolish,” he warned her, uneasy at the thought of her dreams and the light in her eyes. “Don’t forget where you are, who you are. Nothing changes here but the waters. The rest of the country can run mad, turn upside down, but here only the sea changes daily and only the mire goes where it will.” The rumble of the mill, as ominous as thunder rolling over the flat drowned land, emphasized his warning.

“I know,” she reassured him. “I know. There is no hope; nothing can happen.” But the light in her face denied her words.

“If your lad would only work the ferry for me till the end of the summer, I’d go and volunteer for Oliver Cromwell in the North,” Ned said. “They say he’s marching men to meet the Scots. A hard march, from Wales, a long march. He’ll need men who know how to do it. General Lambert is holding the Scots at bay, but he can’t do it alone.”

“Rob can’t take the ferry,” she said quickly. “He’s bound to the Priory until Walter goes to Cambridge.”

“Hasn’t the tutor gone away?”

“A few more days, Rob tells me. The tutor’s left them lessons.”

“I’d give my eyeteeth to be on the road with my troop, to be beside my brothers for another battle, to defeat the enemies of the country and bring the king to justice,” Ned said. “King Charles has to answer for this now. He’s called the Welsh to rise against us, and now he’s summoned the Scots down on us. God knows what he’s promised to the Irish. He uses them all against us, against us English, his own people. He has to be finished, once and for all.”

Alinor compressed her lips on contradictions. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t speak ill of him.”

“Of him?”

“Of the poor king.”

“Then you understand nothing,” he said with brotherly contempt. “You may be very learned in your flowers and your herbs and your healing, but you’re a foolish woman if you don’t know that Charles is a man of blood and has brought nothing but grief to us. He never means peace when he says he wants peace. He never thinks that he is defeated when his own sword has been taken from his hand. He has to stop! I swear to God I think we will never make him stop.”

She rose to her feet as he became angry. “I know, I know,” she soothed him. “It’s just that I don’t want Rob going to war, or Alys trapped in a country at war. I don’t want you going away again, and of course I don’t know where Zachary is this evening.” She felt that tears were burning behind her eyes. “There are good men in danger, going into danger—” She broke off, unable to speak of James and the secret conspiracy that she knew was taking him away from her. “I don’t know what to pray for,” she said in a sudden rush of honesty. “I don’t even know what to wish for, except for peace . . . and that it was all over . . . and I was free . . .”

“Ah,” he said, his anger leaving him at the sight of her tears. “Ah, you pray for peace, you’re right. And there’s nothing for you to fear. Colonel Hammond will have the king safely mewed up at Carisbrooke. Parliament and the army will agree what must be done with the king, and even if parliament are such fools as to come to an agreement with him, they won’t let him raise troops to shed our blood again. We’ve won against the king, and we’ve probably won against the Scots, too, and even now the news of the battle is coming south as we sit here. It might be all over already, and it’s me who is a fool, pining to march north, thinking I could return to the days when I was among my comrades, led by Cromwell and commanded by God. It’s probably all done already.”

“Yes,” she said. “I can pray that it’s over.”

Alys was slow to wake, her arms and back aching. The two women had the rest of the white loaf for breakfast with Ned’s cheese.

“So delicious.” Alys dabbed up every crumb. “I think I shall marry the miller and eat wheat loaf every day of my life.”

“You’ll have to get rid of Mrs. Miller,” her mother pointed out. “And I think you’ll find that she won’t make way for you.”

“How I’d love to be rid of her!” Alys remarked. “I should throw the two of them—her and her helpless husband—off the quay, and marry their son, and inherit the mill.”

The miller’s son was a little boy of six years old named Peter. Alinor had delivered him herself. “And Jane could be your sister-in-law,” Alinor smiled. “That’d be a happy house.”

“I’d marry her off somewhere,” Alys asserted. “But nobody’d have her.”

“Oh, the poor girl,” Alinor said. “Don’t be unkind, Alys. Anyway, have they nearly finished the harvest?”

“Nearly, just one field to go. I was binding and stacking all day. Will you come this afternoon for gleaning?”

“Yes, I’ll bring your dinner,” Alinor promised.

Alys bowed her head in a prayer of thanks and rose from the table. “It’s funny Rob not being here,” she remarked. “Aren’t you lonely all the day?”

“I’m so busy I don’t have time to be lonely.”

“Because you look as if you’re listening for something.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. A footstep?”

Ashamed of herself, Alinor remembered watching James run along the sea-bank path, jumping the wet puddles like a boy running to his lover. “I’m not listening for anyone,” she lied.

“I didn’t say for anyone, I said for something.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t think that you missed my da anymore?” the girl asked gently. “We don’t—Rob and me. You needn’t worry for us.”

“I don’t,” Alinor said shortly.

“D’you just wish sometimes that everything was different? Aren’t you sick of everything? Not the king and the parliament—because I just don’t care for either of them—but something different for us. Something real, not preaching.”

“I wish I could see your future,” Alinor replied seriously. “I know you shouldn’t be stuck here, on the side of the mire, and no chance of marrying anyone but a farm lad or a fisherman, and no chance of earning more than pennies. But I haven’t the money to apprentice you to a trade, and I don’t know where you’d go into service. I don’t think you’d suit service—I’d be afraid for you, in service.”

Alys laughed. “You’re right there! I don’t want to be a servant to anyone. Not to a husband nor a master.”

“Alys, I do so wish for more for you.”

“You wish more!” the girl exclaimed. “Dear God, I pray on my knees for more! Has there been all this fighting and shouting and all the arguing among the men, and the only hope for women is a husband who’s a little bit better than a beast, or a wage of more than sixpence a day? What about Uncle Ned’s new world? What about land for everyone?”

Alinor looked at her bright-faced daughter. “I know,” she said. “There’s a lot of talk, but there’s no new world for people like you or me.”

“You mean women,” Alys said sharply. “Poor women. Nothing ever changes for us.”

Alinor heard the bitterness in her daughter’s voice and felt that she was to blame for having brought her into this world that favored men. “It’s true,” she said.

The girl knelt for her mother’s blessing, and Alinor stooped and kissed her daughter’s neat white cap. Alys rose up, and went out of the door. Alinor sat for a little longer on her stool at the table, facing the corner of the room where she kept her herbs and oils, and the little wooden box where she kept her treasures. It held her mother’s recipe book for remedies, the agreement for the cottage between her missing husband and Mr. Tudeley, and her red leather purse of valueless old coins. It did not seem much for a lifetime of hard work. Then she whispered to herself: “A woman like you in a place like this,” and rose up, and took her basket, and her little knife, and went out to cut herbs while they still were damp with dew.

It was a cool dawn, with strands of gray mist lying along the channels in the mire, melting the boundaries between land and sea and air. Alinor shivered in the morning chill, drawing a shawl over her head as she shooed the hens out of the cottage and down to the shoreline. She looked across her little garden to the harbor, where the water was shrinking away, draining from pools into swiftly ebbing channels, leaving acres of wet mud, sandbanks, and reedbeds. As the tide inched back to the sea, the little harbor birds, dunlin and knot, chased after it, running in and out of the waters on their long legs, suddenly flying up with their rippling calls, and then settling again in a flurry, to run to and fro. At the harbor mouth Alinor could see the flat gray of the sea, and the indigo line of the faraway horizon. From the far side of the mire came the thunderous rumble of the mill wheel turning. If James had already gone to France and was homeward bound, he would have a calm crossing. If he had gone to the king at Carisbrooke Castle, he could sail back to Sealsea harbor in three or four hours. If he had gone to meet the Prince of Wales at sea with his ships, then he could have gone out to sea and back within the day. Since she did not know where he had gone, there was no point in looking to the dark horizon for his sail. As a fisherman’s wife she knew this well, but still she looked for him.

It was going to be another hot day, once the mist burned off. He had said that he would return within the month, but she knew him so little, she did not know if he was a young man who would remember a promise made to a woman, especially to a poor woman of no importance. Perhaps he was in danger, and could not choose when to go or stay? Or perhaps he was a man who was careless with his words, as men are, and he was not counting the days as she was counting them? Or perhaps the kiss had meant nothing, and the words had meant nothing either.

She turned her back on the harbor and bent over her herb beds, picking the herbs that were unfurling their fresh leaves, tying them in little posies and tossing them in her basket. When she had harvested one bed, she moved on to another until she had picked everything that was fresh, and then she went back into the house and tied them on the strings that looped from one beam to another. The earlier dry posies she took down and put into little wooden boxes, each labeled with Rob’s careful script with the name for the herb, sometimes the Latin names, sometimes the old names that her mother had taught her: eyebright, heartsease, and scurvy grass.

She brushed the crumbs from the wooden plates out of the front door and felt the warmer air. The sun was burning off the mist. She watched the garden birds fly down to feed—the robin that lived in the garden all year round and a pair of blackbirds that nested and reared their young in the blackthorn hedge that ran behind the little cottage. She rinsed the two cups, from her breakfast with Alys, in the last of the clean water, then tipped the bowl over the plants at the side of the door. She picked up the empty bucket and walked to the dipping pond, on the inland side of the bank, holding the worn post as she lowered the bucket into the clean water. She heaved the slopping pail back up the steps, stood the bucket by the open door, and ladled water into the three-legged iron cooking pot that sat among the red embers. She took one of the fresh bunches of herbs and set it to seethe in the pot. Her mother’s recipe called for some honey, and she spooned a careful measure from the jar where the comb oozed. Leaving it to simmer, she went outside with a sacking bag, an old flour bag from the mill, to gather driftwood for the fire. She walked along the line of the high tide, picking up twigs for kindling and bigger pieces of wood. When the sack was filled she hefted it onto her back and walked back to the cottage.

The water in the pot was almost boiled away, the herbs a dark green sludge in the bottom. Alinor poured it into a tray and set it to dry on the table; threw a piece of clean muslin over it to keep off the flies.

The sun was rising through the thick banks of rain clouds, and it was getting hot. Alinor put on her working hat, with the wide brim over her face and the fall of linen over the back of her neck to protect from the dangerous glare of the morning sun, and went back out to the garden at the side of the cottage where she grew vegetables: peas, beans, and cabbages. As she dug at the sturdy deep roots of a dock leaf, her hens saw her, and came rushing up from the shoreline. They scratched companionably, looking for worms and little insects in the turned earth, clucking contentedly at Alinor, and she scolded them gently. “You go down to the shore, don’t you scrape up my plants.” One copper-brown hen pecked up a little worm and made a funny grunting noise of appreciation. Alinor, alone under the arching sky with the empty harbor before her, laughed as if she were with friends. “Was that good, Mistress Brown?” she asked. “Tasty?”

Alinor worked all the morning, and as the sun started to slowly descend from the midday high, she went into the house, cut four slices of day-old rye bread, took two smoked fish from the rack at the chimney, a pitcher of small ale from the cool damp corner, and put them all in a little sack to eat with Alys before they started gleaning.

