Tidelands

TIDELANDS, SEPTEMBER 1648

James Summer, Rob, and Walter took ship from the mill quay in a coastal trader bound for the Isle of Wight, Southampton, and westerly. Richard Stoney, Alys, and a couple of the mill girls watched them go. Rob waved as extravagantly as if he were leaving for the Americas and might never return as the two-masted ketch went slowly down the deep channel, with the crew on either side watching for sandbars and shouting the depth.

James went to starboard to look for the little cottage perched on the harbor bank, as ramshackle as if it had been washed there by a high tide. The door was standing open and he wondered if Alinor was watching the ship from the dark interior. He guessed that she was unhappy at Rob sailing to the island, but she had not asked him not to take the boy. She had not spoken to him at all. Not even after church when she made her curtsey to Sir William and rose up to find James’s brown eyes on her face. She had behaved—just as he had prayed that she would—with icy discretion. She had withdrawn from him as if she had never known him, as if she had never held him, as if she had never opened her lips to his demanding mouth. He had prayed to be released, and she had let him go at once, as if she had never whispered that she wanted to be with him, that she wanted to be with him alone. Even as she curtseyed to him, she looked beyond and away from him. He would have thought that he was nothing to her, that he had never been anything to her. He would have thought that he was unseen.

And of course, as soon as she withdrew from him, he wanted to catch her hand, to say her name, to make that gray gaze turn back to him. As the poorest tenant on the estate, a woman that he had stooped to notice, she should have been alert for the least sign of his forgiveness. But it was as if he were invisible to her. He had to stand at Sir William’s shoulder and let this woman, this nobody, walk away from him as if he were nothing.

Now, as the sails of the ship caught the wind and the craft moved a little forward, he looked for the poor cottage that was her home, which she had opened to him as a refuge when he had nowhere else to go. He could see a trail of smoke from the chimney, he saw that the door stood open, he could even see a movement in the dark interior: the glimpse of her white cap. Then, as he watched, she came out of the doorway and stood on the cracked stone of her front step so that he could see her. She raised her hand, her scarred worn hand, to shade her eyes. He could hardly believe it: but she was looking for him. She saw him; she saw the ship that was taking her beloved son into danger, using him as a shield against inquiry, as an alibi in the incredible treason that he was about to commit. He thought she must be ill-wishing him, as he did the one thing that she must dread—taking Rob into deep waters. But then he saw her raise her hand to his ship, in a blessing, as any sailor’s wife would wave to a sail and whisper, “Godspeed! Come safe home!” He saw her stand, watching him. It was unmistakable. She loved him, she had a love deeper and wider than his, for she forgave him for his stupidity and his unkindness, and she was wishing him Godspeed on a journey, even though he was serving the king and taking her boy across the deeps.

He leapt up to balance on the rail of the boat, he gripped the rigging, he leaned outwards over the dark water rushing under the prow. He could hear the ominous hushing of the receding tide as it sucked them towards the harbor mouth, but he wanted her to see him. He stretched out his arm to wave to her. He wanted her to know that as he left Foulmire, the one thought in his mind was not his cause, which he had put before her, nor his king, who should come before everything, but her: Alinor.

NEWPORT, ISLE OF WIGHT, SEPTEMBER 1648

The town of Newport was as busy as a fair day; nothing like this had ever happened on the island before. The arrival of the king to the house of the wealthy townsman Mr. Hopkins gave the provincial street the status of Whitehall Palace. When the parliamentary negotiators arrived, Newport would be at the plumb center of the affairs of the kingdom—“of the world”—according to the dizzied Newport royalists. All the gentry flocked in from the outlying towns and villages to stay with friends and cousins, to dawdle through the narrow streets in the hope of seeing the king. They attended St. Thomas’s Church; they scrambled for the front pews to kneel behind His Majesty at prayer; they sent their servants round to the Hopkinses’ kitchen door to learn what was cooking for the royal dinner. Noblemen, with their ladies, sailed from the mainland on their own ships, or chartered passages to pay their respects to the king who, though defeated, could never be vanquished. All the royalists who had attended the king at London, at Oxford, in victory and facing defeat, now reappeared, learning that he was set free again. Whatever anyone might say, whatever he himself might do, the king was the king, and it was apparent to everyone that sooner or later he would return to London and to his throne.

And would he not be certain to remember the gentlemen and ladies who had called upon him in his time of troubles? Would he not reward those who had invited him to visit, stretching his parole in lengthy jaunts around the island, sent him game from their estates, fruit from their forcing houses? Would he not repay those favored few who had ridden with him in the enormous lumbering royal coach which had been shipped with such trouble, to block the narrow lanes of the island? When he was Charles the king again, would he not be obliged to remember those who had treated him with the most obsequious respect when he had been Charles the prisoner?

Mr. Hopkins’s house was as easy to enter as the royal court had been in the grand old days in London, when any wealthy man might walk in to gaze on his monarch and the royal family. The king believed that his dinner table should be on view in his dining hall, as an altar should be on view in church. There was divinity in both. Here in Newport, although there was a brace of guards on each door, they did not challenge anyone: if a man was richly dressed, he could enter. The king was free to come and go as he wished, bound only by his given word not to leave the island. The street outside was crowded all the day with gorgeously dressed well-wishers, parading up and down the freshly swept cobbles, remarking loudly on the simplicity of the town and the poverty of the buildings, besieged by common people wanting a glimpse of a man who claimed to be semidivine, constantly circled by beggars and the sick. King Charles was famous for the healing powers of his long white fingers. A sick man or woman could kneel before him and be restored with one light touch of the hand and a whispered blessing. No one was refused access to the king’s powers. Already a young woman was claiming that he had cured her blindness with his divine grace. Everyone knew that the king was not a mortal man. He had the holy oil on his sacred breast, he was the descendant of ordained kings, he was only one step down from the angels.

James took care to keep the boys away from the sickly paupers, and paid a guard a small coin to allow them to stand below the window where, they were assured, the king was studying papers sent from parliament. Everyone said that the parliamentary commissioners would arrive within the week and they would work through the many clauses of an agreement with the king so that he might return to his throne and rule with the consent of the houses of parliament. Now the Scots were defeated, the king and parliament would have to agree: he had lost his last gamble. He would always be king, but no longer could he impose his will on the people. Finally, he would have to come to an accord. Peace—after two civil wars—would come to the country and the court.

The boys waited, craning their necks to look up at the overhanging window; the church bells of Newport started to chime all around the town for six o’clock. There was an excited murmur among the crowd, one side of the leaded window swung open, and the graying head of the King of England poked out. Charles looked down at the people waiting below, he smiled wearily, and raised one heavily ringed hand.

“Is that him?” Rob asked, the nephew of an army man, born and bred a roundhead, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice.

“It is,” James confirmed, pulling his hat from his head and looking upwards, hoping to feel a flush of loyalty, of passionate devotion, but experiencing nothing but anxiety.

“No crown?”

“Only when he’s on the throne, I think.”

“Then how can you be sure it’s him?” Rob persisted. “Without a crown? Could be anybody.”

James did not say that at his seminary the novices had been shown portrait after portrait of the dark tragic face of the king to assist in their prayers for his safety. He did not say that he had dreamed of the day when the complicated conspiracy would finally fall into place with loyalists on the island, the Prince of Wales’s fleet waiting offshore, and a loyal ship’s captain engaged to sail at midnight with a mystery passenger. “I suppose I just know,” was all he said. “Nobody else would wave from his window.”

“Hurrah!” Walter suddenly jumped up and down and waved. “Hurrah!”

The heavy-lidded eyes turned towards the sudden cheer and the king raised his hand again to acknowledge the boy’s fervent loyalty. Then he withdrew, the window was slammed shut, and the shutters closed.

“That’s it?” Rob asked.

“Same every day,” a woman beside them answered him. “God bless him. And I come every day to see his sainted face.”

“We’ll go to dinner,” James said, before the three of them attracted any attention. “Come on.”

They went back to the Old Bull on the Street, where James had reserved private rooms, and James ordered a hearty dinner for the two boys, allowing them each a glass of wine. “I’m going out while you eat,” he said. “I want to take a look around and find a ship to take us home tomorrow or the day after.”

“Can’t we come?” Walter asked. “I want to look around too.”

“I’ll come back for you,” James promised. “We can walk through the market and along the riverside before we go to bed.” He pulled his hat low over his face and went out.

The streets were still busy as he went down the narrow lanes to the harbor and looked at the boats bobbing at the quayside. The dull clatter of the cleats against the wooden masts reminded him of all the other quaysides, of the many ships in his young life of constant traveling. Every port had the same rattle of rigging, just as every town had an hourly carillon of church bells. He thought that one day he might have lived so long at peace that he would be able to hear it without knowing that it called him to secret dangerous work. He hoped that one day he might hear it without dread.

“Is there a ship, the Marie, in port?” he asked a man, who was pushing past him with a coil of rope under his arm.

“Come and gone,” the man said shortly. “Were you meeting her?”

“No,” James said, lying instantly. “I thought she was always here.”

“Because if you had been meeting her, I would have told you that the master told everyone that he would not meet his good friend after all, and he set sail this morning.”

“Oh,” James said. A small coin found its way from his pocket to the waiting hand. The man hefted his rope and started to go on.

“Any idea how I can hire another ship?”

“Ask ’em,” he said unhelpfully, and pushed past.

James paused for a moment, almost winded by the disastrous news. Everything had depended on the ship sailing at midnight, as they had agreed, but now the ship had failed him. His only comfort was that the openness of the failure probably showed that they were not detected. The master had cold feet at the thought of rescuing the King of England, and had set sail, but he had not been arrested. The plot could still go on with a new ship. James would have to find a master so loyal to the king that he would take the risk, or so easily bought that he would do it for money. James looked up and down the quayside and thought that there was no way of judging, no way even to ask the question without running into terrible danger.

He did not dare to draw attention to himself, going up and down the quayside before dinner. He thought he had better come back later, stroll around the quayside taverns, find a way to have a more discreet conversation. He closed his eyes for a moment so that he would not see the forest of masts. His life had been on a knife-edge for so long that another venture did not excite him. He just felt bone-weary. More than anything he wanted this rescue to be successfully done, and all over. He did not even anticipate a sense of triumph tomorrow. He had set his heart on freeing the king, he had set his name to contracts and letters, and he had set himself to the task. He was faithful; and he thought that God would guide him, so he turned from the harbor to make his way back to Mr. Hopkins’s house. The door, set into the rear garden wall, was unlocked and unguarded, and James slipped into the darkened garden and went quietly towards the kitchen door, which stood open for the cool evening air.

It was chaos inside. The king was a picky eater, but his importance had to be advertised by serving twenty different dishes at every meal. It was a strain on the provincial cooks, who were running out of recipes and ingredients. There were a few guards that James could see through the open door to the dining hall, but their task was to follow the king when he walked abroad, not to prevent anyone from coming into the house. The king’s own servants were responsible for keeping his rooms free of unwanted strangers and admitting noble guests, but they were newly appointed and did not know their way around the rambling house, nor friend from stranger. The king had added half a dozen courtiers to his entourage since being released from the castle, and they too had their servants and hangers-on who came and went without challenge. There were too many strangers for anyone to notice another.

James waited for a few moments in the garden, watching the disorderly service, and how the servers ran to and fro from the kitchen, through the dining hall, and up the stairs to the king’s rooms. Then he took off his hat, straightened his jacket, and boldly went through the back door as if he belonged there. It was stifling: there was a roast turning on the spit over the fire, saucepans bubbling on little braziers of red-hot charcoal, vegetables stewing by the fireside, and bread being shoveled from the ovens. The servers were rushing in and out, demanding dishes for their own tables, sometimes snatching a dish intended for Mr. Hopkins’s table. Mr. Hopkins’s cook was among it all, trying to keep order, her apron stained, her face sweaty with anxiety and heat.

“The king’s carver,” James said to her, respectfully. “Can I assist you, Cook?”

She turned in relief. “Lord, I don’t even know what he’s had yet. Have you not taken the joint up to him?”

“I am here for it now,” James said smoothly.

“Take it! Take it!” she exclaimed, gesturing to a leg of lamb that stood on the table being dressed clumsily by a kitchen server with bunches of watercress.

“This is for the lords!” the server exclaimed.

“Take it!” She thrust it at James. “And tell me if anything is missing from his table.”

James bowed and went through the door, past the guard at the foot of the stairs, and up to the door of the king’s rooms. The porters at the royal door hesitated, but James held the dish high and said, “Quick! Before it gets cold!” and walked unhesitatingly towards the closed door, so the porters threw it open for him.

They closed it behind him, and James, never hesitating for a moment, walked into the king’s dining room and put the dish on the table before him.

The servant behind his chair, the page holding his gloves, the server with the wine, his fellow with the water did not look twice at James as he took up the long sharp knife and carved paper-thin slices of lamb and fanned them out on the Hopkinses’ best silver plate. He bowed and put the plate before the king, leaning over his shoulder. With his face so close to his ear that he could feel the tickle of gray ringlets and smell the French pomade, he whispered: “Midnight, tonight. Open your door.”

The king did not turn his head and gave no sign of hearing.

“Clarion.” James said the password that he had been given from France, the password that said that the plot came from the queen, Henrietta Maria herself.

The king lowered his head as if he was saying grace, and his hand, hidden beneath the table, made a small gesture of assent. James walked backwards to the door, bowed his head to his knees, and withdrew.

Back at the Old Bull inn, the boys were eating sugared plums and cracking nuts, and jumped up as he came in.

“Is there a fair?” Rob asked. “It’s so noisy.”

“There’s a market and some strolling players,” James said. “We can go and see what’s going on.” He found that he was grinning broadly, almost laughing in his relief that the first stage, getting access to the king, had been so easy. He had been planning this and working with great men to consider every step, yet in the end he had simply walked towards a door and the porter had opened it for him. He almost did not care that he had no ship. If the luck was running his way, it would run all the way to the high seas and the rendezvous with the prince’s fleet.

“Does the king come out again tonight?” Walter asked.

“No, he only waves from his window before his dinner and then they close the shutters for the night. But we might see him tomorrow. I think he walks out in the morning,” James said, knowing that the king would be on the prince’s ship at dawn. “He goes to church.”

“Is he free to go anywhere?” Walter asked.

“When parliament decided to make an agreement with him, they had to release him so that he could sign the documents as a free man. Now he can go anywhere that he likes on the island; but he has given his word not to leave.”

“Is there a dancing bear?” Rob demanded. “I’ve never seen a bear.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” James replied. “This is a godly town, or at least it used to be. But we can stroll round the market, and you can buy a fairing for your mother. Perhaps some ribbons for her hair.” He found that his throat was suddenly dry at the thought of her fair hair.

“No, she always wears a cap,” Rob replied. “But if there are some little tokens for sale, I’d get them. She likes old coins, little tokens. Come on.”

The two boys walked through the market, looking at the stalls and laughing at the tricks of a small dog who was trained to jump through a hoop and would stand on his hind legs at the command of “Ironsides!” The stalls went down the narrow streets towards the harbor where the River Medina wound through the town, and the boats bobbed at the quayside. James was looking out for ships that had newly arrived, or might be ready to set sail, when Rob suddenly exclaimed: “Da! My da!”

James wheeled round and saw a brown-faced, dark-haired man jerk up his head at a familiar voice. He caught a glimpse of the strange face, looking astounded. Then the man turned and plunged away into the crowd.

“That was my da! That was my da!” Rob shouted. “Da! It’s me! Rob! Wait for me!” He took to his heels, darting forward, worming his way through the crowds, and though the man’s dark head bobbed ahead of him, Rob was quicker. When James and Walter caught up with him, he had laid hold of the man and pitched himself into his arms. “It’s me!” he announced, joyously certain of his welcome. “It’s me! It’s me, Da! Rob.”

The man’s guilty eyes met James’s gaze over his son’s head. “Rob,” he said, patting the boy’s back. “Oh, Rob.”

Rob was fawning like a puppy. “Where’ve you been?” he said. “We didn’t know! We’ve been waiting and waiting! We thought you were drowned!”

James saw that the stranger was looking at him with a sort of desperation, as one man to another, in this terrible failure of fatherhood.

“They thought you had been pressed into the navy,” James prompted.

“Ah! I was. That I was!” the man said, suddenly glib. He hugged his son and then stepped back to see his face. “I didn’t recognize you, you’ve grown so tall. And dressed so fine! I can see you’ve done well enough without me!”

“We haven’t! Where’ve you been?” Rob insisted.

“It’s a long story,” the man said. “And I’ll tell you all of it some day.”

“Why didn’t you come home?”

“Why didn’t I come home? Why, I couldn’t come home, that’s why!”

“But why not?”

“Because I was pressed, Son. Snatched up by the navy press gang off my boat and taken to serve in the navy for the parliament. Served as a common seaman and then rose through the ranks since I knew the seas around Sealsea Island and all the way to the Downs.”

“But why didn’t you send a message to Ma?”

“Bless you, they don’t let you go ashore! They don’t give you high days and holy days off! I was on my ship and spoke to no one but the other poor curs who were pressed alongside me.”

James watched Alinor’s son, raised to love and trust, struggle to believe his father. “You couldn’t even get a message to us? Because we waited and waited for you to come, and Ma still doesn’t know if you’re alive or dead. I’ll have to tell her when I get home. She’ll hardly believe me! She’s been waiting. We’ve all been waiting for you to come home!”

“Oh, she knows.” He nodded rapidly. “It’s better for her to act as if she doesn’t. But you know your ma, Son. A woman like that—she knows in her bones. She knows in her waters. She doesn’t need a message to tell her what’s what. The wind and the waves tell her. The moon whispers to her. The birds in her hedge are her familiars. God knows what she knows and what she doesn’t know, but you needn’t worry about her, ever.”

An icy sweat of sheer hatred washed over James as he saw the boy struggling to comprehend this, the puzzled frown on his young face, as the faithless father told the boy that his mother was faithless too.

“I don’t think she does know,” Rob said tentatively. “She would’ve told us when we asked where you were.”

“Well, you’re doing well enough for yourself anyway,” his father said cheerfully. “Fine clothes and fine friends.” He turned to James. “I’m Zachary Reekie,” he said. “Captain of the coastal trader Jessie.”

“I’m James Summer,” James said, not offering his hand. “Tutor to Master Walter Peachey here, and to your son, who is his lordship’s server of the body and companion.”

“In the Peachey household?” Zachary demanded of his son. “Didn’t I say there was no need to worry about your mother? What did she have to do to get you in there? Imagine I know! Is Mr. Tudeley still the steward there?”

Rob flushed scarlet. “My mother keeps the stillroom for the Priory,” he stumbled.

“It was I who asked for Rob to be Master Walter’s companion,” James said, making sure that his cold rage did not creep into his smooth tone. “Mrs. Reekie was wise to accept the place for him. He is in service and paid by the quarter, and when Master Walter goes to university I hope to get Rob apprenticed to a physician. He is skilled with herbs and medicines and he’s studying Latin with me.”

“Oh, aye, that’s what we say, is it?” Zachary said unpleasantly. “I’m glad it has turned out so well for us all.” He turned as if he thought they might let him go, but at once Rob laid hold of his arm.

“But you will come home now, Da? Now that you’re not in the navy anymore?”

“I can’t immediate,” he said, looking again to James for help. “I got out of the navy when they went over to the prince. When the ships went to Prince Charles, I got away. I couldn’t have looked your uncle Ned in the eye if I had served the king! Now could I? But I had to indenture myself to the ship Jessie and so I’m bound to serve in her for another year. She’s a coastal trader, all around England and all around France. I’m never here. Never stop sailing. But as soon as I’ve served my time I’ll come back to you, for sure.”

“But what shall I tell Ma?” Rob pressed him.

“Tell her that! Ask this tutor of yours to explain. He understands, don’t you, sir?”

“Very well,” James said levelly.

Rob looked at him with hope. “You do?”

“I understand that your father was bound to the navy and is now bound to a trading vessel. That’s quite usual. He’ll be able to come home when his term is over, but we can tell your mother that he is alive and well, and will return.”

“If it suits her,” Zachary said. He turned to James and, unseen by his son, closed his eye on a wink.

James swallowed distaste. “But you must have a drink with us and talk with your son now we have so luckily found you,” he said heartily. “It’s such a chance! We only came to Newport to see the sights of the island and catch a glimpse of the king, and we have found you.”

Walter did not look as if it were much of a treat for him, but Zachary brightened at the invitation to take a drink. “We can go in here,” he said, indicating one of the quayside alehouses. “I have a slate here and I wouldn’t mind bringing them some trade.” He winked again at James. “Gentry trade,” he said. “Carriage trade. That’ll surprise them.”

“Certainly,” James said pleasantly, and led the way into the room, looking around quickly to ensure that although it was a poorhouse, serving fishermen and the harbor traders, it was not bawdy or unsafe for the boys.

Walter and Rob took their seats at a small table in the corner while the men stood at the doorway to the kitchen to order their drinks. Zachary entered into a brief whispered discussion with the landlord that James cut short by saying, “Tell him I will clear your slate.”

“Kindly of you,” Zachary said, instantly suspicious.

“I may have work for you,” James said.

“Happy to help a friend of the Peacheys. Or perhaps you’re a friend of my wife?”

James was stony-faced at the slur on Alinor. “This is for the Peacheys,” he said. “I think I may be able to put some business your way.”

“Oh, aye,” Zachary said, agreeably. “Boys, would you take a slice of beef and bread? I know boys are always hungry.”

Walter, uncomfortable, shook his head.

“We just dined,” James explained. “They’ll take a glass of small ale and then they’ll go back to our inn.”

“Fair enough,” Zachary said. “I’ll take a measure, since you’re buying.” He nodded to the landlord, who poured a spirit from a blackened bottle under the table. Zachary raised his earthenware cup in a toast to his son. “It’s good to see you, my boy,” he said fondly. “And looking so fine!”

The boys were awkward at the table. Rob did not take his eyes from his father’s face but asked no more questions. After a while, James told them that they could make their way back to the inn and go to bed. “I will make arrangements with your father,” he promised Rob.

“Will you, sir?” Rob’s brown eyes were trustingly on his face. “Shall we see him tomorrow?”

“I’ll ask him to breakfast with us.”

“Thank you, sir, because . . . I have to ask him . . . I have to be able to explain to my mother how it was.”

James thought of Alinor’s poverty and the terrible risk to her reputation since this man had abandoned her and their two children. “I’ll speak to him,” he promised, and was ashamed at his own duplicity when the boy’s face cleared.

The men waited until the boys had left and the door had closed behind them.

“What d’you want with me?” Zachary said bluntly. “You needn’t cony-catch me.”

“I need your ship,” James said. “I agreed with a coastal trader to meet me here, but he has failed. I need to commission a voyage out to sea.”

“Which way?” Zachary asked sarcastically. “For this is an island. It is out to sea in every direction.”

“South, towards France.”

“That’s what I do, once a week.”

“You’re the ship’s master?” James confirmed. “You can sail when and where you want?”

“Provided I have a load and can turn a profit,” Zachary said. “My owner trusts me to manage the business.”

“I want you to meet a ship offshore and transfer some goods,” James said. “You don’t need to know more.”

“Smuggling?” Zachary asked quietly. “It can be done, but it is expensive.”

“I will pay you,” James promised him. “I will pay you well.”

“Would this be a barrel sort of goods? Or a chest sort of goods? Or more like a person?” he asked.

“You don’t need to know that,” James said. “All you need to know is that you will be well paid, and set sail a few minutes after midnight. I will come with you. Not the boys.”

“And how much am I paid for this nighttime jaunt? With Your Honor as shipmate? With these goods?”

“Twenty crowns as we leave, twenty crowns on the quayside when we come back; and no one the wiser,” James said.

Zachary tipped back his chair and put his sea boots on the barrel that served as a table. “No, I don’t think I’ll take it,” he said, smiling at James over the top of his cup. “It’s too much for ordinary smuggling and I’m no smuggler, I must tell you. And it’s too little for shipping the king off the island. If that’s your game, you’ll be hanged for it.”

“It’s what my other ship would have been paid,” James said coolly. “It’s the right price.”

“No, it isn’t. For—see? He wouldn’t do it for the price. Your fine friend didn’t appear. You don’t know why?” His sharp glance at James’s face told him that the handsome young man did not know why his ship had failed. “So, if he wouldn’t do it for the money, I don’t think that I will either.”

“I think you will,” James said. “For I can call the watch to arrest you, and I can tell the magistrate that you have abandoned a wife and thrown her children onto the parish at Sealsea. I can tell them that you deserted from the parliament navy and serve as a smuggler. I can tell them that you are an adulterer and possibly a bigamist. I can tell them that you are wanted on Sealsea Island, perhaps elsewhere. Your own son would give witness that his mother is waiting for you to come home and that the Sealsea church wardens want you for your tithes.”

“She is not!” Zachary slammed the table with the palm of his hand. “She’s not waiting! Damn you for all the rest of it, but don’t tell me that. She don’t miss me, she don’t want me. The boy might look for me, but she won’t.”

“I know that she does,” James said steadily, thinking of the white-faced woman waiting for this man’s ghost to speak to her on Midsummer Eve.

Zachary leaned forward confidingly. “Not her, because she’s a whore,” he said frankly. “One honest man to another: she’s a whore and a witch. They married me to her, though I had my doubts, but her mother—another witch—wanted my boat and my nets and my catch, and thought that I would keep her girl safe, in difficult times. Thought I would make a fortune. Maybe I swore that I would. Maybe I made all sorts of promises. I was so mad for her—and who do I blame for that, eh? I built our house right next door to her mother in the ferry-house so that they could carry on their trade as wisewomen together, and I looked aside when they did what they did. I brought home fish, I sent her to market for me, and I took the money she brought back. I had plans for another boat, but I was unlucky a few times. I was as good a husband as any on the island. I didn’t know what tricks that they would play on me. My wife and her mother, God curse them.

“One child we had: a daughter as beautiful as a faerie-born child. What did I know? Only that they had foisted a changeling on me from the moment that I saw her. Then came Rob—look at him! He could read as soon as he could walk, though I can’t spell my name. He knew the herbs as soon as he toddled into her garden. Used to name them by smell. Who smells leaves but a faerie child? They’re not my children. Nobody could ever have thought that they were my children! Look at them!”

“Then whose?” James demanded tightly.

“Ask her! She knows who she meets when she goes out into the full moon, when she goes out at Midsummer Eve, when she goes out to dance in the darkest of the nights of winter. She knows where she got these children. But I swear to you, it was not from me.”

James braced his shoulders against a superstitious shudder. He forced himself to speak steadily: “This is nonsense. Are you saying that you left her for no better reason than this?”

“Damn her to the deep! She left me!” Zachary exclaimed. “I may have been the one that was pulled out of the alehouse and thrown into the navy, but it was her who left me, years before that. She unmanned me; she can do it with a look. I could do nothing in her presence. I grabbed her once and was going to force her, but my hand went weak and my blood went like ice. I was going to make her do her duty by me—you know what I mean, a man has rights over his wife, whether she was willing or not—but I couldn’t. She looked at me with eyes like a curse, and I went as soft as a dead fish. I swear to you, she was killing me. I could do nothing with her: not beat her nor swive her. She was killing me from the cock up.”

“She was?”

“She drained me of life, I tell you. I could be no husband to her, and when I went with some drab I couldn’t do the act there either, for thinking of her. What is that but a curse on me? And after her mother died, it got worse. I thought that when her mother died her power would go, but it was as if she added the old witch’s power to her own. I was a baby in my own house. More of a baby than Rob, less of a voice than Alys. The press gang took me away, but by God I was glad to go!”

“Would you ever come back?” James asked.

“Never! Never! I’d rather die than go back to her. I’d rather drown. She’s a whore, I tell you. A whore to faerie folk. She’s a witch, I tell you. She can make a child without a man; she can prevent a child despite a man. She can kill a child in the womb and blast a man’s cock with one icy breath.”

“Dear God, what are you saying?” James could no longer hide his fear at the man’s words—the worst things a man could hear: a woman that could shrink his potency, kill his children. “I know her! This isn’t possible for a woman like her. It isn’t possible for any mortal woman!”

“You can say that, Priest,” the man said, his voice low. “You can say that who has never seen her naked, who has never touched her warm skin, who has never longed for her. But the taste of her mouth is like drinking henbane—she makes you thirsty for more and more, and then she drives you mad.”

“I’m no priest,” James said, quickly, ignoring what Alinor’s husband said about the woman he loved.

Zachary’s lip curled. “As you wish,” he said coldly. “But something stinks of incense here and it’s not me.”

There was a silence between the two men.

“Anyway,” James said, trying to recover his authority, trying to banish the image of Alinor whoring to a faerie lord, “I have no time for this nonsense. I am offering you a voyage or arrest. Which will it be?”

“Twenty crowns to take the trade out, to a meeting of your saying. Twenty crowns to bring you back?”

“Yes,” James said.

“And we never speak of this again, and you take that boy back to her and tell her that you never saw me?”

“I can’t make him lie, but I can make up some excuse.”

“So that she does not look for me?”

“She would not come looking for you.”

“She has the sight, fool. She can see me if she pleases, unless there is the deep sea between us. She cannot see me through deep water, I know that. She’s afraid of deep water because she has no power over it. But if I ever sail into Tidelands again the mire will boil beneath my keel and throw me up like sea wrack before her door, and she will destroy me with one look.”

“You speak like a madman.”

“What d’you think killed her sister-in-law?” the man suddenly demanded.

“What?” James was thrown off course again. “What sister-in-law?”

“See how little you know her?” He turned and shouted over his shoulder for another drink. The landlord brought it in silence, and silently James waited for him to pour, and for Zachary to take a thoughtful swig.

“Go on,” James said through his teeth.

“So you don’t know that either! Her sister-in-law. Ned’s wife. Her that she didn’t like. What killed her, d’you know?”

“I didn’t even know . . .”