The tide was flowing in, there was only a quiet hiss from the hushing well as Alinor walked along the raised bank to her brother’s house and found him picking plums from the fruit tree. “Want some?”

“I’ll take some for Alys’s dinner. I’ll come tomorrow and pick the rest for bottling and drying.”

“It’s a good year. Look at the branches.”

They admired the tree, the branches bowed down with the purple fruit. Alinor ate one. “Sweet,” she said. “Very good.”

“Going to the mill for gleaning?”

She nodded, glancing at the ferry bobbing as the in-rushing tide met the flowing river.

“I’ll take you over,” he offered. He led the way down the steps to where the ferry was moored to a post, pulling on the rope and sidling in the tide. He untied it and looped the painter around the overhead rope, which stretched from one side of the swirling deep water to the other.

“Running fast,” Alinor observed.

“It’s been such a wet summer,” he said. “I’ve never known the rife so high at harvesttime. Come on.”

She stepped down to the raft and held to the rail that ran on either side. He smiled at her fear. “Still agauw? The ferryman’s daughter?”

She shrugged at her fears. “I know. I’ll walk home on the wadeway.”

“You’ll get wet feet,” he warned her. “It’s high till dusk tonight.”

“Hold tight to the rope,” she begged, as the current took the raft and pushed it farther up the rife, and the rope on the overhead line went taut and the ferry rocked.

Ned went hand over hand to haul the ferry across the swiftly flowing rife. They reached the other side in moments and she was off the raft and up the steps to the safety of dry land before he had even tied up. “See you tonight,” he said. “You’d best come on the ferry. No point getting soaked.”

“Thank you,” she replied, and started off down the track along the shoreline to where the mill and the granary stood beside the stone quay with the deep water lapping at the quayside.

For once, it was peaceful in the mill yard. The water wheel was stilled; there was no rushing torrent in the millrace. The millpond was quietly filling, the great sea gates pushed open by the incoming waters, the little waves lapping up the pond wall, the water level rising steadily. Inside the mill the great grinding stones were parted and the cherrywood cogs detached. The miller was bagging up flour, and the two lads were humping it to the quayside, ready for the high-tide ships of the flour merchants.

“Good day, Mr. Miller,” Alinor called as she went past the open door.

He was white as a ghost from his flour-dusted hair to the hem of his white apron. But his smile was warm. “Good day, Mrs. Reekie! Come for gleaning?”

“Yes, and I’ve brought Alys’s dinner.”

“She’s a lucky girl to have you for a mother. Will you come to the harvest supper? Shall we have a dance, you and I?”

Alinor smiled at the old joke. “You know I won’t dance. But, of course I’m coming.”

She waved her hand, and walked across the yard between the mill and the house, through the gate at the north of the yard and into the wheat fields. The fields looked shorn, the wheat stooks dotted around on the stubble. As Alinor went through the open gate, a flock of rooks rose up before her, one after another like a string of black rosary beads.

Alys was in the line of binders, working alongside the other women laborers, following the reaping gang of men. Most of the men were stripped to the waist, their backs blistered from the sun, but the others, godly men, some of them puritans, wore their shirts modestly tucked into their breeches and tied at their sweating throats. The men were working in a line across the field in a punishingly hard rhythm: grasping a handful of wheat stalks, bending and slashing at the stalks with the sickle, straightening up and throwing the bunch behind them. Alys and other women followed them, gathering the cut stalks into armfuls, tying them with a twisted stalk, piling them in a heap for the wagon. Every so often Mrs. Miller or her daughter, Jane, came out of the house, crossed the yard, and stood at the gate to the field, her hand shielding her eyes, glaring across the field to make sure that the reapers were doing their job, and not leaving uncut wheat for the gleaners.

Alys was pale with exhaustion, her hands and arms scratched from hugging the stooks, her apron filthy, her hair falling loose under her working cap, walking in the line with the other women, bending and gathering the cut wheat, straightening up, tying it, stacking it, bending again. She was working alongside women from Sealsea Island that she had known from childhood; but there were also day laborers come from inland, and half a dozen women were travelers, a harvesting gang that went from one farm to another through the summer. They were paid by the job, not by the day, and they set an exhausting pace that Alys had to match: she was struggling to keep up.

Alinor waited at the gate and was joined by half a dozen other women who had the gleaning rights to the mill fields. They stood together, commenting on the richness of the crop and the heat of the day until Jane rang the bell in the mill courtyard and everyone in the field turned from their work to the shade of the hedgerow and the dinner break. The gleaners went into the field, some to meet husbands or children with their dinner. Alinor walked across the spiky stubble and wordlessly held out the pitcher of small ale to her daughter. Alys drank deeply.

“Thirsty work,” Alinor said, looking at her beautiful daughter with concern.

“Filthy work,” the girl said wearily.

“Nearly done,” her mother promised her. “Come and sit.”

The men gathered into one group, passing around flasks of ale, eating the food they had brought from their homes. The women gathered at a little distance. One woman untied a swaddled baby from her back and put him to the breast. Alinor smiled at her. It was one of the babies that she had delivered in the spring.

“Is he feeding well?” she asked.

“God be praised, he is,” the woman replied. “And I still name you in my prayers for coming to me in my time. D’you want to see him?”

Alinor took the baby into her arms and gently pressed her lips to his warm head, marveling at the warmth of his skull, and the tiny plump hands.

No one else spoke as they drank and ate their first food since breakfast. When Alys had finished the thick slices of bread and the last of the smoked fish, Alinor returned the baby to the young mother, and she and Alys shared the plums from Ned’s plum tree.

“I’m surprised at you eating fruit in the sunshine, Mistress Reekie,” one of the women remarked. “Aren’t you afraid of the gripe?”

“These are from my brother’s garden. We’ve eaten them every summer and never taken ill,” Alinor explained.

“I’d never eat fruit with the sap in it,” one of the older women declared.

“I stew most of them,” Alinor agreed. “And I pickle some, and make jam, and I dry a lot of them.”

“I’ll buy two jars of your stewed plums,” one of the women offered. “And a jar of dried plums. We had your dried gooseberries at Christmas and everyone wanted more. How much’ll they be this year?”

Alinor smiled. “Tuppence a jar, for them both. I’ll bring them to you with pleasure,” she said. “It’s been a good year for gooseberries too.”

“I’ll take a pound of them,” another woman offered.

The women stretched out their weary legs. Some of them lay back on the prickly stubble.

“Tired?” Alinor asked her daughter quietly.

“Sick of it,” the girl said irritably.

The bell, warning them that rest time was over, clanged in the mill courtyard. Mrs. Miller was a strict timekeeper. The men got to their feet, cleaned their sickles, and started to walk to the mill yard. They would bring the wagon, fork up the stooks, and take them to the barn for threshing.

Alinor handed a bag with a shoulder strap to Alys. The women who held gleaning rights on the mill fields formed themselves into a line at the foot of the field. They were careful to spread out fairly so that no one woman was given a broader sweep than another and they looked jealously down the line to see that no one was taking an advantage. Mothers and daughters, like Alinor and Alys, took care to stand wide apart to give themselves the maximum area. The line moved forward.

Wearily, the women who had worked all day for cash, now labored for themselves, bending to the ground to pick up every fallen ear of wheat, even individual grains. In some strips an inexperienced reaper had missed a stand of wheat, or crushed it down as he stood, and there the gleaners could snatch handfuls of grains. Slowly, they moved like an advancing line of infantry across a battlefield, never getting ahead of each other, holding their advance, holding the spacing between them. Alinor, her eyes fixed on the ground, bending and picking, bending and picking, was almost surprised to come to the blackthorn hedge at the end of the field, and realize that they had finished. Her bag was filled with ripe pale heads of wheat.

“Both ways,” one of the older women declared.

Alys muttered resentfully, but Alinor nodded. Nothing should be wasted, nothing should be missed. “Both ways,” she agreed.

The women changed the line, as well as turning the direction, so those who had been on the hedge at the left and those who had been on the extreme right were now at the center, so that no one would walk the same part of the field twice. Once again, they edged forward, their eyes on the ground, their hands snatching at heads of wheat, even scraping individual grains, pressing everything into their gleaners’ bags, some of them filling their upheld aprons. Only when they came to the hedge at the end of the field again did they straighten their backs and look around them.

The sun was low in the sky, sinking into drifts of gold and rose clouds. Alinor looked at Alys’s heavy bag and her own. “Good,” was all she said.

They walked together to the mill yard. Mrs. Miller had the scales out in the yard and was weighing the gleaners’ wheat, and marking the weight on a tally stick, as a record. Alinor and Alys tipped the contents of their bags into her scale and snapped off the few stalks. Mrs. Miller added weights on the scale until she said begrudgingly: “Three pounds two ounces.” Her daughter, Jane, marked the hazel stick with three thick gouges around one end and two small cuts at the foot and then sliced it in half with a little hatchet. Alinor took their half with a word of thanks, and put it in her bag. Jane Miller tossed the other into the tally stick box as a record of what the Reekie women were owed in flour, when the wheat was milled.

“Bring some of your cordial when you come tomorrow for harvest home,” Mrs. Miller told Alinor, as she turned to weigh another gleaner’s load. “My back feels like it’s on fire, bending over this all day.”

Alinor nodded. “I’m coming to glean in the afternoon. I’ll bring it then,” she said.

The water in the harbor was low, the millpond brimming, gates gently bumping together, pushed shut by the dark weight of the water in the deep pond. As the weary women walked to the white-painted gate of the yard, one of the miller’s young men walked around the millpond wall, balanced like an acrobat on the top of the gates, the dark waters lapping below him. He shouted boldly: “Good night! See you tomorrow!” to Alys.

All signs of her fatigue fell away in a moment. She could have been a princess hearing a tribute. She did not answer him, but she inclined her head, smiled very slightly, and walked on. Alinor, watching her, saw her weary daughter transformed.

“Who was that?” Alinor asked, hurrying her steps to catch up.

“Who?”

“That young man?”

“Oh, I think that’s Farmer Stoney’s son, Richard,” she said.

“Farmer Stoney from Birdham?”

“Yes.”

“Handsome young man,” Alinor observed.

“I’ve never noticed,” Alys said with immense dignity.

“Quite right,” her mother replied with a hidden smile. “But I noticed, and I can tell you: he’s a very handsome young man. He’s the only son, isn’t he?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Alys exclaimed, and strode ahead of her mother along the track to the ferry, so that when Alinor came up, Alys was standing beside her uncle Ned in the ferry, one hand on the rope, waiting for her mother.

Alinor paused on the bank, as some of the other women and a few of the reapers hurried past her to take their place on the ferry to go to their homes on Sealsea Island. Alys went among them, collecting the copper coins and calling out the promises to pay to Ned. Only when the ferry was full and ready to go did Alinor go down the bank and take tight hold of the side of the craft, and she was first off at the other side. The women laughed at her. “She’d be no good as a barker for you!” they teased Ned. “Nobody would ever take your ferry if they saw your sister’s face!”