“Exactly. You know nothing. She struck her dead from jealousy. So the poor mortal woman would not bear the child in her womb.”

“She would never do such a thing.”

“She did. I know it. For it was my child.”

“You put Edward Ferryman’s wife with child?”

“Yes, and my wife killed it, for spite.”

There was a long silence. Zachary drained his mug and pushed it towards James, hoping for more.

James took a shuddering breath against these horrors, casually asserted. “Stop this slander. It means nothing to me. I don’t know these people, and I don’t care about them. We are here to make an agreement: that you will sail for me.”

“You’re here for an agreement. I’m here for drink.”

James nodded over his shoulder to the landlord to pour another draft. “Will you sail for me or not?” he demanded, his voice very low.

“I will.”

“And if I agree to tell her that you will never return, do you swear that you will not?”

“Willingly. Didn’t you hear me? I’ll never go back to her.”

Zachary stuck out a dirty hand. Reluctantly, James shook it. When the warm palm with the old scars pressed against his own, he was reminded with a shock of Alinor’s skin.

“Ah, you’ve touched her,” Zachary guessed with spiteful satisfaction as James blanched. “You’ve touched her and she’s got your soul in thrall too.”

James walked back to the Old Bull inn and up the rickety stairs to the boys’ low-ceilinged room. They were in their nightshifts in the big bed together.

“I prayed for my father,” Rob confided.

“That was good,” James said. “We’ll see him again tomorrow. He’ll come here for breakfast. You go to sleep now.”

He watched them: Walter sprawled out to sleep, arms across the bed, feet to each corner, and Rob hunched into a ball. Then James quietly went from the room, downstairs to the private dining room.

Two men were seated on either side of the fire. As James came in, they rose up and clasped his hand, but no names were mentioned.

“You’ve seen him?”

“I have. I told him it’s to be midnight. And I’ve met the boatman, and agreed a price,” James confirmed. “You’ve bribed the guard?”

“Easily done,” the other said. “He’s not guarded as he was at Carisbrooke. That was the agreement with parliament, and they are true to it. They offered that he should be free to come and go here, limited only by his parole. They think an agreement is his only hope: fools.”

“If I am caught at the Hopkins house don’t wait for me. Get him away at all speed. The ship is the Jessie, by the quay and ready to sail.”

“I thought it was the Marie?” the second man demurred.

“He failed me. It is the Jessie.”

“Have you paid him?”

“Twenty crowns to go, twenty when we are safely home.”

“I’m going with him to France,” the first man said, “if he will allow me. I’m not coming back.”

“I have to return with the boatman to finish my mission here,” James said. He felt in his pocket and gave the second man a heavy purse. “But you can hold this for me. Be on the quay to pay the Jessie when it returns.”

“You won’t carry it?”

James shook his head.

“You don’t trust him not to steal it and throw you overboard?” The man was appalled. “What kind of comrade is this? On a venture like this?”

James was silent for a moment. “I don’t trust anyone,” he answered, hearing the ring of truth in his own words. “I don’t trust anyone, in this land which is sea, in these harbors that are not havens, in these ebbing tidelands.”

“What?”

“Anyway, if I don’t get down to the quay, get the person we have come for safely aboard, and pay the boatman.”

“What d’you mean, if you don’t get down to the quay?”

“If I’m caught,” James said flatly. “If I’m dead.”

At five minutes before midnight the three men pulled on their tall hats and wrapped their thick cloaks around their shoulders. James assumed that it was the damp air that made him shiver and long to stay by the fire for one minute, just one minute more.

“I’ll go ahead,” he said. “You come behind me and wait below his window, and you wait on the quay.”

“As agreed,” the first man said, irritable with fear. “For God’s sake, can we get on?”

All the windows were dark at the Hopkins house. There were no guards to be seen, but James had a suspicion that the commander of Carisbrooke Castle, an experienced army man, would have posted men to watch the doors, whatever promises the parliament might have made about the king’s freedom. The Hopkinses’ porter on their front door had been bribed to look away at midnight, but there was no way of knowing if there were spies hidden in the dark doorways or leaning against the dark walls. James peeled off from the main road and entered with assumed confidence through the garden door, walked around the vegetable and herb beds to the kitchen door. It was unlocked for early deliveries. James turned the handle and stepped into the quiet kitchen.

The spit boy rose up from his truckle bed by the fireside. “Who’s there?”

“Sssh, it’s me,” James said familiarly. “I didn’t know if anyone had remembered his sops in wine?”

“What?”

“The king. He takes bread and wine at midnight. Has anyone taken it up?”

“No!” the boy exclaimed. “Lord! This is always happening. And his servers have gone to the inn, and the cook gone to bed.”

“I’ll do it,” grumbled James. “I do everything.”

“D’you have the key to the cellar? Shall I wake the groom of the servery: Mr. Wilson?”

“No. The king doesn’t drink from your cellar. He has his own wine, in his own room. I have the key. You go back to sleep. I’ll serve him.”

He took a glass and a decanter from the cupboard in the hall and walked up the stairs. The door to the king’s room was locked on the inside, but as he approached it across the creaking floorboards of the landing he heard the clock on St. Thomas’s Church strike midnight, and at the same time the sound of an oiled bolt sliding back. He felt a sense of complete elation. He was on the threshold of the king’s bedchamber, the king was opening the door, the boat was waiting. “This is triumph,” James thought. “This is what it feels like to win.”

The king opened the door and peered out.

“Clarion.” James said the password, and dropped to his knee.

“Rise,” the king replied indifferently. “I’m not coming.”

James turned an incredulous face up to the king. “Your Majesty?”

The king stepped back into his room and beckoned James in, nodding that he should close the door. His lined face was bright: a cornered man getting the last laugh. “Not tonight.”

“The porter is gone from the door. Your son, His Royal Highness, is waiting for you with his fleet. I’ve got a man under your window and another on the quay, a ship to take you to the prince. We’re safe to go now . . .”

His Majesty waved it all aside. “Yes, yes. Very good, very good. But we’ll do it another day, if needs be. I have them on the run, you see. They’re bringing me an agreement.”

James felt his head swim with dismay, and then he remembered the frightened man waiting under the king’s window. “I have to send some men away,” he said. “Men in danger, waiting for you. I can’t stay myself, if you’re not going to come. But I beg you to come, sire. This is your chance—”

“I am making my own chances.” The king had already turned away. “You can go.”

“I beg you,” James repeated. He heard his voice quaver and he flushed, shamed before his king. “Please, Sire . . . Her Majesty the Queen sent the money herself, for me to hire the ship. She commissioned me to rescue you. I am under her orders.”

The king turned back, his smile vanished. “I don’t need rescuing,” he said irritably. “I am the best judge of my actions. I know what is happening. Her Majesty has nothing but a woman’s wit: she cannot know. They are coming to me on their knees with handsome proposals. The Scots’ invasion taught them that they have to make terms with me or next I will bring the Irish down on them. They have seen that the country rises up for me. They begin to understand my power; it is never-ending, it is eternal. They can win a thousand battles—but I still have the right. The parliament knows they cannot rule without a king. Without me.”

James felt the rise of a treasonous rage. He wanted to lay hold of the man and drag him to safety. “Before God, Your Majesty, I swear that you should come now, and then you can negotiate from a place of safety, with your wife and son at your side. Their future depends on you, as does all of ours. However good the offer, whatever parliament promises you, you would be safest talking to them from France.”

The king drew himself up. “I will never leave my kingdom,” he said firmly. “My kingdom can never leave me. God ordained I should be king. That cannot be set aside. We will come to an agreement, my subjects and I. I shall return to London and Her Majesty the Queen will join me there, at my palace at Whitehall. I shall not steal away like a thief in the night. Tell her that.” He nodded James to the door as if to dismiss him.

“I cannot go without you! I swore!”

“It is my command.”

“Your Majesty, please!”

Charles made a little gesture with his hand, a little cutting-off gesture. There was nothing James could do but leave: stepping carefully backwards as royal protocol demanded, never turning his back, going steadily until he felt the brass ring latch of the door press into his back, and he checked.

“Your Majesty, I have risked my life to come for you,” he said quietly. “And a loyal man is waiting on the quayside to go with you to France. He has said good-bye to his own family and his country. He will go into exile with you and not leave your side till you are in safety. We have a boat, we will take you to your own son. He is waiting for you with his fleet on the high seas. Your safety and freedom are waiting. Your future—all of our futures—depends on you coming away now.”

“I thank you for your service.” But the king had already seated himself and turned to his letters. “I am grateful. And when I come to my own again I will reward you. You can be sure of that.”

James, thinking wildly that he would never be sure of anything, ever again, bowed low and went out of the room. As he stood on the shadowy landing he heard the door close quietly behind him and the bolt slide shut. He thought it was the most final noise he had ever heard, like the dull thud of an executioner’s axe through a neck and onto the block.

Downstairs, in the street, the nameless man flinched like a frightened dog when he saw the figure come from the darkened doorway. “Your Majesty,” he breathed, and dropped to his knee.

“Get up, it’s me.” James pushed up the brim of his hat to show his face. “He won’t come.”

“Mother of God!”

“Come on,” James whispered. “Back to the inn.”

They went swiftly, by a circuitous route, down the dark alleyways and then along the quayside to fetch their comrade from his hidden doorway. The three of them slipped in the unlocked front door, and into the dining room. As soon as the door was shut, James pulled off his hat and threw down his cloak. He flung himself into a chair and buried his face in his hands.

“Why didn’t you make him come?” one of the men demanded.

“How?”

“Christ! You should have told him!”

“I did.”

“Doesn’t he know the danger he’s in? That we’re in? How could he let us go through all this for him, and then not come? We’ve been planning this for weeks!”

“Months. He thinks they will make an agreement.”

“Why didn’t you insist?”

“He’s the king. What could I say?”

“When parliament comes, what if they can’t agree?”

“He’s sure they will,” James said through his clenched teeth. “I begged him to come. I warned him. I did everything that I could. He was determined. I pray to God that he’s right.”

“But why not come? Why run away from imprisonment at Hampton Court, breaking his word of honor, his parole, but not run from here? When we’ve got a ship waiting and his son at sea?”

“In the name of God, I don’t know!” James swore, driven to despair. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it was the right thing, the safest thing, the only thing for him to do. But how could I make him come! How could I?”

The second man had not taken off his hat, nor even unfastened his cloak. “I’m off,” he said savagely. “I won’t do this again. Don’t try to find me or invite me. Don’t call on me for help. This has been a night I won’t repeat. This is my last time. I am finished in his cause. He has lost me. I cannot serve him. They warned me he was changeable and talkative as a woman. But I would never have thought he would let his friends, men sworn to his cause, stand in the street in mortal danger while he chose not to bother.”

James nodded in silence as the man let himself out of the door and they heard his footsteps go quietly across the hall and the front door open and close.

“Shall you come back?” the first man asked unhappily. “Try again?”

“If I’m ordered, I must obey. But not like this again. Never like this again. Forcing men to serve him, swearing them to his cause. I even brought two boys into this danger to hide the plot. I put my life at risk, yours, even the villain on the Jessie. I have been a mortal fool for a man who does not want my service, who didn’t even ask my name, who didn’t even give me a message for his wife, who sold her jewels to pay for this. I shall have to go back to her and tell her he would not come. I have failed. I have failed him, and I have failed her because of him.”

“Good night,” the man said abruptly. “I pray to God that we never meet again. I will swear that we never met, and I will never speak of it. If I am captured I will deny all this, and you will do the same.”

“Amen,” James said, slumped in his chair.

The man paused at the door. “Even if they burn you, I trust you not to say my name, and I will not speak yours. I don’t want to die for nothing.”

“Agreed,” James said bitterly, as if it was all nothing, as if loyalty was nothing, as if death by burning was nothing. The man let himself out into the night.

James sat in silence by the dying fire, sick with the draining away of his courage. He found his hands were shaking and that all he could see, as he watched the embers, was the triumphantly gloomy face of the king with his dark sorrowful eyes. James thought himself to be a fool to have given his life to such a man and such a fanciful web of plots. The king he had sworn to serve wanted none of his loyalty, and the woman he desired was a whore to the faeries and had murdered the wife and baby of a mortal man. He thought he was very far from God, and very far from grace, and a long, long way from his home.

At dawn in the morning when a man might reasonably be up and about, James went down to the quayside. The air was cool and smelled of salt in the light breeze. The sky was peach pink. It was going to be a beautiful day. If they had sailed overnight as they had planned, they would have had a good wind homeward and the sun on their backs. They would have moored on a peaceful quayside, paid off Zachary, and gone their own ways to their homes. No one would have known that the king was gone until they served his breakfast, late in the morning. The king would have been breakfasting in France, the Stuart monarchy safe in exile, certain to invade; Cromwell’s rebellion doomed. James looked to pink clouds at the east and thought that never in his life had he seen a sun rise and felt such darkness.

Zachary was asleep, curled up under a sail in the stern of the little trading ship. He opened his eyes and sat up as he heard the sound of James’s riding boots on the stone quay.

“Miscarried,” he observed. “Like the babies she says she will deliver that come out blue. Unsatisfied—as she always is.”

“Yes,” James said shortly. “But I know nothing about any babies.”

Zachary hawked and spat over the side. “Her hands are stained with them,” he said conversationally. “She smells of them: dead babies. Had you not noticed? But—anyway—what happened to you? Nothing good. Were you caught? Doing whatever you were doing?”

“No.”

“Probably half the island knows anyway,” Zachary said pessimistically. “He’s not famously discreet, your master. Everyone I know has taken a letter from him and learned his ever-so-secret code.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, you’ll pay me the forty crowns for my silence,” he observed.

“Twenty,” James said flatly. He took the purse from his pocket and tossed it over. Zachary caught it neatly, and it disappeared into the folds of his tattered jacket. “So you failed,” he said spitefully. “Your mission was a failure and so are you.”

“I failed,” James said. “But no one the wiser, and no harm done.”

“But I am wiser. I know of you and where you came from. Who you came from. Where you live. I think you’ll find that is harm done.”

“You know,” James agreed. “But I know of you, so we are equal in that. Will you come to have breakfast at the inn and see your boy this morning?”

Zachary shook his head. “Not I.”

“What am I to tell him?”

“Tell him I went out last night and drowned.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Then tell him whatever lie you can stoop to. For clearly you are not wedded to truth. You have broken your vows and you lie to those who trust you. You lie to your hosts and to their servants. If you have a lover, and I think we both know her name . . .” he paused and leered at the thought of Alinor, “. . . then, for sure, you lie to her, for she’s no royalist. She can’t be faithful to any cause or mortal man. You’re no better than me. In fact, you’re worse than me, for I ran for my life from a witch, but you are running back to her. And she will eat your lying soul and steal your child.”

“I am not running back to her!”

“Then you’re lying to yourself as well.”

“And there is no child.”

“There will be if she wants one.”

James paused and gritted his teeth on hatred. “I will not help her to find you in any way, and I will tell your son that you took a message for me and have not yet come back.”

Zachary nodded indifferently. “I sail on the morning tide anyway,” he said. “I’ll be gone for days, weeks. If the boy comes looking for me, he won’t find me.”

“Good-bye,” James said shortly.

“Godspeed, Priest,” Zachary said, getting a threat into the last word as James turned and walked away.

James went through the day in a daze. The boys wanted to watch the king go to church, but James could not bear to see that mournful face again, so he sent them on their own and they came back full of excitement that the king had saluted the crowd of well-wishers, that someone had raised their voice against him, that some cavaliers had started a brawl, that the king had laughed and gone back to his house, then waved to the crowd from his window, and that everyone said that the parliament men were coming in the next week to give him his crown back.

“D’you want to ride over to Cowes?” James asked. He found that every minute in Newport was unbearable. “We could take a ship to Portsmouth from Cowes, and then hire horses to ride home.”

“Can we?” Walter was exuberant. He cuffed Rob around the head. “Say yes!”

“Yes! Yes!” Rob exclaimed. “But did you say my father was coming to breakfast? Can I see him before we go?”

“He took a message for me to Southampton and he’s not returned,” James lied smoothly. “He said that he might be delayed. We might see him at Cowes. We might not. But I am afraid that he’s not coming home to your mother, Robert. He said he wouldn’t come home. I am sorry.”

“But what is she to do?” Rob demanded. “What if he never comes home? She can’t live off the herbs and the midwifery. Did he say he would send money? And there is Alys to be provided for. She needs a dowry. Her father should give her a dowry, sir.”

James swallowed his own sense of despair. “I will talk to your mother,” he said. He knew that he longed to talk to her. “If we can get you an apprenticeship, then you will earn good wages. You could do well, Robert. You could be her support. If your sister marries well, then your mother can live more cheaply at home. She’s got the boat now; she can earn her own keep. She does not depend on your father. She is skilled, and when she can get work she is paid well.”

“The women won’t use a midwife who is neither a wife nor a widow,” Rob said, flushed to his ears. “They think it’s unlucky.”

“I didn’t know,” James said quietly, realizing how much he did not know about Alinor and her life. “Perhaps she could go and live inland, where people don’t know her, where she could pass as a widow?”

“Why can’t he come home, and make everything right?” The cry came from the boy as if it were wrested from him.

James could not meet his eyes. “These are troubles between a man and a wife,” he said lamely. “I am sorry for you and for your mother. But if your father will not do his duty, I cannot make him. Neither can you, Robert. It’s not your fault.”

“The church wardens would make him!”

“They would, but he won’t come back to face them.”

“She will be shamed,” the boy said bleakly. “And they will call me a bastard.”

They rode to Cowes, Walter in buoyant spirits but Rob was very quiet. Then they spent the night at an inn on the quayside, and took a ship across the Solent. It was a calm crossing and when they landed in Portsmouth they hired horses and took the coast road, riding east, through fields and little villages with pretty waterside churches. They stayed overnight at Langstone in an old fishing inn. James woke to the smell of the sea and the cry of seagulls, and thought that for the rest of his life he would hear that mournful calling as the sound of defeat. Then they rode on, east through the marshy tidelands of Hampshire and across the county border to Sussex. When they came down the road that led south to her brother’s ferry and the wadeway, James narrowed his eyes against the low sun, looking for Alinor, where he had seen her before.

The tide was on the ebb, the water was dazzling in the rife. He almost thought that she would be waiting for him, her pale face bright with joy at seeing him. The light on the water was so bright, and he was so certain that she would come to meet him, that he saw her, her hood pushed back from her white cap, looking over the mire towards him. But it was a mirage, a false seeing in the haze of the waters, a chimera. It was her brother who came from the ferry-house, his dog at his heels, and he pulled the ferry over to them, and helped to load the hired horses.

“You can go along the bank and see your mother if you like,” James said quietly to Rob as Ned hauled the ferry, hand over hand on the rope. “Walter and I will go on to the Priory. I can lead your horse.”

Rob nodded.

“Why, what’s the matter with you?” Ned demanded, hearing the dullness in James’s voice and seeing Rob’s drooping head. “Are you sick, Rob? Is there something wrong, Mr. Summer?”

“Just weary,” James said. He had not known that the despair he felt in his belly was showing in his face. “I think we’re all weary.”

“So the sight of the king did not cheer you?” the ferry-man remarked. “His touch did not cure you of all ills?”

James reminded himself that nobody here knew that he had failed in his mission and the purpose of his life was wasted. “No. The boys liked to see him.”

“You a royalist now, Rob?” his uncle demanded, as the ferry grounded on the bank.

“No, Uncle,” Rob replied quietly. “But I was glad to see the king in person.”

“And his coat!” Walter interpolated. “You should have seen his hat!”

The boys led their horses off the ferry onto dry land.

“Looks like he’s going to haggle on and on with the parliament men,” Ned said to James. “But I reckon the army will have something to say about any deal. He won’t wrap the army round his little finger, whatever tricks he plays on parliament. The soldiers won’t forgive him for starting the wars again, after we all thought we were at peace. The country’s turned against him like never before, for that. No one will forgive him that.”

“I don’t know,” James said wearily, stepping ashore and pulling at his horse’s bridle. “God knows what they will come to, and what it will cost us all.”

“You don’t take in vain the name of our Lord on my ferry,” Ned reproved him.

“I apologize,” James said, through cold lips, leading his horse up to the mounting block, climbing into the saddle, and taking Rob’s reins. “My good wishes to your mother, Rob.”

Alinor was striding along the bank path to Ferry-house garden to pick blackberries when she saw the silhouette of her beloved son against the afternoon sky, as he walked from the rife. He did not bound like a colt in the field, but walked as if his feet were heavy, his head down as if he were hurt.

“Holloah!” she shouted, and ran towards him. As soon as she took him in her arms, she knew that there was something wrong. She sniffed at him like an animal scenting ill health: the different houses where he had lodged, smoke from different kitchens in his hair, a different starch in his collar, the smell of the sea and the salt of the harbor on his coat. Then she stepped back and looked into his face and saw how his shoulders were hunched, and his face turned down. “What is it, son?” she asked him gently. “What ails you?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” he said dully.

“Come home, come inside.” She led the way back to the cottage without another word, dimly understanding that he would not speak under the arching sky with the gulls crying and the sea lapping at the bank as if it were flowing inshore and would make all the world into tidelands.

“Were you going somewhere?” he asked her.

“Just to pick blackberries. I can go later.”

She did not close the front door on the little room, but kept it open so that she could see his face in the bright afternoon light. He dropped onto his stool. He had sat there when he was a boy and cried for some small hurt. She wanted to hold him now, as she had done then.

“Where’s Alys?” he asked.

“She’s having her dinner at Stoney Farm with the Stoney family, and staying the night there. She’s fine. But what is it with you?”

“I . . . It is . . . We met . . .”

Inwardly, she cursed the priest who had taken her boy from his home, over the seas, and brought him back speechless with distress. “Are you hungry?” she asked him, to give them both time.

“No!” he exclaimed, thinking that she could not waste her bread on him, that it would be hard for her to earn it when everyone knew that she was an abandoned wife.

“Have a cup of ale, then,” she said gently, and went to the jug and poured them each a cup. Then she sat beside him, and clasped her hands in her lap to keep herself still. “Tell me, Rob. It’s probably not that bad. It’s never as bad—”

“It is bad,” he insisted. “You don’t know.”

“Tell me then,” she said steadily. “So that I do know.”

“I saw my da,” he said quietly, his face downcast. “At Newport, on the island. He had a ship, he’s master of a coastal trader. It’s called the Jessie.” He snatched a quick look at her face. “Did you know?”

“No, of course not, I’d have told you.”

“He could’ve come home to us months ago,” he said. “But he didn’t.”

She gave a little sigh. “This doesn’t shock me,” she promised him. “Nor hurt me, neither.”

“I saw him, and I called his name, and he saw me and he ran,” Rob said, his voice quavering a little. “I didn’t think it at the time, but now I think that he knew me at once, and ran from me. But I went after him like a fool, and Walter and Mr. Summer after me.”

Now she flushed, a deep humiliated blush that rose from her neck to her forehead. “Master Walter and Mr. Summer were there, too?”

“Course they were! They met him.”

“Oh, no!”

“Yes.” He nodded. “Awful. We all went with him into an inn, a small dirty place where he had a slate. I think Mr. Summer paid foreverything. And he said he’d been pressed by the navy, the parliament navy, and escaped from them when they went over to the prince, and then he got a passage on a coastal trader. He said he’d come to breakfast with us the next morning, but he didn’t. He went on an errand for Mr. Summer and never came back. We thought we might see him in Cowes, but though I went down to the quayside he wasn’t there, and they hadn’t seen his boat. Mr. Summer says that he won’t come back here.”

With one hand shading his eyes so he did not see her face, he stretched out his other hand and she gripped it tightly.

“I don’t even know there was an errand,” he said, his palm clamped over his eyes. “It may be that they lied to me, thinking I was a child, thinking I am a fool. Maybe he just ran away, and Mr. Summer lied for him.”

“This isn’t your fault.” She felt that she could wail with pain that anyone should turn from Rob, that his own father should run from him. “This is the fault of the man that Zachary is, not the boy that you are. He can’t live with me: p’raps that’s my fault. But it’s nothing that can be blamed on you. You’ve been a son that anyone would be proud of, and Alys a daughter that anyone would love. Zachary cannot live with me, nor I with him. But that’s our fault. It doesn’t fall on the two of you.”

“Did you ever think he’d come back?”

“I didn’t know,” she confessed. “As the months went on, I thought it less and less likely, but I didn’t know. Just this Midsummer Eve I went to the graveyard in case his ghost was walking, so that I’d know for sure that he was dead. God forgive me, Rob, I was hoping he was dead so that we wouldn’t have to think of him anymore. When I didn’t see his ghost, I knew he must be alive, and was choosing not to come home to us. But it’s still not your fault, Rob.”

She felt a pulse of shame that she had met the priest in the graveyard when she should have been undertaking a vigil for the ghost of her husband, and now he had met Zachary, and they had spoken together of her. She could not imagine what Zachary might have said. If he had repeated the wild accusations he used to make—of her taking faerie gold for whoring in the other world, of her witchcraft and unmanning him—she would be shamed before James Summer forever. If he had convinced James that Ned’s wife had died because Alinor was negligent or worse: murderous; then she might face questioning. She closed her eyes at the shame and the danger that Zachary could still bring her. They sat side by side, both blinded with distress for a moment.

“It’s not your fault, Rob,” she repeated steadily. “And much of it’s not my fault either.”

“What’ll we do?” Rob asked anxiously. “If he doesn’t come back? You’ve got the boat now, but you can’t sell fish to fishermen, and when Walter goes to university I’ll have to find other work, and nothing’ll pay as well. And Alys can’t marry without a dowry.”

“I don’t rightly know what we’ll do,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. “But I have the herbs and the babies. I’ve been paid by Farmer Johnson. Everyone will go on having babies, God bless them. And if peace comes, and the bishop comes back to his palace, then I’ll get my license from him, and I’ll be able to charge more and I’ll be called out to more homes.”

“Not when they know that Da’s left us,” Rob contradicted her. “Not when they know you’re not a widow nor a wife. You’ll never get your license then. Even if the bishop comes back. You won’t be a woman of good repute. They won’t even let you into church; you’ll have to stand in the porch. They won’t let you in for communion.”

“Perhaps people won’t mind too much. Nobody liked Zachary.”

“They’ll call me a bastard!” he choked.

“They’ll be wrong,” she said steadfastly. “And you need not answer to it.”

He was silent for a moment. “Should we move away?” he asked. “Somewhere that you could call yourself a widow, and Alys and I could find work, and people wouldn’t know?”

“No parish would have us!” She tried to smile but he could see the pain in her face. “No parish would admit a widow woman with two children! They’d be too afraid that we’d fall on the parish and cost money. Mrs. Miller is afraid already, and we were born and bred here and have paid our tithes for generations. And besides, you know, gossip’d follow us, and it’d sound worse to strangers, people who didn’t know Zachary, and don’t know what he’s like.”

“I can’t face it here.”

“Yes, I understand. I do understand, Rob. But, at least here we have the garden and the boat and your uncle. I have my stillroom and my dairy and the brewhouse in Ferry-house. I work the garden with your uncle. There’s always work at the mill. They think well of you at the Priory, and Mrs. Wheatley, the cook, is a good friend to me. We’ll just have to make up our minds to tell everyone that Zachary has left me, so there’s no more talk of whether or not he’s dead. It’ll be bad for a month or two; but then something’ll happen and everyone’ll become accustomed.” She tried to smile at him reassuringly. “You’ll see. Some poor woman will hop over the stile and be shamed in church before us all. They’ll find something else to gossip about; they’ll talk about someone else.”

“They will blame you and they will look down on you, and you’ve done nothing wrong!” he said fiercely.

She nodded grimly. “Yes, maybe. But I have a good reputation as a hardworking woman with some skills, and that won’t change. Zachary was not well loved and nobody’ll miss him. I didn’t even miss him, but for the boat and his earnings.”

He nodded. “You’ll have to live without a husband for the rest of your life. And you’re—I don’t know—thirty?”

She smiled. “I’m twenty-seven years old. Yes, I’ll be a single woman for the rest of my life; but that’s no hardship for me. I have you and Alys, and I want for nothing more.”

“You might find someone you love,” he said shyly. “Someone might find you.”

“Nobody will ever find me here.” She gestured to the open door and the stretches of mud and slowly receding brackish water outside, as the low rumble of the tide mill started up like thunder, and there was a sudden gout of green water in the rife. “Nobody will ever find a woman like me in a place like this.”

James met with Sir William in the library after Walter had gone to bed. The candles were burned down in their sconces and the deerhound slept before the fire. Sir William was in his great chair by the fireside, James on the other side in a smaller chair. Both men had glasses of French brandy, smuggled by the hidden traders who came to the tide mill quay on the high tide dark nights, and left without showing a light. James was wearily explaining the king’s plan to trick the parliament and his refusal to leave.

“He wouldn’t come? Not even for the password?” Sir William repeated incredulously.

James shook his head. “No, sir, he would not.”

“You warned him of what might be?”

“I warned him, and I told him that it was his wife’s own plan and his son was waiting in his ship offshore. I begged him. He wouldn’t come.”

“God save him, this is a damnable mistake.” Sir William held up his glass in a toast. James clinked glasses and sat back in his chair.

“Are you sick?” Sir William cocked an eye at the younger man’s pale face.

“Perhaps a little fever. Nothing important.”

“So d’you think there’s any chance he might be right? That parliament will come to an agreement with him?”

“Newport is filled with royalists who boast that it doesn’t matter what he signs. They say he will sign anything, and once he’s back in his palace he’ll avenge his advisors that parliament executed, restore the queen, and bring the royal family back to London. He’ll take back his power and destroy his enemies. Everyone says that it doesn’t matter what he signs now—he will restore himself.”