Alinor raised a hand at the old joke. “I’ll come to pick plums tomorrow before gleaning,” she said to Ned.

He nodded. “I’m always here,” he said. “The good lord knows that I am always here.”

Alys and Alinor went about their chores in the shadowy cottage in weary silence. Alys opened the door for the gently clucking hens and they hurried into their corner of the cottage to roost. Both women drank a cup of small ale, and then Alinor washed her face and hands in a bowl of water and Alys followed her, using the same water and throwing it out of the door on the lavender and marigold plants. She knelt before her mother as Alinor combed out her fair hair and then plaited it for the night, resting her hand on her daughter’s head for a blessing. Alys, still on her knees, turned towards the bed and said her prayers, burrowed in like a mole.

“Sweet dreams,” Alinor said gently, and saw her daughter’s hidden smile.

Alinor twisted her own thick locks in a knot and tucked them under her nightcap, laid her shirt and gown over her stool, and got into bed in her linen shift. They lay side by side in bed together.

“I’m as tired as a dog,” Alys remarked, and fell asleep at once, like a child.

Alinor lay silent, her eyes wide open in the darkness. Perhaps tomorrow he would come back. Or perhaps the day after. Then she too fell asleep.

Just after midnight she started up at the loud knocking on the door. Her first frightened thought was that her husband, Zachary, had come home and was pounding on the door in a drunken rage, as he used to do. Then, as she jumped from the bed and went to the door and shot the bolt, she thought, confused by sleep, that the war had started again and the soldiers for the army, or the cavalry of the king, were knocking down her door. Her last thought, as she threw the door open, was that it was James, come for her; but there, on the doorstep, was Farmer Johnson of Sealsea.

“Thank God you’re here. It’s Peg,” he said shortly. “You must come, Mrs. Reekie. Her time’s come early, I think. We need you at once. I came as fast as I could. Come now! Can you come now?”

At once her dreams and fears vanished. “Farmer Johnson.”

“I’ve got a pillion saddle on my horse waiting for us at Ferry-house. Come! Please come!”

“One moment.” She closed the door on him and in the darkness pulled on her skirt and jacket that were laid on the stool. She found her cap, and pulled it on.

“What is it?” Alys asked sleepily from the bed.

“Mrs. Johnson’s baby, come early,” Alinor said pushing her feet into her boots.

“D’you want me to come with you?”

“No, you go to work in the morning. If it all goes well—God willing—I’ll meet you at gleaning and harvest home. If I’m kept overnight, you stay at Ferry-house.”

Alys nodded in the darkness, turned over, and went back to sleep immediately. Alinor picked up her sack, a box of dried herbs and some bottles from the cupboard, and stepped out into the cool nighttime air. The tide was coming in, seeping over the mud and climbing the bank towards the cottage and the sleeping girl.

“Quickly,” said Farmer Johnson. “What’s the safest way?”

“Follow me,” Alinor told him, and led the way, sure-footed along the top of the bank, the waves lapping in the darkness below them till she could see the ferry-house, her family home, as a dark bulk on the skyline. Her brother, woken by Farmer Johnson’s gallop up the road, held a lantern for the two of them to walk round the front of the house by the dark rife, to the road, and then led the farmer’s horse to the stone mounting block beside the track to Sealsea village.

Farmer Johnson heaved himself into the saddle and Alinor stepped onto the mounting block and then seated herself behind him, her feet on the pillion step, her back supported by the saddle.

“Hold tight,” her brother said, and she nodded and took a grip of the farmer’s wide belt.

“Look for Alys in the morning,” she replied. “She’s working at the mill tomorrow. Make sure she has some breakfast.”

“Aye. God bless you, and the godly work you do.”

The farmer clicked to his big horse and the animal started to walk, and then went into a shambling canter. Alinor held tight, one hand wrapped inside his belt, the other gripping her sack of precious bottles and herbs clinking in her lap. The mud track to Sealsea village was deeply rutted and puddled, but they stayed on the grassy verge, and as the sky lightened they could see the way ahead of them. After two miles, the horse recognized his home, dropped down into a walk, and turned into the gateway of the farm. Ahead of them the riders could see the moving lights in the downstairs windows as the servants went to and fro. Alinor felt the familiar sense of excitement at what was before her: anxiety that she would be faced with some complication of birth, confidence in the vocation that she had learned from her mother, that she had taught herself, that she was born to do. She had an illuminating sense of standing at the gateway to life and death and feeling no fear.

The farmer pulled up the horse and turned in the saddle, holding Alinor’s sack of physic as she stepped down to the mounting block, and then he handed her the precious sack and dismounted himself. “This way, this way,” he said, leaving the horse to stand at the door as he hurried Alinor inside.

“Here’s Goodwife Reekie,” he said to an older woman, whom Alinor recognized as his mother.

“At last!” she replied rudely. “You took your time!”

“Good morning, Mistress Johnson,” Alinor said politely. “How does Margaret do?”

“Poorly,” the woman said. “She can’t sit down and she won’t lie down either. She’s tiring herself out walking up and down.”

“For God’s sake!” Farmer Johnson cried out. “Why didn’t you make her rest? Goodwife Reekie, make her rest!”

“Let me see her,” Alinor said calmly. “Farmer Johnson, would you ask them to boil up some water and bring it in a bowl? With soap and linen? And some hot mulled ale for her to drink? And d’you have any wine you can heat up for her?”

“I’ll get it, I’ll get it all!” he assured her. “Boiled water in a bowl and mulled ale and mulled wine. I’ll get it all.”

He rushed towards the farmhouse kitchen, roaring for servants, as his mother led Alinor up the wooden stairs to the master bedroom.

The room was stifling hot, a fire of heaped logs in the fireplace and the windows shuttered and covered with tapestries. In the center of the room, one hand gripping the post of the bed, was Margaret Johnson, very pale in a stained nightgown. Her own mother was pulling ineffectually at her hands and urging her to lie down on the bed and rest, for assuredly this could go on for days, and she would die of exhaustion before the baby came, or die of hunger during labor.

“Alinor,” she said in a little gasp as Alinor came through the door.

“Now, Margaret, how are you going on?” Alinor spoke gently.

“My waters have broken; but now nothing is happening,” she said. “And I am so hot, and so grieved. I think I have a fever—could I have a fever? And I am breathless.”

“You might have a fever,” Alinor said, taking in the disordered room and the ill-concealed panic of both the older women, the housemaid piling another log on the fire. “But it is very hot in here, and you are bound to be breathless if you are walking around and talking.”

“I told her so,” her mother confirmed, “but she’ll listen to no one, and we wanted them to send for you hours ago, but Mother Johnson said no, and now she’s tired herself . . .”

“Do you have any lavender in the garden?” Alinor turned to Farmer Johnson’s mother. “Could you gather me some fresh heads for the floor?” She turned to Margaret’s mother. “Could you go and see that they are bringing the water I asked for?”

“The house is at sixes and sevens,” the woman replied. “I daresay they’ve let the kitchen fire go out, and there is nothing for anyone.”

“If they can’t manage the birth of a baby, I’m sure I don’t know why,” Mrs. Johnson said rudely. “I had ten in that very bed. One was born dead and one came before its time . . .”

Alinor herded the two women from the room before Mrs. Johnson could tell more terrifying tales, and suddenly there was a silence broken only by the crackle of new wood burning in the fireplace. “It is very hot,” Alinor remarked. “Don’t put another log on.”

The maid shrank back, as Alinor drew back the tapestry and opened the window.

“Night air?” Margaret said fearfully.

Alinor dropped the tapestry so no one would see that the window was opened but a cool breeze came into the room and Margaret sighed with relief.

“Spirits’ll come in,” the maid whispered. “Don’t let spirits in!”

“No, they won’t,” Alinor ruled. “Shall we get you into a clean nightgown?”

Margaret’s mother came through the door with a bowl of water. “Thank you,” Alinor said, taking it at the threshold and heading her off. “And the mulled ale?”

“We could all do with a glass,” the woman agreed, and went back to the kitchen as Alinor closed the door.

“Why don’t you sit down and let me wash your face and hands?” Alinor suggested.

Margaret protested faintly that washing must be dangerous in her condition, but she watched Alinor add some lavender oil to the warm water. The sharp clean scent filled the room and Alinor gently patted Margaret’s temples and the back of her neck with the warm water and the oil, washed her hands, taking them gently and rubbing them with oil, and then washed her own.

Margaret sighed and then held her big belly and groaned. “I feel as if my guts are turning over.”

“So you should,” Alinor said with satisfaction.

“I don’t want to lie on the birthing bed,” Margaret protested.

“Not if you don’t want,” Alinor said pleasantly. “You can stand or sit or kneel as you like. But let’s be still and calm.”

“I have to walk about. I feel so restless!”

“Walk in a moment,” Alinor suggested. “But sit still now while they bring you some ale to drink.”

“Is it going to take a long, long time?” Margaret demanded nervously. “Is it going to be torture?”

“Oh, no,” Alinor said. “Think of a hen laying an egg. It might be quite easy.”

Margaret—who had been filled with terrors by the older women—looked incredulously at her young midwife and saw her confident smile. “Easy?” she demanded.

“It might be,” Alinor said smiling. “Perhaps.”

It was not as easy as a hen laying an egg, but it was not torture, and Margaret did not see the gates of heaven opening up before her, as her mother-in-law had confidently predicted. She gave birth to a boy, as her husband secretly wanted, and Alinor, receiving the miracle of the bloodstained, warm, squirming baby into her steady hands, wrapped him in a clean linen cloth and laid him on his mother’s breast.

“Is he all right?” Margaret whispered, as the other women in the room—the two mothers and three friends who had arrived to bear them company—drained a glass of birth ale to the mother and baby.

“He’s perfect,” Alinor said, snipping and tying off the cord. “You did very well.”

“Shall you baptize him?”

“No, he’s in no danger, and the new churchmen don’t like it done by a midwife.”

Quietly and carefully she washed Margaret’s parts and bound them up with moss. “I will come later today and every day for a week with fresh moss,” Alinor promised.

“And you will stay,” the girl insisted. “And help me with him?”

“I will.” Alinor smiled. “As long as you want me. But you will see, soon you won’t want anyone in your way. He will like you best.”

The young wife looked torn between fear and love. “Will he? Won’t he prefer . . .” her eyes slid to her overbearing mother-in-law, “. . . someone who knows what to do? Better than me?”

“You will find he is all yours,” Alinor confidently predicted. “For him there will be no one better than you. And both of you will learn what you like best together.”

“Can I see my son? Can I see him?” was the shouted demand from the other side of the bedroom door. Farmer Johnson would not be allowed into the bedroom nor see his wife for another four weeks, but his mother carried his son out to him. They could hear the loud exclamations and blessings, and his words of love for his young wife, and then Mrs. Johnson brought the baby back in again.

“He won’t have the baby baptized at church,” she said in a shocked undertone to Alinor. “Says it’s papist ritual and a God-fearing father names his own child at home. What d’you think of that, Mrs. Reekie?”

Alinor shook her head, refusing to be drawn into the new argument. “I don’t know the rights and wrongs of it.”

“And he says she’s not to be churched.” Margaret’s mother nodded at her dozing daughter. “How can that be right?”

Alinor maintained her silence: all the new church sects were determined to be rid of all ritual, to cut any traditions that were not named in the Bible. “He’s a godly man,” she said diplomatically. “He must know what’s right.”

“Says he’s prayed on it,” Margaret’s mother sniffed. “And so my girl gets up and goes about her work without a blessing. What about giving thanks for escaping death and danger?”

“We can all give thanks that she had a safe birth,” Alinor said. “In church or out of it.”

“Thanks are due to you too,” the older woman said. “You have all your mother’s gifts. You have a way with a woman at her time that is like magic.”

It was a dangerous word to use, even in praise. The older women turned and looked at Alinor to see what she might admit.

“There’s no magic,” Alinor insisted. “It’s not magic. Don’t say such a thing! It’s just trusting to the Lord and having attended so many births.”

“And yet you don’t have a license from the bishop?”

“I had my license, of course; but His Grace hasn’t been seen in his palace at Chichester for months, not since the siege. I’ve asked, and asked, but nobody knows how a midwife gets her license now.”

Both older women shook their heads. “Well, someone has to give you a license,” Mrs. Johnson ruled. “For there isn’t a woman in all of Sealsea Island who would have anyone else attend them.”

“Though it was a pity about your sister-in-law,” Mrs. Johnson added.

An old pang of grief shook Alinor. “Yes,” she agreed. “Some things are mysteries. It’s God’s will, not ours. I’m so glad that Margaret came through safe.”

“And a man midwife is just ungodly. What shameless woman would want a man at a time like this?”

“I’m glad it went so well,” Alinor said, gathering up her things: the sharp knife for cutting the cord, the clean string for tying it off, the oils in the bottles, the tincture of arnica and the St. John’s Wort for the bruising and the pain. “I’ll come back this afternoon.”

“Come in the morning?” Margaret’s sleepy voice came from the bed.

“It’s morning already,” Alinor said, lifting the corner of the tapestry and seeing the pearly light of the summer day. “Your first morning as a mother. Your baby’s first dawn.”

“You’ll see a lot more dawns,” her mother-in-law predicted grimly. “All the babies in our family wake early.”

The young wife was drowsy on her pillow in the best bed. “Don’t be late.” She opened her eyes and smiled at Alinor. “I shall look for you this afternoon.”

“I won’t be late,” Alinor promised. “You can count on me.”

Farmer Johnson sent her home in the clear dawn light, riding pillion on his horse behind the groom, to her brother’s ferry-house. Alinor was seated high on the plow horse, a tiny crescent moon like a clipped silver coin in the light sky above her, water rising in the rife, when she saw a figure on the other side. He was riding down the road towards the ferry. She recognized him at once: James Summer, the man she loved, come home to her as he promised, within the month.

Alinor dismounted from the farmer’s horse, said a word of thanks to the stable lad, and stood and watched her brother pull the ferry over the water, hand over hand on the overhead rope. She saw James lead his horse down the bank, and its nervous steps onto the rocking ferry. The two men crossed in silence, and then they went either side of the horse to lead it off the ferry and up the cobbled bank on the island side.

“He should know it by now, he’s done it a dozen times,” Ned remarked to James, patting the horse. “I’ve seen horses get used to cannon and musket fire within a day. He’s an island horse, he knows the ferry, he’s just playing with you.”

“Did you see cavalry in the war?” James asked. He turned and gave Alinor a smile just for her, shielded beneath his hat. “Good day to you, Goodwife Reekie. You’re up very early?”

“Yes. At Marston Moor,” Ned said, naming Oliver Cromwell’s first great victory. “That was all in the hands of the cavalry. And many of us had never seen fighting but had only practiced standing and facing a charge, marching to the right, falling back and reforming, in the fields. But the horses bore it as if they knew it was the right thing to do.”

“So I heard,” James said blandly. He paid over his penny for the one-way passage and Ned tucked the coin into his pocket.

“I think your lord was on the other side,” Ned goaded the stranger. “Sir William? On the losing side. God commanded the victory to the godly and Sir William was in the wrong. He wasn’t lord of everything, that day.”

James sidestepped the challenge. “I didn’t know him in those days. I was appointed only last month to tutor Walter and prepare him for Cambridge.”

“From what?” Ned asked suspiciously.

“I beg your pardon?”

“What were you doing before?”

“Teaching another family,” James lied easily.

“And you teach my nephew too, don’t you? I’m Rob’s uncle, Mrs. Reekie’s brother.”

“I do,” James said cheerfully. “And I know of you, of course, Mr. Ferryman. Robert is a very keen clever young man. When Master Walter goes to university I should think Robert could get an apprenticeship, perhaps as a clerk to a physician. He knows more about medicines and herbs and oils than I do. He’s a very unusual young man.” He slid a smile at Alinor, who still sat on the farmer’s horse, looking at the two men.

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Ned said proudly. “And she learned from our mother, and she from hers and so it goes backwards.”

James smiled at Alinor again, his eyes searching her face, wondering at her silence. Still, she said nothing. He did not know, but she was thanking God for the sight of him, marveling that he had come, as he had said he would, conscious of her own simple joy at his handsome face, of the rich tumble of his dark curly hair, of the beautiful line of his mouth. He had come as he said he would—that was what surprised her most. He had kept his promise, and the warm rising of her desire felt like gratitude that he should be the man that she hoped, that he should be fit for her love, as natural and as unstoppable as the incoming summer tide.

“She’s been out all night attending a birth,” Ned spoke for her, and then turned to her: “Is all well? God bless them in their travail?”

“Yes, she has a boy,” Alinor answered, recalled to herself. “Strong and well made. She’s well herself. I’ll go back to see them later.”

“And will you rest now?” James asked her.

She smiled at his ignorance. “No, no, of course not. I have all my work to do in the cottage and garden,” she said. “And this afternoon I’ll come here to pick the plums, go to visit the mother and baby, and then go to the mill for gleaning and for the harvest home. Is Sir William coming to see the harvest in?”

At once he realized this was a chance for them to meet. “I don’t know. I’m on my way there now. But if Sir William attends I will come with him and bring Walter and Robert.”

“I should like to see Rob,” she replied. “Sir William usually attends the harvest home at the mill. The mill is the biggest farm in his estate.”

“I hope to come then. Shall we see you there?”

“At sunset,” Alinor said.

“Is there dancing?” he asked, as if they were a girl and a boy, and he might bow before her, take her hand and lead her out.

“After dinner,” she said. “Just a fiddle and the harvest dances.”

He did not dare to ask if he might dance with her. “I should so like . . .”

“What?” she asked, instantly alert. She thought of his hand on her waist; she thought of their steps going together.

“To see you at harvest home,” he said lamely. He nodded to her brother, bowed to her, climbed on the mounting block, and rode his horse down the track to the Priory without looking back.

“Pleasant enough, though fine as a lord,” Ned said carefully, watching her.

The face that she turned to him was blandly serene. “I’m so glad he’s teaching Rob,” was all she said. “It’s a great chance for him.”

“Started work but went away the very next week,” he pointed out.

“He left them studies to do. Rob told me they read in the library every morning and do the exercises he set them: translating and mathematics and map reading—all sorts.”

“Is he a godly man?” he pressed her.

“Oh, I should think so. He preached a fine sermon in Sir William’s chapel and stood before a table. He didn’t use the altar at all, and all the gold and silver and all the fine embroidered cloth must have been taken down and packed away. There were no tapestries or statues or anything fine. He’s one of the new men.”

“Well enough,” he said, denying the uneasiness he felt at the brightness of her face and the way that the gentleman had looked at her, as if he were surprised to find a woman like her in a place like this. “Well enough, I suppose.”

She nodded. She was completely calm. Ned could not reach her; he could not understand her.

“Seems very friendly,” he said, as if it were a failing.

“I don’t find him so. He’s just his lordship’s tutor. He just takes Master Walter out and about to see the things he should know, and Rob with him.”

“Handsome man,” he remarked.

“Do you think so?” she asked, just as Alys had said to her of Farmer Stoney’s son at the mill. “I hadn’t noticed.”

As soon as James Summer arrived at Mill Farm with Sir William, Master Walter, Rob, and the groom, he knew it was a mistake to come. It was obvious that they were the family from the great house, the landlords: riding out, ready to be amused by peasant celebrations. Sir William was on his charger and Walter rode his father’s hunter, James was on a high-bred black riding horse, and even Rob had the handsome cob once used to pull the ladies’ carriage. The four of them, overhorsed, overdressed, followed by the groom, rode through the white-barred gate into the mill yard as if they were royalty: condescending to observe village customs, patronizing the people’s sports.

Mr. Miller came out into the yard and bowed low to his landlord, his little son Peter beside him. Mrs. Miller burst out of the kitchen door, flinging off her stained work apron, trying to look as if she were a lady of leisure and had not been basting the roasting ham. Jane raced after her, pulling her best cap over her dark hair. James flinched at the bleached whiteness of the Miller women’s best aprons, the stiffness of the frilled lace, and the falseness of their smiles.

Workingmen who declared themselves godly, who knew well enough that Sir William had sided with the king, reluctantly doffed their caps and nodded their heads to their landlord, then turned away. They disapproved of him, of the old order, and the old ways. There would be no corn dollies and dancing and bringing the harvest home for them. But those who liked the old ways, and who liked a drink and were looking forward to a feast, set up a cheer for Sir William, hoping that he would pay for the harvest ale. The women smiled and waved at Walter and curtseyed low to Sir William. They could not take their eyes from James Summer, high on his black horse, his profile like one of the carved stone angels in the old churches. Alinor took a sharp breath and looked away from him. She tried to smile at her son, but she found her cheeks were hot and she was painfully aware of the knee-high dust of the field on the hem of her homespun skirt and the damp stains at the armpits of her shirt.

“Mrs. Miller,” Sir William said pleasantly to the miller’s wife, who dropped like a sack of corn into a deep curtsey, “I’ll take a glass of your home-brewed ale.”

She bustled back to the house to fetch the best pewter tankard, while Mr. Miller stood at his landlord’s horse’s head, waiting for Sir William to condescend to dismount.

“Good harvest?” his lordship inquired, glancing at the granary and the piles of stooks waiting to be threshed, the clean-swept threshing floor.

“Medium,” the miller said carefully. He would have to pay a tithe from the harvest to his landlord and another to the church. There was no point in boasting.