“I doubt it. I really doubt it. The parliament men aren’t fools. It has cost them dear to get here. They’ve lost sons and brothers, too. They won’t throw it away on an empty agreement when he has given them every reason never to trust him. My own ferry-man doesn’t trust him! Anything they offer would have to be binding. They’ll tie him down with oaths. They won’t just hand him the treasury and the army for a handful of promises.”

“I was told that he will consent to nothing less,” James said wearily.

“Impossible!” Sir William said scathingly. “Besides, it’s not his army anymore. This is the New Model Army, they’re all Cromwell’s men. They’ll never serve under a king; they have their own ideas! They’re a power to themselves, they think for themselves. Not even the parliament can control them—how ever would he?”

James clenched his hands on the carved arms of his chair, trying to master a wave of dizziness. “Yes, sir. But that’s the very reason that parliament will have to agree with him: to avoid the demands of the army. Some parliament men hate the army worse than they doubt the king. Some would rather have a tyrannical king than a tyrannical army—who wouldn’t? They’re divided among themselves, whereas he is determined . . .”

The older man nodded. “It’s a gamble,” he said. “A royal gamble. You have to admire him for taking it.”

James, very far from admiration, took a sip of brandy. “I don’t know where it leaves us,” he said. “I don’t know where it leaves me.”

“I’ll wait until I’m summoned again to serve him,” Sir William spoke for himself. “But I’ll never put my son in danger again. It’s hard to accept that he would let us come to his door before refusing. Did he not think of the danger to us? And what about you? Will you have to go back to your seminary for your orders?”

“I suppose so.” James put a hand to his forehead and found it was wet with sweat. “They’ll never understand how I failed. I was told to set loose a lion; I never thought it would stay in its cage. Of all the things that I feared might go wrong, I never thought of this. I’m at a loss. I was to see him safe on his son’s ship, and then go to London. I am ordered to report to London as soon as he was safely away. I suppose now I shall go back to them and say he has stayed, and I have failed. I will have to go to the queen and tell her that I have spent her fortune for nothing.”

“You’re very welcome to stay here. The chapel needs a chaplain. Walter needs a tutor. Nobody doubts you. You’re safe here.”

“I’d be glad to stay overnight, but I am under oath. Tomorrow I must ride to London.”

“You don’t look fit for it.”

James felt his very bones ache. “I have to report. There’ll be another plot. There’ll be more journeys along hidden ways. There will be another task for me: and I am sworn to obedience.”

“Well, please God they don’t ask more of you than to lie low and wait for better times. You’ve been living on the brink of danger for months, and you look as sick as a dog.”

“It’s been weary work,” James conceded.

“What if they send you back to him, to do it all over again?”

“I am sworn to serve,” James repeated, feeling the words sour in his mouth and his heart hammering. “I pray for peace.”

“So do we all,” his lordship said. “But always on our own terms. Shall we pray now?”

“Matins?” James offered, looking at the French clock that ticked on the stone chimney breast. It was past midnight.

“Yes,” Sir William said, getting to his feet. “And will you leave tomorrow?”

“At dawn,” James said, thinking of the two boys in his care, of his plans for them, which would not now happen, and of the woman that he had sworn he would never see again, and now he never would.

James, in his white shirt and riding breeches, but with his holy stole around his neck, went quietly around the private chapel lighting candles. Sir William knelt before his great chair, his eyes closed, his face buried in his hands. Turning his back on his congregation of one, James prepared the bread and the wine for the Mass at the old stone altar at the east end of the church and spoke the prayers in Latin, his voice never rising above a quiet monotone. Sir William did not need to hear clearly. He joined in the confession and the preparation of the host in Latin, knowing every word from his childhood in a family that had never surrendered their faith, not during the years of Elizabeth, not during the years of Edward, not during the years of Henry.

The sense of despair that James had felt when he realized that he had spent months preparing an escape for a king who would not leave drained from him as his hands moved deftly among the goblets and the pyx, turned the page, poured the wine, broke the bread. He turned to find Sir William kneeling on the chancel steps and gave him the holy bread and a sip of the sacred wine. He knew, without any doubt, that at that moment Jesus Christ, the risen Lord, was in the bread and in the wine, that it was His body and His blood, that James and Sir William had dined at the table of the last supper, and that they had defeated death itself. He knew himself to be a sinner and he knew himself to be mired in doubt; but still he knew that he was redeemed and saved.

He muttered the final prayer in Latin: “Abide with us, O Lord,” and heard Sir William whisper the response: “For it is toward evening and the day is far spent.”

“As the watchmen look for the morning . . .”

“So do we look for Thee, O Christ.”

“Come with the dawning of the day . . .”

“And make Thyself known in the breaking of bread.”

James had a sensation under his ribs, which he thought must be his heart breaking, just as Christ’s heart broke on the cross. He had given up the woman he loved for the king that he must save, and he had failed to save him and learned to doubt her. He would never see his king again; he would never see her. He would leave her in poverty and the king in imprisonment. He was only twenty-two and he had failed in everything his duty and his heart had prompted him to do. “God forgive me,” he said, and without another word, sank to the floor as his knees buckled beneath him, and he lost consciousness.

They sent Stuart the footman to fetch Alinor, three miles round by road, as he did not know the tracks across the harbor and was fearful of the tide coming in and drowning him, and of the ghosts of drowned men swimming after him. But when he hammered on the door of the cottage he found Alinor and Rob in the half-light of the smoldering fire, hours after good Christians should have been in bed. He recoiled in fear at the sight of the wisewoman, waking in the dark hours, with her son beside her.

“Not abed?” he asked fearfully. “Up all night?”

Alinor rose. “Is someone sick?”

“It’s the tutor,” he replied. “Sir William said to come at once.”

Rob handed Alinor her physic basket, already stocked with oils and herbs, pulled on his cap and jacket, and led the way across the mire to the Priory, by shore and bank and hidden path, lit by the half-moon gleaming on the rising water. They were at the Priory sea meadow as the moon came from behind a bank of cloud to make the eastern waters of the harbor shine, and they crossed the kitchen garden in the eerie light.

The chapel was closed and quiet, all the gold and candles hidden away by Mr. Tudeley and his lordship. They had dragged James back into the library, stripped him of his stole, and left him on the rug before the fire, fearful of lifting him up the stairs.

“Did he say anything before he fainted?” Alinor could not look at him, so deathly pale; sprawled on the hearthrug, just as he had sprawled in her net shed, when he had slept beneath her roof and she had thought him as beautiful as a fallen angel.

“He said, ‘God forgive me,’ ” Sir William said. “But he could not be possessed by devils. He is a godly man and he was in . . . in a state of grace.”

One swift glance from her gray eyes told him that she understood what he and the exhausted priest were doing at midnight. “Did he complain of fever or chills?” she asked, putting her warm rough hand on his cold sweating face.

“Yes, and he was weary,” Sir William said. “And melancholy.”

She had a very good idea why he was tired and sad. “May I use the goods from your stillroom?”

“Of course. Take whatever you need. You know what’s there. But, Mrs. Reekie: you don’t think it is the plague?”

It was the one question that Alinor dreaded, worse than whether a baby might be breech or malformed. If it was the plague it was almost certain to be fatal for everyone in the room, for half the household, for most of the village. Their death sentence had already been written and could not be recalled. There was nothing she could do against plague. She was likely to be the first to die. That was how it was. Everyone knew it.

“I can’t tell,” she said. “Not till I search his body for the marks.”

“But could it be?” Sir William demanded. He had retreated behind his chair. “He was at Newport. Dear God, he took my son, Walter, to Newport and to Cowes.”

“And mine,” Alinor reminded him.

“They could have met with anyone. He could have taken the plague from a ship. They could all three have taken it. They came home by ship to Portsmouth.”

“I’ll need to examine him,” she repeated, hiding her own dread. “I can’t say yet.”

Sir William would not take the risk of the man staying in his house another moment. “Get him carried over to the stables.” He turned to Mr. Tudeley. “Carry him on the rug so he’s not hurt. Leave the rug there. We’ll lock him in to be on the safe side until we know.” He turned to Alinor. “Mrs. Reekie, I have to ask you, will you go in with him and nurse him till he is well?”

“I can’t,” Alinor said flatly. “I have a son and daughter of my own. I will examine him, but if he has the signs I can’t be shut in with him. I’ve never been a plague nurse.”

“I beg you,” he said. “I will pay you well, very well. Go in with him now and examine him. If he has it—God forbid that he has it—I will get a plague nurse from Chichester to come and be locked up with him and you shall come out, before she arrives, before we declare it, and go to your own cottage and not stir until it is over. If he does not have it I will still pay you three shillings a day to nurse him until he is better.”

She hesitated.

“You don’t want him to be put into his bed in the boys’ room,” he reminded her. “Not with your son and mine. Better for us all, if you nurse him in the stable loft.”

She looked at James’s white face, at the fall of his dark curling hair, his black eyelashes lying on his pale cheek, the darkening of his chin and upper lip that marked him as no angel but a mortal man. She saw the rapid rise and fall of his chest and how the cold sweat darkened the curls on his forehead. She knew she could not bear to leave him. She could not bear to hand him over to the rough care of a strange woman.

“Ten shillings.” His lordship raised his bid for the safety of his household. “Ten shillings a day, till the plague nurse comes. Every day.”

“I’ll do it,” she decided. “Rob can fetch what I need from your stillroom, but then he must stay away.”

The rooms above the stable, hastily vacated by the grooms, were light and airy with dappled windows not of glass but of thin cut horn set at each end into the eaves. Down below, the hunters stirred and snorted in their stalls and the room smelled comfortingly, of clean straw and hay and the warm oaty smell of horses. Stuart and two of the grooms lugged James, still wrapped in the hearthrug, up the ladder and laid him on the bed.

“I’ll send over food,” Mr. Tudeley said, keeping his distance, halfway down the ladder. “You can pull it up on the rope.”

“And a bucket of hot water for washing and a pitcher of cold water. A big jug of small ale and some little dishes for mixing. I’ll need fresh bread, cheeses, and meat for when he wakes, and at noon someone must bring breakfast,” Alinor instructed. “I’ll need a pail for a chamber pot, and strewing herbs.”

“Of course, he’ll be served as an honored guest, and you too, Mrs. Reekie,” Mr. Tudeley said. “Shall your boy come and sleep here with you?”

“No,” she said firmly. “He’ll stay in the house with Master Walter. I’ll sit up tonight with Mr. Summer and if he is well tomorrow, God willing, he can come back to the house and I will go to my own home. This is just for a night.”

“You will tell us at once,” the steward said nervously. He would not mention the word “plague.”

“I’ll tell you the moment that any marks show, and you’ll call another nurse and I’ll hand over to her,” Alinor assured him.

“I’ll send over everything,” Mr. Tudeley promised, then descended the ladder and closed the hatch behind him. Alinor waited a moment and then went over and bolted it from her side, so that no one could come up the stairs unexpectedly. She and James were quite alone.

She went to where they had left him, limp as a corpse in the rug, and she unfolded him, as if she were unwrapping a precious parcel. As the carpet fell away, he sighed and seemed to gasp for air. Alinor lifted his head and shoulders a little and slid a bolster behind his head. He seemed to breathe easier and a little color came into his cheek. She found she was looking at his pale mouth and remembering how he had kissed her.

She unbuttoned his fine lawn shirt. The buttons were made from mother-of-pearl. She touched each one, seeing the sheen on it, and then opened his shirt so that she could see his chest and his belly.

His shoulders were broad, his chest and belly flat. He was well muscled as a man who rides and runs every day. A dark trace of hair ran from his belly down towards his breeches and Alinor, who had undressed her drunken husband more than once, unlaced his breeches without hesitation and peeled back the flap. For the first time she saw him naked. She saw the darkness of his thick hair, the strength of his sleeping cock, the muscled line of his haunches. She looked at him for no more than a moment and felt her desire like a fever of her own. Carefully, she eased the breeches from under him, bending over him and smelling the clean warm male scent of him; she had to stop herself dropping her head to kiss his belly and laying her cheek against his hot skin.

She peeled the riding breeches off him, down to his boots, and then she unlaced the boots and slipped them from his feet, then the fine hose. He lay before her naked, except for his open shirt and jacket.

There were no red spots of smallpox. She lifted one arm and then another and felt in his armpits. There were no swellings of the buboes that were a certain sign of plague. There was no sign, on any part of his smooth creamy skin, that anything was wrong with him except the heat of him: he was burning up with fever.

Gently she raised him higher on the bolster, and felt him nestle towards her and groan a little as if he were in pain. She buttoned up his shirt again to protect him from cold, and she felt a passionate tenderness as she did so, as if she were tending to Rob or Alys when they were babies. She left the rich carpet underneath him, and she covered him with one of the blankets from the other bed. Most physicians would heap blankets on a feverish patient and add a warming pan to burn out the fever. Alinor treated her patients as she had treated her children, keeping them cool and still. Again, she put her hand against his forehead. She could almost feel the heat pulsing through the blue veins at his temples. She put two fingers inside his shirt collar on his neck and felt the drumming of his heartbeat.

There was a call from the yard outside, and she went to the window and opened it to find Stuart, the serving man, with linen and small ale, a bucket of hot water and some washing bowls, some linen towels and a box of herbs and oils chosen by Rob from the stillroom. There was a pulley and a rope above the window for raising sacks of grain. Alinor lowered the hook and Stuart sent up the basket loaded with a tureen of soup, and bread and cheeses on platters, then all the other things he had brought, until he said: “Will that be all, Mrs. Reekie?” as if Alinor were a guest and not a servant like him.

“That’s all,” she said. “Tell Rob to come here after breakfast. I’ll speak to him from here. But nobody is to come in until I know what ails the tutor.”

“Beg pardon, Mrs. Reekie, but d’you think it might be plague?” Stuart whispered fearfully.

“There are no signs now,” she said cautiously. “I will watch him today in case of the signs. There are no marks on him yet. Wait there.” She went to her basket of herbs and brought out a bunch of dried sage, and tossed it down to him. “Light this at the kitchen fire,” she said, “and then blow it out and bring it to me still smoking.”

He was gone only a few moments and brought it back, smoldering in an earthenware bowl. Alinor lowered the rope and he put it in the basket and she pulled it up.

“Does it summon spirits?” he whispered. “Are you calling them up?”

Alinor shook her head. “It cleanses the air,” she said firmly. “I do no work with spirits or anything like that. Just herbs and oils, like anyone else.”

He nodded, but he did not believe her.

“That’s all,” Alinor said, thinking that however often she denied the rumors of magic they clung to her, and to all the women of her family, like the mist from the mire.

“God bless us all,” Stuart gasped, and scuttled to the kitchen door.

Alinor took the stems of the smoldering sage and walked around the room, shaking the burning leaves so that the cleansing scent went into every corner. Then she set it back on the bowl and left it to smoke. She opened the sack of physic to see what Rob had sent her. There was a stick of cinnamon, a jar with a lemon bottled in oil, and a bottle of distilled holy basil from the Peachey stillroom. Alinor thought that James might have taken tertian fever, a sickness that lingered in the mire, striking visitors, and staying with them for life, coming back three times a year and so earning its name. The first bout of illness was always the worst, often fatal; the others wore the patient down, as he became feverish and delirious. Most of the Foulmire families took it as children: Rob had it as a child, and Zachary had quatrain fever every season. Alinor’s mother believed it came from the bites of the flies that whined noisily in your ear as you slept, and advised her daughter to plant marigolds and lavender at windows and doorways to keep them out. It was no surprise to Alinor that the man she loved had been poisoned by the flies that lived on the waters of her home. This proved he should never have come; and, once he had left, he should never have come back. It was a sign to them both.