“You will stay for dinner, my lord?” Mrs. Miller asked breathlessly, nodding to her daughter to pour the first of the harvest ale, handing her the precious tankard. “Your lordship, and of course Master Walter and . . .” The invitation tailed off as she took in the glamorous looks of the stranger and longed for an introduction.

“This is Mr. Summer,” his lordship announced generally. “A Cambridge man, my son’s tutor.”

There was a little ripple of interest. That he was a Cambridge man suggested that he was a godly man. Everyone knew that the heart of reform was Cambridge, while Oxford had been the wartime headquarters of the king. James Summer tipped his hat to acknowledge the attention and made sure that he was not looking towards Alinor. She was looking carefully down at her dusty boots tied up with string.

“All welcome,” the miller said grandly, overcoming his unease at what dinner for the gentry would cost him in the long run.

Sir William dismounted heavily and his groom took his horse. The miller’s lad, Richard Stoney, came forward and took the others and led them into the stables. Rob went to his mother and his sister among the gleaning women, kneeling for Alinor’s blessing and then bobbing up to hug her.

Alinor kissed him, conscious of her sweating face and dirty hands, and then curtseyed to Master Walter, his lordship, and the tutor. James glanced at her, but could not cross the yard to approach her with everyone staring at him.

“We’re just bringing in the last wagon,” Mrs. Miller said, pleased. “You can see it come in, your lordship. Mr. Summer, you must know that we grow the best wheat in Sussex here.”

“A middling good harvest,” her husband supplemented quickly. “A lot of blight this year from the rain . . . terrible rain. And that’s before the rats get at it.”

“So I see,” James said pleasantly, glancing through the granary doors.

“And Alys Reekie is Harvest Queen,” Mrs. Miller said begrudgingly. “The young people chose her. They wouldn’t have any other, though there were girls with better claims, God knows.”

James, looking at the beautiful girl with interest, could see that there was no contest for the title of queen of the harvest. With her regular clear features and her dark blue eyes, she was far and away the prettiest girl among the gleaners. They had taken off her modest white cap, and her golden hair was tumbled down over her shoulders. They had thrown an embroidered white smock over her working clothes, and placed a crown of wheat on her fair hair, gold against the gold.

“And Richard Stoney is Harvest King.”

“Are we ready?” Mr. Miller demanded as the last cart rumbled in. As the men hurried to unload it, Richard Stoney came from the stables and received a crown of plaited wheat on his brown curly head.

Mr. Miller ceremonially closed the barn doors, the young women gleaners, Jane Miller among them, and the young men reapers lined up before it, as if to block entry, and Alys and Richard went to their places on the far side of the yard with the lads catcalling and the girls singing out Alys’s name. His lordship, knowing the harvest games, waited for the young couple to stand side by side, and called to them: “Ready?”

“Aye!” Richard answered for them both.

Sir William shouted: “Go!” and the young couple dashed across the cobbled yard towards the barn doors, dodging and twisting as their friends sprang towards them, pelting them with jugs of water and handfuls of chaff, trying to prevent them entering the barn. They fought their way through, pushing and ducking, swerving and gasping. Richard grabbed Alys’s hand to pull her from a mob of boys as the adults cheered them on, until finally each of them got a hand on the great iron ring of the barn door, pulled it open, and declared that the harvest was safely home.

Everyone cheered. Alinor saw the bright looks that the young couple exchanged, and the way they immediately turned away from each other to return to their friends, Richard exuberantly bouncing towards the harvest lads, who jostled him and pulled at his straw crown, as Alys ran to the girls, flushed and giggling. Mrs. Miller served the harvest ale, first cup to Sir William, and the thirsty harvesters gathered around for their cups as Alinor turned to find James at her side.

“Your daughter is a very beautiful girl,” he observed.

“She is,” she said quietly.

They were painfully tongue-tied in company. They wanted to speak nothing but secrets; and they could not be seen to whisper. “You got home safely from your travels?” was all she could say.

“Yes,” he said awkwardly. “Yes, I did. Did you go back to the young mother? Is she well?”

“I went this afternoon, and I will go again tomorrow,” she confirmed. “I like to visit a young mother with her newborn baby, even if she has her own mother at her side.”

He was about to ask if he might come to see her at the cottage tonight, after harvest home; but he broke off. Her brother was coming down the track from the ferry to the mill yard, his old dog, Red, winding around his feet.

“I have to see you,” James said urgently. “Not here. Not in front of all these people. Alone.”

“I know, I know,” she breathed.

“Can I come tonight?” he whispered; but before she could answer Ned walked up to his sister, and acknowledged James with a brief nod.

“Good day, sir,” Ned said abruptly. “I see you came to visit the poor people of the parish. I suppose you like the old ways: Harvest Queen and Harvest King.”

“As long as the harvest games are modest.” James tried to steady himself.

Ned turned to Alinor and demanded: “I take it you won’t be dancing?”

“No. But Alys can, can’t she?”

Ned frowned and was about to refuse.

“There can be no objection to dancing at harvest home,” James interrupted. “Oliver Cromwell himself does not object to a glass of wine and godly merriment.”

“Not pagan dances,” Ned said stiffly. “And harvest home with the Harvest King and Queen is both pagan and monarchical.”

James tried to choke back a laugh but Ned was red to his ears and looked angry. “My sister’s situation is awkward.” Ned turned on him. “You wouldn’t know, Mr. Summers, but this is a small island, and nobody has anything to do but gossip.”

“No one says anything against me,” Alinor argued. “And everyone knows that Alys is your niece and a godly child. She can dance with her friends, Brother. Surely she can!”

“As you wish,” he said sulkily. “But you should both leave before the harvesters get drunk.”

“Of course. You know I always do.”

They had set up trestle tables laden with dishes in the mill yard. Sir William stood at the head of the table and the miller and his wife stood at the foot. “Will you say grace, Mr. Summer?” he invited.

James had to leave Alinor without another word, take his place, put his hands together, and say a prayer.

Ned listened suspiciously for any old-fashioned doctrine, but James Summer recited the grace in simple comprehensible English, as plain and unvarnished as any army preacher.

“Amen!” said everyone, and seated themselves all in a jumble, on the benches and the stools, except for Sir William, who took the great Carver chair, brought from the house, at the head of the table. The miller sat on one side of him and James Summer on the other. Rob was seated farther down the table opposite Walter, Mrs. Miller at the foot with her daughter at her right hand. Sir William drank a glass of the Millers’ ale, but did not dine. He sat for a little while and then nodded to his groom for his horse. “So, you have my good wishes, and I will leave you,” he announced. He glanced at James Summer. “The boys can stay to dance if they like,” he said.

“I’ll bring them home in good time,” James promised him.

Sir William closed one eye in a knowing wink. “Let them have a cup of ale or two and a dance with a pretty girl,” he said. “Maybe a kiss and a romp behind a haystack if the fathers are looking the other way!” Some of the nearby men guffawed at the bawdy suggestion, but most were coldly silent.

James did not dare look towards Ned, who was bristling with indignation. “No, no, they will behave themselves,” he said repressively.

His lordship laughed, as if to say that he did not care about good behavior at harvest home, and stepped up on the mounting block to wait for his horse. His groom brought his charger to the block and held it while his lordship heaved himself into the saddle, gathered up the reins, and nodded to the Millers and the diners in the yard. “Good Harvest!” he said, and smiled when they raised the cups and mugs and repeated the toast. Then he turned and rode away, his groom following him.

Alinor felt her brother’s eyes on her. “What’s the matter?” she demanded.

“It makes my blood boil, how he speaks,” Ned exclaimed. “He lost the war, his king is in our keeping, and yet still he rides around as if he owns the place—because he does still own the place! How can everything change and nothing change? How can he say that Master Walter can take a girl behind the haystacks, as if the girls are at his bidding! As if they are as light as that old goat’s mistress in London town?”

“Hush,” Alinor said swiftly. “Don’t spoil it.”

“It’s spoiled for me already,” he said furiously.

“Why the long face, Ned?” the blacksmith from Birdham called to him. “I’d have thought you’d have been pleased with the news from the North?”

Ned’s head went up like a hound hearing the hunting horn. “I’ve heard no news from the North,” he said. “What’ve you heard?”

A number of men turned to the blacksmith. “And how d’you know anyway?” someone demanded suspiciously.

“Because I shod the horse of a man carrying the newspapers, and he gave me one. He was carrying the Moderate Intelligencer for sale. Showed it to me and read it to me. Gave it me in payment.” He brandished an ill-printed twice-folded paper.

“Read it!” someone exclaimed.

“I don’t read so very well,” he confessed. “But he told me it was good news for parliament.”

“I’ll read it,” Ned said impatiently. “Give it here.”

The men gathered round him as he spread it flat on the table and, ignoring the dishes as they were brought from the mill kitchen, spelled out the words.

“From Warrington, 20th August,” he said slowly. “A godly victory.”

“Victory to the army?” someone asked.

“God be praised. Wait, wait, I’m reading it. Yes. It looks like a true report. Someone reporting from the battle. It says that Oliver Cromwell joined with John Lambert’s Horse—they mean his cavalry—in time to catch the Scots at Preston and split them in two. It’s a victory. God has saved us: the Scots are broken.”

“God bless us: we’re safe?”

“Does it say how?”

“Many dead?”

“Bad weather, hmm hmm, listen . . . I’ll read it . . .”

After a tedious and weary march, enduring many difficulties and pressures, through the unseasonableness of weather and extreme badness of ways: Lieutenant General Cromwell joining with the Northern Brigade, came on Thursday, very early in the morning, our army marched towards Preston, where the enemy lay all about, both Scottish and English. The enemy was sufficiently alarmed by the resolute going on of our men who thereupon drew up on a Moor two miles Eastward from Preston. Our forlorn—

“What?” demanded one of the women reaping gang.

“Our ‘forlorn hope,’ our men in the front, with the hardest job to do,” Ned explained, and went on reading:

. . . with gallant courage, notwithstanding the deepness of the ways and the enclosures which were much to our disadvantage, still pressed on, charged several of the enemies’ bodies, routs them and gains their ground.

“They were fighting alone?”

“Desperately,” Ned said, his brow knotted.

Our forlorn had several encounters and behaved themselves gallantly, and about 4 of the clock in the afternoon, as soon as the narrowness of the lanes and passages would permit, our Infantry comes up to the relief of our forlorn and to the heat of the battle with an extraordinary cheerfulness.

“At Preston?”

“So it says.”

“Isn’t that a long way south for the Scots to come?” someone asked nervously. “Isn’t that far south? Nearly to Manchester?”

“Yes,” Ned answered dourly. “It’s dangerously far south. We can all thank God that He sent General Cromwell to stop them there. Before they got even closer.”

“He did stop them? It says, for sure, that he did stop them?”

“I’ll read you the rest . . .”

The contention was sore and desperate, some of our men being wounded and the horses slain, for we gained hedge after hedge, which they had strongly manned and one part of the lane after the other with abundance of hazard as well as gallantry—

Ned broke off again. “It sounds as if it was deep lanes and thick hedges, difficult for an army to advance, and the enemy had manned the hedgerows against us. But listen . . .”

The enemy still gave ground, our horses forced them through the Town of Preston and cleared it.

“Preston?” someone asked again.

“Preston,” Ned confirmed.

“God save us!” said one of the women.

Ned read on. “It’s a victory,” he said. “Against great numbers. We pursued them to Warrington and put them to the sword.” His face was shining. “It says here . . .”

Our word at first was Truth, in the middle of the fight, an addition was made Truth and Faith. It was Truth we acted in and it was Faith we acted by.

He raised his head. “I wish to God that I had been there. But just hearing about it makes me closer to the Lord . . . Truth and Faith the watchwords of the battle, General Cromwell in command!”

“Mr. Ferryman, I’ll thank you to take that dirty paper off my table,” Mrs. Miller interrupted him sharply. “And not to make a fool of yourself and spoil the harvest home with war news. And send that dog of yours out of my yard.”

Nothing could wipe the joy from Ned’s face but he took up the paper as he was ordered and told Red: “Go bye. It’s great news for the parliament and the army,” he muttered.

“It’s more news of war, and some of us have had plenty of that,” she overruled him. “Besides, we have guests. And they might not care for your great news.”

Walter flushed and looked awkward, but James Summer was completely bland. “At least, there will be no fighting here,” he said smoothly. “All good men must want peace. Perhaps, Mr. Ferryman, you would read the newspaper in full to those who want to hear after dinner? I should be glad of news myself.”

“You don’t know already, sir?” Ned demanded sharply. “When you’ve been away for weeks, and just came down the Chichester road yourself? Nobody mentioned it to you, on your way here, from wherever you have been? They didn’t know there? Whoever they were? Wherever it was?”

“No, I hadn’t heard anything,” James lied. He had been told the disastrous news of the Scots’ defeat at a safe house in Southampton. His host had been white with shock: “The Scots have turned back. They won’t save him. God save the king, God save the king, for now I think he is lost.”

James had cursed the bad luck of a king mustering such unreliable allies as the Scots, but failing to launch his own son’s fleet. Led by a competent general, this invasion could have turned the course of the war. But the best royalist generals were dead or dismissed, and the king was not on the field under his standard, but in prison, sending streams of contradictory orders.

“Actually, I came along the coast, not from London,” James said smoothly, hiding his chagrin. “I knew that the army had marched north to meet the Scots; but this victory is news to me.”

“And no reason that a gentleman should explain himself to the ferryman,” Mrs. Miller interrupted. “Mr. Summer, Your Honor, would you be so good as to carve the meat, sir?”

An enormous ham was placed in front of James, as the principal guest, and he took up the knife and carved it while the miller broke into a great game pie, Mrs. Miller spooned out chicken broth into the wooden bowls and passed them around, and Jane, her daughter, went to the dairy to fetch more butter.

“Not too thick,” Mrs. Miller instructed, keeping a jealous eye on the portions.

“It’s a good-sized ham,” he praised the meat.

“My own,” she said. “And I’ll have another four of them in the chimney this winter. I take great pride in my hams.”

James fought to keep his face straight. He did not dare to glance down the table to see if Alinor had heard this boast. “You have a very handsome farm,” he recovered, passing the platter with the slices cut thin.

“There are some that will taste meat this evening at my table that won’t have it again till Christmas,” she said complacently. “I believe in the old ways. Low wages but a well-spread board: that’s how you run a good farm.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” he agreed, knowing that the wages would be cut to the bone.

“Some of our neighbors—well, I don’t know how they get by,” she confided. “Scraping a living from the hedgerows, feasting like birds on berries and raw herbs.” Her envious gaze drifted down the table to Alinor and her daughter.

Around them everyone was helping themselves to food, passing bread, meat, the broth, cooked vegetables, and pouring the specially sweetened harvest ale.

“Hard times,” James said generally.

“Take Mrs. Reekie for one . . .”

Despite his sense that he should silence the gossiping woman, James could not help but lean forward.

“On the edge of starving last winter, I swear it. Knocking on the yard door and asking for work, anything. It was charity to buy her herbs. But now, from nowhere she has a boat, her son is in service at the Priory, and her daughter is making eyes at Richard Stoney and him a farmer’s son, the only son, and certain to inherit the farm! How’s that come about? For I know for a fact that her brother has nothing but the ferry and whatever was left of his army pay, and her husband has been gone for months.”

“Robert is my pupil,” he said cautiously. “He’s a good companion to Master Walter and paid for his service. Mrs. Reekie is well liked at the Priory.”

“By who?” she exclaimed as if scoring a point. “Who likes a common cottager so much that her son is suddenly Master Walter’s companion? Two months ago, the lad was bird-scaring for me after school, and glad of the work. Barefoot half the time. So where did she get the money to buy the boat? When she couldn’t afford shoes?”

James, knowing very well that it was a bribe for her silence about him, muttered that perhaps she had savings.

“Savings?” She snorted. “She has none! I say to my husband, please God that she does not fall on the parish, for we’re a poor church, and can’t support everyone, especially women who are neither widows nor wives, with a son and a daughter to keep. We can’t support a woman who may have beauty but not enough wit to keep her husband at home.”

“She has her craft and her boat and her herbs,” he protested. “I am sure she can keep herself.”

“She has no business keeping herself!” Mrs. Miller protested. “She’s neither a widow nor a wife, and when she walks across the yard, the work stops dead as if the Queen of Sheba was dancing on my cobbles. If her husband is gone, she should declare herself a widow and remarry—if anyone will have her, given what they say about her. If he’s alive, she should get him home. Then we’d all know where we are. She’s nothing but a worry as she is. Nothing but a worry to good wives. Who would give her money for a boat? And why? It’d better not be Mr. Miller, that’s all I can say!”

James finally understood the objection to Alinor. “She can’t be a worry to an established housewife like yourself,” he said soothingly. “There can be no comparison. Look at the dinner you put on today! Look at where you are in the world! The respect you are shown! You are blessed indeed. Mr. Miller must know that in you he has a helpmeet appointed by heaven.”

She flushed a little under his attention. “It’s not easy for me,” she reminded him. “Everything that I have, whether it is respect, or hams in the chimney, I have worked for. Every penny of my little savings I’ve worked for. Years of money I have saved up. Jane’s dowry is ready, for the first good husband to offer for her. You don’t find me without a penny to my name! But where does Goodwife Reekie get her money from? Her own husband swore she had faerie luck; perhaps he spoke true for once. How can she buy a boat if not by some double dealing? I tell you one thing: whenever she has something to sell, my husband buys a dozen of them—as if he needs lavender bags!”

James managed a false laugh, as if he thought the Millers’ grudging generosity to Alinor was funny; and unwillingly, Mrs. Miller smiled too. “Ah, well,” she said, recovering her temper. “No one is more charitable than me to our poor neighbors. I pride myself on my Christian spirit.”

James nodded his head approvingly. “It does you credit,” he praised her. “A woman so great as you in the neighborhood must show compassion to those who have less.”

“Was it Mr. Tudeley who chose her boy to be server to Master Walter?” she lowered her voice. “I thought it must be him.”

“I really don’t know.”

“But why would a man like him, his lordship’s steward, give a boy like Rob such a chance?” She slid a sideways glance at him. “I trust and pray that she has not played tricks on Mr. Tudeley. They say she can . . .”

James maintained a discouraging silence.

“. . . summon,” she said: an odd ambiguous word.

“Rob was chosen for his skills in the stillroom,” James repeated. “And because he’s a very clever boy.”

She hesitated. “I know she’s a good woman. I had her myself to the birth of my boy. But times are changing and if she can’t get a license for midwifery what is she to do? She might be an honest woman now, but what of the future?”

James glanced up and found Alinor’s dark gaze was steadily fixed on the two of them, watching them as if she could hear every spiteful word. He could not smile reassuringly while Mrs. Miller was pouring poison into his ear.

“Surely the only reason she cannot get a license from the bishop is because there are no bishops in the new parliament?”

“Aye, that’s what she says,” Mrs. Miller said grudgingly. “But everyone knows she’s lost more than one poor woman, dead in childbed. Her own sister-in-law . . .”

“She would get her license if they were being issued?”

“But they’re not! And so she has no license! And anyone can say anything against her.”

“Does anyone actually speak against her?” James asked. He longed to have the courage to add: “other than jealous wives and women with half her looks?”

“It’s only natural that they should. With men being such fools, and her in and out of the house when a wife is laid up. And her looking—” she broke off. She could not bring herself to acknowledge Alinor’s luminous beauty. “Like she does,” she said lamely.

“I hadn’t noticed,” James said firmly.

“You had not? I thought you went fishing with her?”

James was horrified that he was part of the gossip whirling around Alinor. “No, I took Master Walter in the boat with Robert,” he corrected. “She rowed.”

“And the rest of it,” she said coarsely.

He looked at her, his eyes cold, thinking that he must silence this woman at once. She must be stopped from gossiping, or sooner or later the parliament spies would hear of his stay at the Priory, and they would suspect him, Sir William, and the whole ring of conspirators. “There is no rest of it.”

“I know full well that she cooked your catch on the beach.”

So he had been spied on; but he could not know how much this woman knew about him and his cause. “She did,” he said levelly. “Just as Mrs. Wheatley would cook our dinner at the Priory. I don’t think Master Walter and I could undertake to be our own cooks.”

She recoiled from the familiar scorn of a gentleman silencing a vulgar woman. “Yes, of course, excuse me, of course, I understand.”

“Sir William would not like any sort of gossip about Master Walter’s companion,” he said.

She nodded, but she could not resist going on: “But you understand that she’s a poor woman; she’s not fit company for the lord’s son, nor for you. How did you even meet her?”

“We hired her when Master Walter wanted to go fishing,” he said, denying her to protect his own secrets.

“Because her own husband said she had faerie luck, and that her children were born beautiful and without pain.”

“He said that?”

“Born, like faeries, in silence and laughed with their first breaths. I wish the best for her, poor thing,” she said. “I don’t begrudge the lavender bags. It’s a pity that she has fallen so very low. But you have to remember that she is a cottager, little better than a pauper, and from a long line of wisewomen.”

“Midwives and herbalists,” James corrected her.

“Who knows what they do? And I can’t stand the daughter.”

James took a slice of ham as the platter was returned to him, keeping his eyes down so that he did not look at Alinor. He felt nothing but nausea at the feast, and revulsion for the Millers.

“No, I imagine you can’t.”