His fever did not break all night. She sponged him down with water and her own lavender oil. She added the oil of lemon to the soup, and she grated cinnamon over it as she spooned it down his throat, but he remained half conscious, in a fevered sleep, turning his head from side to side, and speaking words, Latin words, that she could not understand but that she feared were heresy or magic, or both.

He was only still when she held him, one arm around his shoulders, as she helped him to drink small ale, which she dosed with more lemon oil. Only then was he quiet, as if her touch cooled him, and so, as the night wore on till dawn, she held him, leaning back against the rough wooden wall, his hot head on her shoulder, her arms around him. He nuzzled his head into her neck as if he wanted the cool of her skin against his face, and he slept.

When the thick horn windows showed a cloudy light, he groaned with pain, staggered to his feet, and crammed his fists against his belly. She knew what was coming and tucked the pail beneath his buttocks as he voided himself, doubled over in agony.

“There,” she said, “there,” as if he were one of her sick children, and washed him with Beard-Papa water that she had brought from her home. She lowered the stinking pail on the pulley, and called to the stable boy to tip it in the midden and wash out the pail and return it. Then she washed her hands in the Beard-Papa water and made herself as comfortable as she could against the planking of the wooden wall, and once again took him in her arms and laid his head on her shoulder.

Alinor dozed, dreaming incoherent dreams of love, of a man who spoke of “a woman like you in a place like this,” of a world where women were not condemned in church before the men who were sinners like them, who had sinned with them. She dreamed of Alys and her sweetheart, Richard Stoney, of Rob and the life he might live if they were not poor and born to be poor, of Zachary sailing far away and saying into the wind of the dream, as he had once said so bitterly to her: “Your trouble is that nothing real is ever enough for you.”

She woke in daylight, cramped, with a sense of defeat. All her pride in her passion of the night was gone. She thought Zachary was right and that she had misled herself and misled her children, and he had spoken the truth—not when he said that she danced with faeries, but that she longed to be with them. All her life she had wanted more than the life she was born to; but this morning she knew she had sunk very low: a poor woman, about to be disgraced before her neighbors, working as that lowest of beings: a plague nurse, almost a layer-out, only one step above a porter of a plague cart heaped with dead bodies, calling for people to bring out their dead. She knew no work lower than a plague nurse, and her folly and her love had brought her down to this: locked up with a dying man, who was foresworn, and who had never said that he loved her.

Still, she held him; knowing herself to be a fool, and ashamed of her folly. But then she realized James was warm in her arms, not cold and stiffening, not sweating and dying. He was warm and sweet-smelling, like a man who would live, and his eyes were opening and his color was good.

“Alinor,” he croaked, as if he was saying her name for the very first time.

“Are you better?” she asked incredulously.

“I can hardly speak. I don’t know. Yes.”

“Don’t speak. You were very ill.”

“I thought I was going to die.”

“You’re not going to die. It’s not the plague.”

“Thank God. I thank God.”

“Amen,” she said.

Blearily, he looked around. “Are we in the net shed again?”

“No! The hayloft at the Priory. You fell sick. D’you remember?”

“No. Nothing.” He frowned. “I brought the boys home from Cowes.”

“You did. They’re safe. Then you had a great fever.”

He struggled with the memory of the lies that he had to uphold, but he could not remember them. He could not be sure anymore what was true and what was false. “I’m so thirsty.”

She offered him small ale and he drank it gratefully, but she allowed him only one cup. “Slowly, slowly, you can have more later.”

“I’m not sure what I said, what I may have spoken in my sleep . . .”

“Nothing that made sense,” she reassured him. “Sir William sent for me after midnight. He told me nothing. You were lying on a rug before the fire. He said only that you had fainted. When I got here, you were dazed with fever.”

He nodded. “I can remember nothing.”

She thought that he must spend his life forgetting half of it, and speaking of less, and now oblivion had come to him, like a curse in answer to a wish.

“His lordship sent for me and asked me to come up here with you to make sure that it was not the plague.”

“You came to me . . . although you said . . .”

“Yes,” she said steadily. “The lord of the manor sent for me. I had to.”

“But you agreed to nurse me.”

“His lordship asked me. I had to.”

“You came to me,” he insisted. “You chose to come.”

She showed him the sweetest, most generous smile. “I came to you,” she confirmed.

“And undressed me.”

“I had to see if you had the marks of the pox or the plague.”

“And stayed with me all night.”

“To watch over your fever.”

“You held me in your arms.”

“It was the only way you would lie still, and not toss and turn and throw off the covers.”

“I was naked in your arms.”

She pursed her lips. “For your own good.”

He was silent for a moment. “My God, I wish I could be naked in your arms again.”

“Hush,” she said, wondering how much they could hear in the stable below. “Hush.”

“I will not hush,” he whispered. “I have to speak. Alinor, I thought I would go away without seeing you again, I thought we would never meet. I have lost my faith—my God—I am forsworn so many ways. I have lost my king and my God and myself. But I thought there would be some meaning to my life if only I could see you again—and now you are here.”

“I am not faith, nor God, nor king,” she told him solemnly. “I am not even a woman of good repute. I know you met Zachary at Newport. He will have told you—unless the fever has made you forget—he must have told you that I’m a bad woman: neither widow nor wife.”

“He swore to all sorts of terrors. I don’t regard them,” he promised. “I didn’t listen to him, and I didn’t believe him. I can’t remember anything he said.” He did not even know that he was lying to her. “I thought I would never see you again—I am ordered to leave you, and leave Foulmire—and now here we are, locked up together, almost as if it is God’s will that we should never part. I swear in His name that I don’t want to be anywhere else. I’ve lost everything but you. I thought I was dying, and when I was at the very darkest moment, the only thing I wanted was you. I could not speak, I could not think, I could not pray: all I wanted was you. I thought I was dreaming that you were holding me. I thought it was a fever dream of desire. I would not have come back to life if it had not been for your touch.”

They were silent for a moment at the enormity of what he had said.

“When I tell them you’re well, you’ll be free to go,” she warned him. “And I’ll have to leave. You’ll go to your bedroom at the Priory to rest and grow strong, and I’ll go home and come back tomorrow to see that you continue well. Sir William may call the Chichester physician.”

“Then tell them you won’t know till tomorrow,” he instantly replied, and when she hesitated, he said again: “Alinor, I am begging you. We have no chance, we two. We have no chance to be together in the world, but we can have today and tonight, if you will just tell this one, this little lie, we can hold each other. Tell them that you are waiting to see the fever break, or the spots come out, or whatever it is that you might wait for. And give us today and tonight and tomorrow, here alone. Nothing more. I ask you for nothing more. But I beg this of you.”

She hesitated.

“You need not lie with me unless you choose to,” he offered. “I ask nothing of you but to be here with you. You can see I can’t force you.” As he spoke he realized that he was unmanned, as Zachary had said he would be. He shook his head to clear it of the malign thought. “I don’t want to force you. You shall not be constrained. I won’t even touch you if you don’t allow it. But, Alinor, give me a day and a night with you before I go out into that world where I have lost everything but you.”

Without replying she rose up from the bed and she untied the laces down the front of her linen shift, so that he saw, for the first time, the curve of her breasts. She untied the waistband of her skirt and dropped it to the floor so that she was naked but for her open shift, and beneath it, he saw the outline of the long line of her haunches and thighs.

“If you want, we will have today and tonight,” she agreed, like a woman preparing to drown in deep water. “Today and tonight,” and she came to his arms, half naked.

At noon Rob came to the yard under the window. Alinor leaned out, smiled down at her son, and told him that she was sure it was not the plague but she would stay and nurse Mr. Summer until his fever had broken. She praised him for the herbs he had chosen and said that she needed no more, just another jar of oil of lemon to bring down the fever. She told him to ask Mrs. Wheatley for more small ale and for Stuart to send up their dinner in a basket. She said that Mr. Summer was sleeping and he was feverish but no worse.

“But how are you, Rob? You don’t have it?”

“I’m well,” Rob said, looking up at her. “And Walter is well, too. I checked him for heat and I looked at his throat. No inflammation, no spots on his back or his chest. Whatever ails Mr. Summer, I don’t think Walter and me have it.”

“God be praised,” Alinor said. “And, Rob,” she lowered her voice as he stepped closer to the wall and looked trustingly up at her. “Don’t be troubled about your father. Mr. Summer won’t speak of meeting him and we need say nothing. Don’t speak of Zachary till I come out and we can agree what we want to say. Especially, Rob . . . don’t be unhappy about him. He has made his choice and will live his life. We’ll make ours. You should be happy. You have so much to look forward to.”

He nodded, his eyes on her face.

“And go and tell Alys to stay the night at Ferry-house,” she instructed him. “I’ll be home tomorrow. And say nothing to her yet.”

She blew him a kiss and he ducked his head in embarrassment, waved his hand to her, and went from the yard.

James, in his makeshift bed, watched her close the window and step back so that she could not be seen from the yard below.

“All well with him?” he asked her.

“God be praised,” she said.

He found he could not say: “Amen.” He thought that he could no longer speak to his God.

“I think I should make a new bed for you with clean sheets,” she said. “And shall I ask Stuart to bring water for you to wash?”

“Yes,” he said. “And we shall have all day and all night,” he said. “This is like a dream, as if I still had fever.”

At once she put the back of her hand against his forehead. “No,” she said. “No fever and it’s no dream.”

“And tomorrow . . .”

“Let’s not think of tomorrow till we have to,” she whispered, and he drew her down to him, as he lay on the bed and pressed her against him.

The hours went by unnoticed. Two or three times Stuart called from the yard below, and Alinor threw on her gown and let down the rope from the window. He passed up food, water for washing, ale for drinking, but they hardly noticed how often he came, nor what he brought. Alinor made up the bed with clean linen and they both lay down together naked, made love, fell asleep, and woke to make love again. They watched the sun set over the marshes from the west window, and they saw the moon set. All night they stirred and woke and made love and slept, as if there was neither night nor day, and they needed no light but the flickering candle that made their moving bodies glow.

“I never knew that it was like this,” James confessed. “When the brothers spoke of the love of a woman in the seminary I thought it was somehow harder and cruel.”

“Was this your first time? Your very first?” Alinor asked, feeling a pang of guilt as if she had sinned against James and taken his innocence.

“I’ve been tempted,” he said. “When I was in hiding and traveling from one house to another. There was a lady in London, and another at a house in Essex, I knew that I felt desire; but it always felt like sin, and I could resist it; but this feels right.”

Alinor imagined that the handsome young priest had been desired by more than one woman, receiving him into her house and hiding him from everyone, delighting in the secret. She laughed at the thought of it and at once his face lightened. “You must think me a fool,” he said. “To be a virgin at my age!”

“No,” she assured him. “I’ve learned to despise a man who has been with many women and loved none. Zachary was the only man I was ever with, and he was a hard husband. They were right to teach you that at the seminary. Hard and bitter and . . . thankless.” She found the truest word. “It was a thankless task being wife to Zachary.”

He took a bright lock of her hair and twisted it around his third finger as if it were a ring. “And have you had no man since him?”

She looked at him. “Did he tell you otherwise?”

He shook his head. “He told me all sorts of fears and terrors,” he said. “I was not asking because of his lies, but because I cannot believe that no one courted you.”

“I had no desire,” she told him. “If anyone had asked me—but nobody speaks of such things on Foulmire—I would have said that I was one of those women who feel no desire. For me, it was always pain and harsh treatment. Zachary said that I was cold as stone to him, and I thought there was no other way to be. I never knew that it could be like this.”

He smiled at her and touched her warm cheek with his finger.

“When I delivered a baby sometimes, and the woman asked me when she could lie with her husband again, I never understood why she would want to. I would tell her she must wait for two months, until she was churched, and I used to wonder why she complained that it was so long.”

“Would it seem long to you now?”

“A day would seem too long a time to wait, now.”

“So now you understand love?”

“For the first time.” She smiled at him. “So it is the first time for me too, in a way.”

He kissed her hand. “The woman of stone has melted?”

“I’ve become a woman of desire.”

Later in the night they woke, ravenously hungry, and ate the rest of the bread and cheese, good white bread from the Priory bread oven, smooth hard cheese with a salty crust from the Priory dairy.

“Zachary spoke of something,” James said tentatively, afraid of the darkening of her eyes, of her turning away.

“Oh, he’s one that never stopped speaking,” she said, with a smile. “He thundered like the tide mill at every low tide.”

“He said that Ned had a wife . . .” he began.

His words were like a blow. He had knocked the smile off her. At once she went as white as guilt.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . Don’t say anything,” he begged her. “You need say nothing. It was just . . .”

“Did you believe him? Will you repeat to Sir William . . . what he said? Whatever it was he said? Are you bound by your vows to tell the minister at St. Wilfrid’s?”

“No, I’ll never say. I wouldn’t have said anything now but . . .”

“But he made you wonder,” she said slowly. “For all your learning, and your languages, and your knowledge—for all your faith!—he made you wonder. He made you . . . afraid.”

“I’m not afraid!” he started up, but she put a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“If the world was as Zachary sees it, we would all be afraid,” she said gently. “For like a poor fool he has peopled it with monsters to frighten himself. He speaks of me as a woman who lies with faerie folk. He denies his own children. He says I cast a spell that unmanned him. He says that I killed my poor sister-in-law, Mary. You know, if people around here believed just one of these things, they would test me as a witch?”

He shook his head in denial of the terrible accusations against her. “They must know you’re innocent!”

“You didn’t know.”

“I did! I do!”

“You know what they would do to me?”

“I don’t know.” He did not want to know.

“They have a ducking stool on Sealsea quay and they strap a woman into the seat, truss her like a kitten for drowning. The seat is on a great beam that the blacksmith—usually it’s the blacksmith—pushes down on the other end. The woman goes up into the air, where everyone can see her, then he lowers her down into the water, underneath the water. They take their time and when they judge that the trial has been long enough, they bring her up and raise her in the air again, to have a look at her. If she’s retching seawater, they say that the devil has protected her, and they send her to Chichester, for trial in the court before the judges, who will hear the evidence and may sentence her to death by hanging. But if she comes up white as sea-foam, and blue as ink at the lips and fingernails, her mouth open from screaming in the water, her hands like claws from tearing at the ropes, then they know she was innocent, and they bury her in the holy ground in the churchyard.”

“I’ve heard of such things but—”

“It’s the law that every parish should have a ducking stool. You must know that.”

“I thought it was just a ducking?”

She showed him a thin smile. “Yes, that’s what it’s called. Makes it sound light work, doesn’t it? And some women are only ducked. But of course, some drown.”

“Sir William should make sure it is only a ducking.”

She shrugged. “He should. When he’s here. But it’s better for Sir William that they duck a witch from time to time, and blame some poor woman for their misfortunes, than ask him whose side he took at Marston Moor, what he did at Newbury—and why they should pay their tithes to him.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it! He’s paid his fine for serving the king. And he’s been forgiven by parliament.”

“We’ll never forgive him,” she said, speaking for her brother, for all the men who hoped for a better life without a lord. “He took a dozen lads from Sealsea with the king’s cockade in their hats, and he brought only seven home.”

“But that has nothing to do with it,” he explained patiently. “And he’s a civilized man—he would stop a witch trial. He’s a justice of the peace—he would uphold the law. He’s an educated man, a lawyer. He wouldn’t hurt an innocent woman.”

She smiled at him as if he were a child. “No woman is innocent,” she remarked and her words made him shudder as if it were Zachary speaking. “No woman is innocent. The Bible names the woman as the one to blame for bringing sin into the world. Everything is our fault: sin and death are at our door, from now till Judgment Day. Sir William isn’t going to risk his own authority by stepping in to save some poor slut from drowning.”

He was chilled by her cynicism, and he did not want to hear her. He wanted her back in his bed, warm and responsive. She had been hardened by the cruelties of her life and he wanted her to be soft and melting.

“But it doesn’t matter to us,” he suggested. “And I daresay there was nothing in what Zachary said anyway, about your sister-in-law?”

“Mary died under my care,” she told him frankly. “And the world knew well enough that we quarreled like a cat and a dog in the same barn, every day since Ned brought her into Ferry-house and set her up in my mother’s place. I disliked her and she loathed me. But, all the same, I cared for her the best that I knew how. I didn’t know what should be done for her; I don’t think anybody would have known. Her baby came too soon, and it was a bitter stillbirth for us all. Then I couldn’t stop her bleeding. She died in my arms and I couldn’t save her. I don’t even know what caused either death: hers or the child’s. I’m not a physician, I’m just a midwife.”

“Zachary said it was his child, and you were jealous,” he said, and instantly regretted it.

She looked at him very coolly and levelly. She drew the sheet around her shoulders as if it was a silken stole. “He told you that, did he?” Suddenly she was cold. “Well, you must be the judge of what you hear. I’ve never defended myself against Zachary’s lies, and I’ll not reply to his foul words in your sweet mouth. But if it was his child—as he boasted to me, after she was dead and couldn’t answer back—then I doubt she was willing.”

He shivered with distaste. He felt that he could not bear the ugliness of these people’s lives on the very edge of the shore, with their loves and hates ebbing and flowing like a muddy tide, with their anger roaring like the water in the millrace, with their hatreds and fears as treacherous as the hushing well. That Zachary might have raped his sister-in-law, or seduced her, that he bedded his own wife without her consent, that her brother tolerated this, and instead of putting it right, went away to fight against the king, that Alinor’s own husband denied fathering her children! James’s shudder told him that he wanted nothing to do with any of them. He wished himself back with his own people, where cruelty was secret, violence was hidden, and good manners more important than crime.

Tentatively, he reached out to her; he wanted her to be the lover of his feverish dream, not the woman who struggled in this sordid world. “I believe in you. I believe in you, Alinor.”

The face she turned to him was warm and trusting, her eyes brimming with tears. “You can,” she said simply, and he felt that he was falling into the deepest sin as he kissed her soft mouth and her wet eyelashes as they rested on her cheeks.

After that, they kept to their promise not to think of the world outside the stable loft; not to think of tomorrow; but at dawn, making love even before they were fully awake, when her eyelids fluttered open in pleasure, she saw the dim light at the window and she said quietly, sorrowfully, “Ah, my love, it’s morning.”

“Not yet,” he said, moving slowly above her. “That’s moonlight.”

“No. It’s dawn. And I have to go back to my home today, and we have to tell Sir William that you are well.”

He rested his head on her shoulder as he moved within her. “I can’t bear it.”

“Can’t bear the pleasure or can’t bear the parting?”

“Both. Can’t we say that I am still ill? Can’t we take another day? Alinor, my love, can’t we steal another day together?”

“No. You know we can’t. Neither of us can come under suspicion.”

“I won’t let you go.”

She raised herself up to his kiss and her rich hair tumbled back from her face. “Let me kiss you once,” she said, “and then I’ll get up and get dressed.”

He wanted to hold her, but she shook her head and he rolled away and lay back, gripping his hands behind his head so that he should not snatch at her, as she leaned over him and kissed him passionately on the mouth and then rested her forehead on his chest, inhaling the scent of him as if he were a rose beneath her lips. Then she peeled herself off him, as if she were shedding her own skin, and turned away, to pull her linen shift over her head so that the stiff fabric fell, concealing her.

“I can’t do this,” he said quietly. “I really can’t be parted from you.”

She said nothing, but stepped into her skirt and tied the laces at her waist with meticulous care, and then sat on a bench at the side of the room to pull on her woolen hose.

“Alinor,” he breathed.

“Let me dress!” Her voice was choked. “I can’t dress and speak. I can’t hear your voice and think. Let me dress.”

He sat up in the bed in silence while she twisted her hair into a knot at the back of her head and pulled on her white cap, crumpled as it was. When she turned to him she was, once again, the respectable midwife of Sealsea Island; and the tranced lover of the night was hidden under the shapeless bulky clothes.

“Now you,” she said.

He started towards her and she put out her hand to fend him off. “Don’t touch me,” she begged him. “Just get dressed.”

He pulled on his linen shirt. For the first time in his life he noticed what fine linen he wore, and he thought that the first thing he would do, as soon as he was well, would be to go to Chichester and buy her some beautiful shifts, as smooth as her flawless skin. He pulled on his hose, heaved up his breeches, stamped his feet into his riding boots, and turned to her.

“I’m dressed,” he said. “Are you satisfied?”

Her dark eyes in her pale face were huge. “No,” she said quietly. “I am longing for you again, already. But we have to be ready to face the world and the day.”

He heard the echo of Zachary in the back of his mind: that she was a woman that no man could ever satisfy. He shook his head. “Where will you go?” he asked, as if she had anywhere to go but the poor fisherman’s cottage.

“Home.”

“I shall stay here for a few days and then I will have to go to London and then to my seminary,” he told her, trusting her with his secrets as he had trusted her with his sin. “But, Alinor, my love, it is all changed for me. I have lost my faith and failed in my mission. I have to go and tell them that, and I will have to confess, and then, I suppose, I shall have to leave. I will have to beg them to release me.”

She looked alarmed. “You have to confess? You have to speak of this?”

He grimaced. “These are mortal sins. I have broken so many of my vows. I have to confess. My loss of faith is worse than this, but I have to confess this too and face my punishment.”

“Will they punish me too?” she asked.

He could have laughed at her ignorance. “I won’t say your name,” he assured her. “They won’t even know where you live. They cannot report you.”

“D’you have to speak of us?”

“I have to make a full confession, great sins and lesser.”

She wondered which was the greater sin and which the lesser. But she did not ask. She would not have claimed her own importance. “If you confess to them, mightn’t they keep you there?”

“I don’t think they will want me,” he said desolately. “I have failed in everything they sent me to do. And I have lost my faith as well.”

“But even so, mightn’t they keep you? Can they keep you? Can they make you stay there? Can they lock you up?”

“They would not keep me against my will, I know that. But they will make it very difficult to leave. They will have to be convinced that I am sure. I can never go back, you see. If I leave, I can never return. They will see this as a betrayal of my duty and of my faith. And they have been father and mother and schoolmaster to me as well as my way to God. They will be sorry, as I am sorry.”

She looked very grave. “You are sorry?”

“But I will come back to you.”

The flush on her face told him what that meant to her, but she shook her head. “Don’t come back for me,” she said quietly. “This has been everything to me, but you can’t come back here for me. I’m not fit for you. I couldn’t live in your world, and you’d never live in mine.”

“But we have been lovers as if the world was ending!”

“But it’s not ending,” she said reasonably. She found a little smile. “Outside, everything goes on. I’ve got to go back to my life, you’ve got to return to yours, whatever it turns out to be. Faith or no faith. King or no king. And even if everything’s changed for you, nothing changes for me. Nothing ever changes for me.”

“Have I not made a change for you?” he demanded. “Are you not a woman of desire, as you said? Will you go back to stone?”

She turned her head from him. “I won’t be dead to myself again,” she promised. “I won’t turn back to stone. But I wouldn’t survive long in my world as a woman of desire. I have to harden, or someone will destroy me.”

“My family are in exile,” he told her, his voice very low. “My mother and father are in exile, our lands and houses sequestered—do you know what that means?”

She shook her head.

“My father was appointed by the king to advise the Prince of Wales,” he said. “When the prince went into exile, my father and mother went with him. Our lands were sequestered—that means taken by parliament, to punish us. My father and mother are now at the queen’s court in Paris. But if we left the royal courts, made an agreement with parliament, surrendered to them and paid a fine, just as Sir William has done, we could get our lands back, just as he has done. I could live in my family house. It’s in Yorkshire, a long way from here—a beautiful house and good farmlands. I could get it back; my mother and father could return to England.”

“Would they want to?” she asked. “Would they want to live with a new minister in their church, and new men in power? Under a parliament, not a king?”

He waved away her objection. “What I’m saying is that I could get our house back, I could return home. I’d be in England again, not an exile, not a spy, not in hiding.”

She tried to find a smile. “I’d like to think of you living in your house with your lands around you. I’d look at the moon and know it was shining on you, as it was shining on me. I’d like to think of you at the water’s edge as the tide ebbed, while I stood on the tidemark in Foulmire.”

“It’s a different tide, and anyway we’re inland,” he said, distracted by her ignorance. “But that’s not what I mean. I mean to say: I won’t leave you here. I would not return to my house without you. I will take you there, to my home.”

She looked at him as if he were speaking Latin, as if he were quite incomprehensible. “What?”

“Would you come with me to Yorkshire? Will you marry me?”

“Marry?” she asked wonderingly. “Marry?”

“Yes,” he said steadily. “Why not? If there is no king on the throne and no bishops in their palaces, if there is no royalty nor church, if all degree is leveled and there is neither master nor man as the radicals say, then why should I not marry you?”

She held out her hands to show him the roughness of a workingwoman’s palms. She spread her tatty brown skirt caked with foul mud at the hem. “Look at me,” she said bleakly. “You will see that the radicals are mistaken. There is still master and man. You can’t take me to your mother and ask her to accept me as a daughter-in-law. I can’t go with you and be a lady in your house. The woman who is to be your wife is far above me. You can’t put me in her place.”

He was about to argue but she went on: “And you’ve forgotten? I can’t marry anyway—I’m married to Zachary, and we both know he’s still alive. We couldn’t stand before an altar and take vows. I’ve two young children and they know their father. I couldn’t go to your home as an honest woman, a widow. I’m not an honest woman. I’ve been your slut here, I’ve been your whore. I’ve lain with you without a promise. I don’t demand one now. I couldn’t even be your mistress. I’m not even fit for that.”

He flushed as if he was scalded with her shame. “Don’t say such things! You’re no slut! You’re no whore! I’ve never loved anyone as I love you! This has been sacred! Sacred! This is a first and last for me.”

“I know! I know!” The first words of love calmed her. For a moment, he saw a glimpse of her smile. “For me too. Oh, James—me too. And that’ll be a joy to me when you’re gone and I’m left here.”

“I can’t leave you here,” he said. “I have to be with you.”

She shrugged as if the world were full of incomprehensible disappointments, and this was another. “I wish it was different,” was all she said. He came closer and she stretched out her hand to him, but she was not reaching for him, she was gently fending him off. She touched his cheek with the back of her fingers. He caught her hand and pressed it to his mouth.

“Don’t hold me,” she said very low. “I can’t leave you if you take hold of me. I can’t pull away from you. I think I’ll die if I have to push you away. Please let me go. I’ve got to leave you now.”

“I’ll come to your cottage tonight,” he whispered. “We can’t say good-bye like this.”

“I’m not for you. Our worlds are very far apart.”

“I’ll come to you. I’ll come tonight.”

“Then we’ll only have to say good-bye again.”

“I want to say good-bye again. This cannot be the last time that I see you.”

“Tonight, when it is dark,” she agreed reluctantly. “But I’ll come to you. It’s high tide, the path isn’t safe for you. I’ll meet you in the sea meadow outside the Priory. Where we said good-bye before.”

“Tonight,” he said again as she turned, unbolted the hatch, and made her way down the ladder to the stable yard, where the grooms were sleepily watering the horses, and brushing them down.

He watched her go, the basket on her arm, the neat white cap on her head. He saw her speak a pleasant “good morning” to the grooms, and saw them turn and watch her as she walked across the yard to the house. Behind her back one lad made an obscene gesture pumping his buttocks to mimic lust, but the other did worse: he gathered spittle in his mouth and he spat on her tracks, and clenched his thumb inside his fist, in the old, old gesture of guarding against a witch.

“His lordship wants to see you,” Mrs. Wheatley said to Alinor as she came into the kitchen. “Good Lord! Mrs. Reekie! I’ve never seen you in such good looks. You’re glowing!”

“Your good cooking,” Alinor said lightly. “I’ve eaten better these last two days than I have for weeks. I shall come to nurse at the Priory again if I can.”

“Pray God we’re spared illness,” Mrs. Wheatley said.

“Amen,” Alinor answered correctly. “His lordship is well?”

“Yes, but he asked you to go to his gun room before you leave this morning. You can go now. Stuart will show you in.”

“Why does he want to see me?” Alinor hesitated.

“It can only be to thank you,” the cook replied. “You saved us all from great worry, and perhaps you saved the island from sickness. Go, you’ve got nothing to fear.”

“Thank you,” Alinor said, going to the door into the house.

“Come back this way and I’ll give you a loaf of bread to keep that bloom in your cheeks,” Mrs. Wheatley said.

Alinor smiled and followed Stuart down the corridor towards the garden door and his lordship’s gun room.

Sir William was seated at the table, cleaning his flintlock rifle. He glanced up and nodded when Alinor knocked, came in, and stood before him.

“Goodwife Reekie, I’m grateful to you,” he said, looking down the barrel. “Thank God it was no worse than a fever.”

She nodded. He took care to pay attention to his gun and not to look at the curve of her breasts under the bulky jacket.

“Your son, Robert, found his way round the stillroom. He’s a bright lad. He fetched all the things you needed?”

“Yes, he knew what was wanted for a fever,” she said. She thought her voice sounded thin, as if the light was too bright and Sir William was too loud.

“Nobody told him what to get. He picked out the things himself?” He took up a piece of wadding and polished the beautiful enameled stock.

“He’s watched me since he was a baby. He’s got a gift with herbs and their use.”

“James Summer said some time ago that he was fit to be a servant to a physician, or apprenticed to an apothecary.”

Alinor bowed her head. “I think so, but we couldn’t afford his entry fee.”