As soon as dinner was done, all the women helped carry the dishes to the farm kitchen and scrub them clean, while the men lifted the heavy table from the trestles and cleared the yard for dancing. A couple of barrels and a door made a raised dais for the fiddler and the tabor player, and they played for the old circle dances, men on the outside, girls inside, dancing slowly one way and then another, a little pulling this way and that, as boys and girls positioned themselves so that they were opposite their desired partner. Alys took hands with Richard Stoney and they processed through the archway of upraised arms as if they were dancing on their wedding day. He was a lanky brown-haired boy with a merry smile, and he never took his eyes from the tall blond girl at his side.

Alinor watched him and glanced over to see the proud beam of his mother, and thought that next week, or the week after, she should walk over to the Stoneys’ farm and see what dowry they were wanting from a daughter-in-law. Richard was their only son—they had no other children—the farm would be inherited by him. They could look for a far wealthier bride than Alys, but they would not find a prettier girl in all of Sussex. They were indulgent parents, and if she was Richard’s choice, then they might agree to a down payment now on betrothal, and more over the next few years as Alinor earned it.

James was trapped with the Millers, watching Master Walter and Rob as they joined in the circle. The dancers laughed and twisted and turned as the fiddle ripped out an irresistible tune. Alinor knew that it was impossible for James to break free from his hosts and dance like his pupils. All the godly men and their wives had gone home as soon as dinner was over—a minister of the reformed Church should do nothing more than watch the first dance and then leave—but she could not stop herself thinking that perhaps he would come to her. For a moment, she fell into a dizzy imagining of him taking her hand and leading her into the circle. She thought of the swell of envy that would follow them, of the familiar flush of jealous rage on Mrs. Miller’s cheek, of how the young women of the parish would whisper behind their hands that of all the girls he could have chosen, of all the young wives he could have honored, of all the plump matrons who would have swooned as they took his hand for a country dance—of everyone—he led out Alinor Reekie, the tall, willowy, excessively beautiful Alinor Reekie, who cast down her eyes like a modest woman and then looked up and smiled at him like a woman in love.

Alinor was so absorbed by this reverie of social triumph that she had a little jolt of surprise when she saw James standing before her. The coincidence of daydream and reality overwhelmed her. She was certain that he had come to ask her to dance, that despite everything he would take her hands and, deaf to her whispered refusal, his hand would come around her waist and their steps would match. She gave a little gasp of delight and stepped towards him, her hand out, her eyes bright, her lips smiling a welcome.

But he was cold. “I will take Master Walter and Robert home now,” was all he said.

“You . . . don’t dance?” she stammered.

“Of course not.” He sounded stern. “And neither may you.”

“But I never do!” she protested. “I was never going to! I just thought . . .” She stepped a little closer. “You won’t stay?” she whispered. “Stay a little longer?”

He frowned at her and stepped back. “No. I certainly won’t.”

She was astounded. “What have you been hearing?” she demanded. “I know you were talking about me with Mrs. Miller. What has she been saying to you?”

He was wrong-footed, caught gossiping like one of the spiteful neighbors. “Nothing! She said nothing but what I knew already: that your husband has left you, that you find it hard to manage.”

“If she told you that I am unchaste it is a lie!” she said fiercely. “If she told you that her husband, Mr. Miller, favors me, then it is another. I never speak to him but in the yard before everyone! He never says a word but what everyone could hear. Is that what she said that makes you so . . . so . . .”

He was mortified that she had seen him listening, and had guessed what was being said. “She could have no influence on me. I wasn’t listening. I have no interest in village gossip.”

“She fears I will fall on the parish, but she is afraid of everyone falling on the parish,” Alinor said rapidly. “Her husband is church warden: he has to raise the funds for poor relief. It is her terror that they will have to provide for the poor wretches, the poor women—”

“Calm yourself. It doesn’t matter what she says—”

“It does matter! It does! It matters to me! She doesn’t care for anyone’s reputation but her own but if she told you she fears a pauper bastard from me then she is slandering me!” The tears started in her eyes, and she gave a little choked sob. “I have known her since I was a girl and she’s never had a kind word for me—”

“Hush!” he begged her. “Everyone is looking!”

He wanted to catch her in his arms and say there was no shame that could touch her. But far more he wanted to get away from her before she openly cried out. He wanted to be far away from this woman, engaged in some pointless fishwives’ squabble with her neighbor, weeping in public at a harvest home. A poor woman, with dirty fingernails, in a mud-stained gown, his friend’s meanest tenant, perhaps the chosen bawd of the manor’s steward, surrounded by her equally poor neighbors, who were all staring at him. Only the young people ignored them, whirling in a circle dance, Walter Peachey hopping about with somebody’s unsuitable daughter, as if there were no degree and order in the world anymore, as if the defeat at Preston had killed the proper distance between masters and men, between gentlemen and wretches, as well as the last hope of the royalists.

It was unbearable: “For Christ’s sake, be quiet!”

She froze at his oath, and shot him a horrified glance from under her drenched eyelashes.

“I cannot be watched,” he whispered urgently. “You know I must not be observed. I have to serve my cause. I cannot have people noticing me. I am going now. I cannot be seen with you while you are in this state. Everyone is looking at us. I cannot have you draw attention to me.”

She changed in a moment, her beauty suddenly pale and contemptuous, her tears frozen. “You go,” she advised him. “I don’t care. Go at once. I don’t care for your cause. I cared for you and I was a fool. But I won’t be a fool again.”

Without another word, with the disdain of an offended queen, she turned on her heel and walked away from him, walked to her brother, and left James all on his own, hopelessly exposed to the inquisitive stares of the mill yard, all of them wondering how Alinor Reekie—the poorest woman at the harvest home—dared to snub him: the greatest guest.

He could not sleep. He turned around and around on the smooth linen sheets of his luxurious bed in the Priory, getting more and more restless until he welcomed the fever in his pulse and the heat under his skin, and he went down to the private chapel barefoot, and laid himself down on the cold stone before the bare altar in the position of penitence: feet together stretched out, facedown, arms spread, like a prone crucifixion. He felt his desire for her like a pain in his belly. He pressed his hands to the cold stone floor and imagined the curve of her cheek against his palm. He pressed his cock, which was hard as iron, into the icy limestone and felt the relief as it shriveled against the cold. He was forbidden to think of her as a lover by his oath to his God, to his king, to his conspiracy, to his class, and to his own honor. But as the cold seeped into his hot skin he knew that he was faithless to his God, to his king, to his conspiracy, to his class, and to his honor. All he could think of was the brilliance of her eyes and the flush of her cheek when she swore that she had cared for him once, but she would not care for him again.

Even in his heat and his distress he felt a little gleam of triumph that she had told him that she cared for him. He knew it—he had known it when she came so willingly into his arms off the rickety pier—but he was a scholar and he loved words; he loved that she had said: “I cared for you.”

That was where he must leave it, he thought. He ought to feel relieved that she had confessed her love and said it was gone. He should be glad that she had dismissed him, even though her pride was impossibly misplaced—she had forgotten the social order that placed her far below him. A woman like Alinor Reekie could not complain of the behavior of a gentleman like him. But better for him, in these dangerous times, that she turned from him, than if she betrayed them both with a foolishly adoring gaze. Better that he never saw her. She might come to prayers at the Priory and present herself at the communion table, but he need do nothing but serve the communion as the minister in the private chapel. If he did not seek her out, they would never meet again.

Of course, he must see her at St. Wilfrid’s Church the very next morning, as it was Sunday, but he would be far at the front, first in the church behind Sir William, and she would be where she belonged—far behind, in the gallery with the other poor women, the faint scent of sweat and fish rising from their damp shawls. She would never dare to approach him; he would not look for her. He would never again speak to her privately and, in time, this ache of longing would pass. Men on both sides in this war had lost their limbs, were crippled for life having fought for their beliefs. He thought that he—whose war had been so privileged, so hidden—had finally taken a wound as grave as theirs.

He would recover. His war was elsewhere: his duty was across the Solent with the king in Carisbrooke Castle. He should never have thought of her. He had been mad to look at her just because she was beautiful, to feel tender towards her because she risked her own safety to rescue him. He would confess the sin of desiring her, and be forgiven for having gone so close to temptation. He must take Mrs. Miller’s spiteful slander as a timely warning and pray that the madness was over, and this greensickness of love would pass quickly too.

“You’re so white—are you sick?” Alys asked her mother.

“Something I ate at the Millers’,” Alinor replied.

“Envy? She serves a lot of that,” Alys suggested. “Is that why you left early?”

Alinor nodded. “I’m fine now.”

“But wasn’t it the most wonderful harvest home ever? Not even she could spoil it. Richard said . . .”

“Richard said?”

Alys flushed. “He said I am as beautiful as a real queen.”

“Nothing but truth! You looked beautiful, and you danced beautifully.”

Alys beamed. “And it’s nice to see Rob.”

“Yes.”

“They were all mad for his tutor, Mr. Summer, weren’t they? Mary couldn’t eat her dinner for making eyes at him. Jane Miller couldn’t speak a word.”

Alinor forced a smile. “He’s a handsome gentleman. And a novelty. Did you dance with Richard Stoney again, after I left?”

Alys ducked her head down. “I didn’t dance with anyone else. I just couldn’t. And he wouldn’t ask anyone else. I love him, Ma, I really do.”

Alinor took a little breath. “My little girl in love?”

“I’ll always be your girl, but I do love him. And he loves me.”

“He’s said so?”

The girl flushed a dark rose. “Oh, Ma, he’s spoken to his parents. Weeks ago, he spoke to them. He wants to marry me! He asked me last night, Ma. He’s given me his promise.”

“He should’ve spoken to me before he said anything to you. You’re not yet fourteen. I was thinking of meeting his parents and asking for a long betrothal and—”

“He’s been courting me for weeks,” the girl said proudly. “That’s long enough for me to be sure. And I liked him from the first. But anyway, they want a girl who’d bring them some land, who has furniture, her own pewter plates, who’s got an inheritance. Things I’ll never have.”

“We can save up,” Alinor said bravely.

They both looked around the little cottage, the sparse worn goods, the wooden trenchers on the plain cupboard, the table and stools that Alinor had inherited from her mother, the hanging bunches of drying herbs, the treasure box containing the tenancy paper, and the red leather purse, filled with nothing but old tokens.

“We have no savings but dried leaves and faerie gold,” Alys pointed out.

“I could talk to them,” Alinor said.

“My father should go,” Alys said resentfully. “It shouldn’t be you, on your own.”

“I know,” Alinor said. “We’re unlucky in that.”

The two women put on their capes and their wooden pattens and started the walk to church. Behind them on the bank path came Alinor’s brother, Ned, his dog at his heels, and behind him a few farmers with their families from farther inland. The women waited for Ned to catch up, and walked three abreast with him, dropping into single file when the thorns of the path closed in.

“You’ll be happy with the news from Preston, Ned,” Alinor remarked. “It sounds like a great victory.”

“Praise God,” he said. “For if the Scots had got past Cromwell I don’t know where they would’ve stopped. We could have lost all of England to them, and they would have put the king on the throne again. But, God be praised, we won, and they are driven back and the king will know that he has no friends left in the world.”

“A friendless king,” Alinor said wonderingly, as if she were sorry for him.

“He’s never had any friends,” he said harshly. “Only courtiers and paid favorites. Some of the most wicked and vicious men in England in his service.”

Together they paused and looked towards the sea, where the waves were breaking white at the mouth of the harbor.

“Just over there,” Ned said wonderingly. “Think of him, so close, just a few hours of sailing time, on the Isle of Wight. And he must know by now that no one’s coming for him. His son’s fleet can’t land, the Scots are running back to Edinburgh, his wife can’t raise the French for him, the Irish haven’t landed. He’s going to have to beg our pardon and rule with our permission.”

“What if he were to be rescued?” Alinor asked.

“There’s nobody who can rescue him and get him to his son’s ships,” her brother ruled. “There’s not one of them with the courage or the wit to break him out.”

“It’s hopeless for him?” Alinor said, thinking of James Summer, the friend of a friendless king.

“Forlorn,” Ned replied, condemning the king, ignorant of his sister’s thoughts. “He’s a real forlorn hope.”

They climbed over the stile in the church wall and walked in silence along the path past the graves of their parents, their grandparents, and generations of Ferryman. The porch, where Alinor had waited for the ghost of her husband, was filled with bright sheaves of corn, though some of the godly men of the church complained that this was paganism. The old black door of the church stood wide open. Red, Ned’s dog, lay down where he always lay, outside the porch, and lolled out his pink tongue. The villagers went without speaking to their usual places: Ned to stand at the back on the left with the men, behind the prosperous families, Alinor and Alys up the stairs to the gallery with the other poor women. Nobody bowed to the altar, nobody ever crossed themselves anymore.

Sir William and his household entered the church, and all the men doffed their hats and all the women curtseyed, except the very godly one or two who would not bow to a temporal lord. Alinor looked for her son, saw his quick smile, ignored his tutor, whose brown gaze was steadfastly directed downwards on his well-shined boots. The Peacheys entered their pew and Mr. Miller, the church warden, closed the door on them with exaggerated respect. The St. Wilfrid’s minister stepped behind the plain communion table and started the new authorized service with a long extempore prayer, thanking God for giving His forces the victory against the misguided Scots in Lancashire.

The service was long, the sermon unending. Alinor and Alys, on the hard benches of the gallery at the back of the church, kept their heads down and hid all signs of impatience. From the shelter of the wings of her cap, Alinor glanced down only once from her seat in the gallery to the Peachey pew and saw James’s head bowed low, his hands clasped before him. He was either in deep prayer, or in the posture of a man enacting godly piety while his head was filled with heretical and dangerous thoughts. She did not even wonder which was the case. She felt that he had gone far from her, as if he had already set sail to an unknown destination, to take part in a secret plot. He had told her—and she had believed him—that his cause was more important than their newly discovered desire. Alinor, abandoned by her husband, was familiar with rejection, accustomed to coming in second place, third place, last place. She bowed her head and prayed for the pain to pass.

At the end of the sermon, while the more devout of the congregation exclaimed “Praise Be!” and “Thanks be to God!,” the minister stepped forward towards the Peachey pew, waited for Sir William to rise to his feet, and from that moral high ground, the two of them turned to scold the congregation, one of them representing the temporal powers, the other, spiritual authority.

“And on this Sabbath day, which the Lord has demanded that we keep holy, we have to call a sister to the altar and remonstrate with her,” the minister said. “It is our duty, and the order of the church court.”

Alys turned one swift sideways glance on her mother. Alinor showed her ignorance with widened eyes. Both of them stiffened and waited for what was coming next, wondering who would be named as guilty.

“A woman who has been the complaint of her neighbors, whose own husband has said that he cannot rule her,” the minister intoned. “Her trade has been uproar and some allege that she has been unchaste. Who gave evidence against her at the church court?”

“I did.” Mrs. Miller stood up from the middle of the church, where the prosperous tenants had their seats, her daughter and little boy either side of her.

“Course she did,” Alys breathed to her mother. “She’s got a bad word foreverybody.”

“Mrs. Miller, of the tide mill,” she announced unnecessarily to the neighbors who had known her from childhood.

“And what did you allege before this court?” the minister asked her. “Briefly,” he reminded her. Everyone knew that Mrs. Miller, once started, was hard to halt.

“I said that I had seen her at gleaning go behind a hedge with a man of this parish and come out with her dress disordered and her hair down.”

There was a mutter of speculation around the church as to who might be the “man of this parish,” but clearly his identity was going to be kept secret. The sinful woman would be denounced, her partner would maintain his reputation. Besides, it was hardly a sin for a man; it was his nature.

“And before that,” Mrs. Miller continued, “she traduced her husband, calling him an old fool, and on market day at Sealsea market she took his purse from him and gave him a buffet and told him that she would learn him.”

“Did anyone else speak against her in court?” Sir William asked.

“I did.” One of the Sealsea Island farmers’ wives stood up. “She came to my house on my night for spinning with my friends, and she called me a doting fool for letting my husband keep my money from my spinning. She slapped my face and she pulled off my cap when I said that her child was not of her husband’s begetting, which everybody knows.”

“I spoke against her, sir.” The Peachey cook, Mrs. Wheatley, rose to her feet from behind the Peachey seats. “She came to the Priory door and she was four eggs short of her tithe, and she said if there was no king, and no bishop, then there was no lord either, and she need pay no tithes and you could do without your eggs.”

“And then there was the ride,” a voice called out from the back of the church, from where the poor tenants stood. “Don’t forget that!”

“There was a skimmington ride,” Mrs. Miller explained to Sir William. “The boys rode a donkey backwards, past her house, with a lad wearing a petticoat over his head, to show that she was unchaste and a disgrace to our village.”

Sir William looked so grave that anyone could have believed that he did not keep an expensive mistress in rooms near the Haymarket in London. “Very bad,” he said.

“And so the church court sentenced her to stand before this congregation in her shift holding a lighted taper to show her repentance for the rest of this day till sunset,” the minister said rapidly, bringing the summary of the trial to an end and moving to sentence.

The church wardens, Mr. Miller among them, opened the door of the church and Mrs. Whiting came in from the porch, in her best linen shift, holding a lit candle in her hand, barefoot and with her hair down to show her penitence. She was a woman in the middle of her life, broad at the hips and the belly and her long hair was streaked with gray. She was ashen-faced with misery.

“Ah, God keep her,” Alinor whispered, high above her in the gallery. “To shame her so!”

“Isabel Whiting, you are brought before your neighbors and this congregation to expunge your disgrace. Do you repent?”

“I do,” she said, her voice very low.

“Do you swear to be neither lustful nor violent in future?”

“I do.”

“And obey God, and your husband, who was set by God Himself above you to be your master and guide?”

Almost, they heard her sigh at the weary drudgery that he would exact. “I do.”

“Then you must stand here, inside the church till sunset, when the church wardens will come to release you. Stand barefoot and shamed, as your candle burns down, while anyone may come to reproach you, but you may not reply or speak any word. Look into your heart, sister, and do not offend God or your neighbors again.”

The minister turned to the congregation, spread his arms, and gabbled the bidding prayer. The woman stood before him, facing the neighbors who had denounced her, her face set and bitter, the light trembling in her hand, while somewhere in the church her husband, who had beaten her, and the man who had taken her behind the hedge shuffled their feet and waited for when they might leave.

After church Sir William paused in the churchyard as his tenants came up and bowed or curtseyed. Alinor and Alys followed Ned to pay their respects and Sir William waved Rob to step aside to kneel for his mother’s blessing and rise up for her kiss on his forehead. Alinor was pale and distracted, thinking of the woman, named as an adulteress left to do penance barefoot in the church behind them, wearing only her shift, holding her candle in a shaking hand. Alinor was well aware of the power of the Millers and the community when they moved as one, and she knew that they moved as the mood took them, against whoever they despised, and a woman could not speak for herself.

“We’re going to go sailing!” Rob announced to his mother. “Across the sea.”

She could not stop herself looking towards James, but she turned her eyes quickly on the steward, Mr. Tudeley.

“Sailing?”

“Mr. Summer is taking the boys for a visit to the island next week,” he announced. “Sailing to the Isle of Wight.”

“Oh.” Alinor turned back to her son, who was bobbing with excitement.

“We’re going first to Newport,” Rob exulted. “We’ll stay the night. Maybe two nights.”

“But why?” Alinor asked. “What for?”

“Geography,” Rob said grandly. “And mapmaking. Mr. Summer says we might even see the king! Wouldn’t that be a sight to see? Sir William knows him, but Walter has never been presented. We can’t speak to him, of course. But we might see him in the streets. Mr. Summer says that he walks out.”

“I thought he was at the castle at Carisbrooke,” Alinor remarked, fixing her gaze on her son’s bright face and looking neither at her brother nor at James Summer, knowing that both of them were listening intently. “I thought he was imprisoned.”

“His Majesty is being released to a private house at Newport, to meet the gentlemen from parliament and reach agreement with them,” Mr. Tudeley told her.

“And we’ll probably see him!” Rob added.

“I’d rather you didn’t go,” Alinor said urgently, putting her arm around Rob’s shoulders and turning him away from the circle around Sir William. “You know, your uncle Ned won’t like it at all!”

“I have to go with Walter,” Rob pointed out. “I’m his companion. I have to accompany him!”

“Yes, but—”

“And it’s not as if the king’s still at war. He’s in Newport to meet with the men from parliament. It’s all at peace now. They’re meeting him at Newport to make peace and he’ll be released. I’d like to see him, now it’s all over. Think of me, seeing the King of England!”

“I’d still rather you didn’t,” Alinor repeated.

Rob was suddenly attentive. He looked up at her pale face. “Why? What’s the matter? Is it the sight, Mam?” he asked quietly.

She shook her head. “No, nothing like that. It’s just that . . .”

“What?”

“Oh, poor Mrs. Whiting, and having to stand before the church . . .”

“That’s got nothing to do with us,” he rightly said.

“I know her, and yet I said nothing in her defense,” she said.

“There was nothing to say.” Alys came up quietly to the two of them. “Everyone would have turned on you, and on the three of us, if you’d spoken up for her. And besides, she did go behind the hedge. I saw her.”

“Yes, but—”

“How’s this got anything to do with me going to the Isle of Wight?” Rob demanded.

“It hasn’t!” Alinor owned. “You know how I feel, Rob . . . it’s just—”

“Is it the sea?” he guessed. “The deep water?”

“The sea,” she said, grasping at the word as if her fear of the ocean could explain the sense of dread that she felt at her son going to Newport to see the defeated king. Going to Newport in the company of his tutor—the king’s spy.