His lordship put the cleaning cloth and the oil to one side, racked the gun, and sat back in his chair. He looked her up and down, and felt again the regret that she was a respectable woman and the sister of a pious man. “I tell you what, Goodwife, I’ll do it for you. He’s a good lad, a credit to you. He’s been a merry companion for Master Walter and you’ve been a great help to me and my house. Just now with the tutor falling sick . . . and I know about earlier.”

For a moment, she could not speak. “Your lordship!”

He nodded. “I’ll get Mr. Tudeley to arrange for him to go as an apprentice, an apprentice to an apothecary, so he can get a training and a trade. Chichester or perhaps Portsmouth, I suppose.”

She was breathless with shock.

“Aye,” he nodded, thinking again that she was a beautiful woman. If only Sealsea Island had not been such a center of gossip, and so damnably godly, he might have brought her into his household, called her a housekeeper, and used her as his whore.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t accept. I can’t afford even the clothes he would need,” she said. “I don’t have the savings—”

“Tudeley will take care of that,” he said, waving away her objection. “How’s that? We’ll give him a suit of clothes, and buy him his apprenticeship as payment for your . . . help. How’s that?”

Her face lit up. “You would do that?”

His lordship thought that he would do much, much more, if she were willing. But he merely nodded.

“He’ll be so glad. I know he’ll work hard.” She stumbled over her thanks. “We’ll owe you a debt of gratitude . . . forever . . . I can’t thank you—”

“I’ll get it done,” Sir William concluded. “These are difficult times for all of us, you know.”

She nodded earnestly, wondering what he meant now.

“Dangerous times for some.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I suppose in his fever, the tutor didn’t speak out at all?”

Alinor checked her breathless thanks and stole a quick look at her landlord from under the brim of her white cap, knowing that this question was the most important moment in the whole of this interview.

“Speak out? Sir?”

“In his fever. Men say odd things when their minds are affected by illness, don’t they? He didn’t say anything, did he? Anything that I’d not want widely known? Or known at all? Anything that I wouldn’t want repeated? Not even here?”

“He didn’t say anything that I heard.” She picked her words with care, knowing that this was important, feeling perilously ill prepared to deal with a powerful man like her landlord. “Sir, people in fever often say fanciful things, things they wouldn’t say in waking life. I never take notice, never repeat them. I wouldn’t speak of things that I see and hear in the sickroom. Being deaf is part of the craft. Being dumb is part of being a woman. I don’t want any trouble. The day I spent nursing him, I won’t speak of, not to anyone.”

He nodded, measuring her reliability. “Not to your brother, eh?”

She met his gaze with complete comprehension. “Especially not him,” she confirmed.

“Then we understand each other. You can consider your son apprenticed to a Chichester apothecary.”

She bowed her head and clasped her hands. “I thank you, sir,” she said simply.

He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a handful of shillings. He made them into a little tower and slid them across the table to her.

“Your wages for nursing him. Ten shillings a day. There’s a pound. And my thanks.”

She picked them up with a little nod and put them into her apron pocket. “Thank you.”

He got up and came around the table. She stood before him and he put a hand on her arm. “You could come back tonight?” he said, unable to resist, looking down the front of her linen shift at the curve of her breast. “To visit me.”

He tightened his grip and drew her towards him, but to his surprise she did not move. She did not yield to him; but nor did she shrink back. She was as steady as if she were rooted to the spot.

“You know I can’t do that, sir,” she said simply. “If I did that, I couldn’t take my pay: it’d be whore’s gold. I couldn’t hold up my head, I couldn’t let you be a patron to Rob. I wouldn’t think of myself a good tenant to a good lord. I don’t want that.”

His grip felt weak, as if his fingers were powerless with cold. Still, she stood her ground, as if she were growing there, like a hawthorn tree, and he could not draw her closer. She stood like a stone, and looked at him coolly with a dark confident gaze until he felt awkward and stupid, and remembered the rumor that she could freeze a man’s cock with a look.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose so.”

There was a little silence. She did not seem shocked; she was neither flattered nor fearful. She stood, waiting for him to take his hand off her arm, and let her go. He supposed that men desired her all the time and that she regarded a touch at her breast, a grab at her waist, as a regular inconvenience, like rain.

“Oh, well,” he said, letting her go, and returning to his seat behind his table, as if to restore himself to authority. “So: your lad. He can go to his apprenticeship when Walter goes to university.”

She nodded. “And when’ll that be, sir?” she asked as calmly as if he had not propositioned her, as if it was merely another thing that she had not heard and would not repeat.

Despite his own discomfiture, he smiled at her cool grace. “He’ll go in the Lent term,” he said. “After Christmas.”

Alinor walked quickly on the hidden paths across the mire from the Priory to her home. The tide was ebbing and, as she went deeper into the harbor on the hidden ways, she could hear the suck and hiss of the waves reluctantly leaving the land, like her fears dogging her quick footsteps. As she walked past the net shed she heard the roar of the tide mill starting up, and saw the spout of water burst out of the millrace, coming directly towards her.

She turned inland and climbed the path to her cottage, opened the door, and looked around. Suddenly the place seemed very small and poor compared to the groom’s loft at the Priory. Even the lowliest servants lived better than she did. She put the loaf of Priory bread under the bread cover, and saw that the fire was dark and cold in the hearth. She levered up the hearthstone and found her little purse of savings, safely buried. She took the twenty shillings for nursing James out of her apron pocket and added them to the purse with a satisfying clink of coins. Then she pressed the hearthstone back into place, and dusted the ashes over it.

She rose up, brushing down her gown, and went to the front door. For a moment, she looked around at the cramped room, the low ceiling, the beaten floor of mud. Then she turned away from her shame at her poverty, and went outside, closing the door behind her, and along the bank to the ferry.

The ferry-house door was closed, the ferry pulling at its mooring rope as the tide ebbed. The raised wadeway was nearly dry and Alinor lifted her skirt and paddled across in the cold water, and then walked down the lane to the mill.

Alys was crossing the mill yard, carrying a bucket filled with eggs. Now that harvest was over, she was working as a maid-of-all-work for Mrs. Miller, gardening in the vegetable and herb patch, feeding and keeping the hens, feeding the ducks, picking and storing the fruit, smoking hams and curing meat. She worked in the dairy too, and in the brewhouse. If they were shorthanded in the mill she would help to weigh and bag the flour. Mrs. Miller might order her to help with baking in the mill oven, and always there was the endless task of scouring and rinsing, scalding and drying the tools for the dairy, for the brewery and the kitchen utensils.

Alinor watched as Richard Stoney, Alys’s sweetheart, came out of the mill at a run and tried to take the bucket of eggs to carry them for her. She fended him off, but he caught her hand and kissed it. Alys looked up and saw her mother as Richard made a little nod of a bow and darted back to the mill. The girl came to the five-barred yard gate, dipped her head for her mother’s blessing, and rose up and kissed her.

“Not plague then,” she said, knowing that her mother would never have kept the clothes that she had worn while nursing a plague patient. When Alinor came home from a death she always washed her hands and trimmed her hair, so that the bad luck would not follow her.

“No, God be praised. They were pleased at the Priory. It was the tutor, James Summer, and they must have been afraid for Master Walter.” She smiled at Alys. “I see young Richard Stoney is eager to work.”

She had thought that Alys would laugh, but the girl blushed and looked down. “He doesn’t like to see me do heavy work here. He wants a better life for me. For us both.”

“He does?” Alinor asked. “Did you have a merry evening at his farm?”

“Yes, they were kind to me, and we were . . .” she tailed off, her face illuminated. “You know what I mean.”

“I understand,” Alinor said quietly.

“So, what was wrong with Mr. Summer?”

“Some sort of fever. It broke overnight. But, Alys . . .”

“Shall I come home tonight, then?”

There was no reason to keep her daughter from her home. Guiltily, she realized that never before had she wished to be alone in the cottage. “Yes, of course,” she said. “I’ve a loaf of bread from the Priory for your dinner.”

“I’ll bring some curd cheese,” Alys promised. “Jane Miller and I are making it, this afternoon. Mrs. Miller will give me a slice.”

“Is she here?” Alinor asked.

“In the kitchen, sour as crab apples,” Alys said under her breath.

“Is her back paining her?”

“Her bottom,” Alys said vulgarly, and Alinor gave her a little cuff around her cap.

“You’d better talk like a goodwife if you want me to go and see Richard Stoney’s parents.”

At once the girl’s face lit up. “Will you go to see them?”

“If he’s promised you, and you wish it, I’d better talk to his parents.”

“Oh, Ma!” The girl plunged into her mother’s embrace. “But why now? Why d’you think we can ask them? Did his lordship give you a great fee for nursing?”

“Yes, he did, a fortune. And something even better than a fee. He said that he will apprentice Rob to an apothecary at Chichester. It’s as good as giving me ten pounds. Now I know Rob is provided for, I can put all my savings into your dowry.”

Alys did not think for a moment that this would leave her mother without anything against accident. She thought only that she could be married to the young man that she loved.

“How much’ve you got?” she demanded.

“One pound and fifteen shillings,” Alinor said proudly. “Farmer Johnson paid me well for the birth of his son, and the boat only cost us three shillings. A whole pound and fifteen shillings altogether. Sir William gave me a pound for nursing the tutor. That’s more than I’ve ever had in my life.”

“How ever have you saved it all?”

“Rob’s wages.” Alinor was silent about the pay for leading James to the Priory at midsummer. “And Farmer Johnson, nursing Mr. Summer just now, and the herbs and fishing, especially the lobsters.”

“But it still won’t be nearly enough.”

“Thirty-five shillings down, and more to come?” Alinor demanded. “They’ll be surprised we have so much. We can tell them that Rob is going for an apothecary. He’ll earn well in the future. He’ll promise some of his wages.”

“It won’t be enough. They thought they’d get a girl who would inherit land. They want some neighbor’s girl whose father owns the fields nearby. Richard has sworn he won’t have her. He’s told them he wants to marry me. We’ve just got to force them to agree.”

“We’ll do the best we can,” Alinor said quietly. “Tell Richard we’ll call on them on the way to market tomorrow.”

“Ma!” Alys gasped, her face alight, and she turned and bounded across the yard to the mill while Alinor tapped on the kitchen door and let herself in.

Mrs. Miller was leaning on the kitchen table, rolling and turning pastry, battering it with an icy roller. Alinor thought that the pastry would be as hard as the woman’s heart.

“Goodwife Reekie,” she said grudgingly as Alinor entered. “Alys told me you were nursing at the Priory.”

“It was the young lord’s tutor that was taken ill,” Alinor said. “Him that was at harvest home, Mr. Summer.”

Neither women referred to the jealous glance that Mrs. Miller had shot down the table at the beautiful younger woman, nor how the young lord’s tutor had gone to speak to Alinor as soon as the table was cleared, and she had stormed away from the harvest home, leaving Alys unsupervised, to dance all night with Richard Stoney.

“Is he sick?” Mrs. Miller asked. “Did he take sick in Newport? I wouldn’t be surprised. The island’s always feverish in summer.”

“Yes, he took a fever,” Alinor said. “Very sudden, very hot, but he’s better now.”

“You nursed him?”

“Sir William insisted. He sent for me at once, to make sure that it was not plague.”

“God save us!”

“Amen.”

“And it was not?”

“No. I wouldn’t be here if there was any danger. I wouldn’t bring sickness to your door, Mrs. Miller.”

“Don’t speak of it,” she said quickly, and knocked on the wooden table, as if Alinor could bring disease by naming it.

Alinor knocked too, a counterpoint to the rhythm of superstition. “No, of course not. I only came in to see if you wanted any of your garden herbs picked and distilled. I’m going to do a batch for myself, and some at Ferry-house. And to ask if Alys might have a day off tomorrow.”

“I could do with some basil oil and oil of comfrey,” Mrs. Miller said. “Of course Alys can have the day off. I don’t have enough work to keep her busy as it is. She’s always dawdling in the yard and talking with the men. I have to tell you, Mrs. Reekie, she’s running after that Richard Stoney every hour of the day.”

“I’m sorry for that.” Alinor resisted the temptation to defend her daughter. “I’ll speak with her. But I know she’s learning so much from you. In the dairy and bakery.”

“Well, of course, I can do more in a big kitchen than you can in your little cottage.” Mrs. Miller warmed to the flattery. “I daresay my kitchen is twice the size of even Ferry-house. Are you two going to Chichester market?”

“Yes. Can I buy anything for you?”

“Nothing, nothing. I can’t afford to waste my money on fripperies. But if you see a piece of lace, just enough to trim a collar and an apron, not too rich, not too fancy—you know the sort of thing I like—you can buy it for me, if it’s not too dear. And a piece for Jane, too. I can put it in her dowry drawer.”

“I will,” Alinor promised. “If I see anything pretty.”

“I’ll give you the money,” Mrs. Miller said. “You can bring it back, if there’s nothing nice.”

“Oh, I’ll take my own money, and you can just repay me, if I find anything.”

“No, it’d be too dear for you,” the older woman said smugly. “I’ll want something worth at least three shillings, and I know you won’t have that. Turn your back and I’ll get out my purse.”

Obediently, Alinor turned her face to the sideboard where the Millers’ well-polished pewter and one trencher of silver was proudly displayed. Behind her she could hear the noise of Mrs. Miller going to the drawer in the big wooden kitchen table, pulling it out and taking out her purse, and her “tut” of irritation as she found that she did not have enough money to hand.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Just wait a minute.”

“No hurry,” Alinor said pleasantly, her thoughts far away from Mrs. Miller’s purse, conscious only of the heat of her lips and the ache in her body and her longing for James.

“Just a moment,” Mrs. Miller said again, but now she was immediately behind Alinor, her voice strange and echoing. Startled, Alinor’s head jerked up and she clearly saw, in the silver trencher, the miller’s wife standing on the hearthstone, behind the glowing embers, pulling a red leather purse from a hole in the brickwork chimney. The woman turned with sooty fingers, and met Alinor’s eyes, flinching at her reflected gaze. Obviously, Alinor had seen her hiding place. Alinor looked down and heard the scrape of the brick sliding back into place.

“You can turn round now,” she said, flustered. “Jane’s dowry. I’m short in my own purse. I’ll just borrow from Jane’s dowry.”

“Of course,” said Alinor coolly, turning and looking at the floor, not the fireplace.

“It’s my own money,” the woman said awkwardly. “It’s me that put it by for her. Surely I can borrow from my own daughter’s dowry, since I put it by for her since she was a baby?”

“I understand,” said Alinor. “And I didn’t see.”

“It’s the same purse that your mother got from the pedlar. We bought them together, years ago. Red leather.”

“I didn’t know,” Alinor said. “I didn’t see.”

“I know you didn’t,” Mrs. Miller lied. “And I wouldn’t mind if you did. I can’t bring myself to keep it at the goldsmith’s. I like it where I can see it. Now and then I top it up. Always have done. Of course, I don’t mind you knowing where it’s kept. Haven’t I known you since you were a little girl? Didn’t your own mother attend my birth?”

“She did,” Alinor agreed.

Mrs. Miller pressed three silver shillings into Alinor’s hand. “There. If you see some fine lace, not too fussy, for a collar and a pinny, you can pay up to three shillings for it.”

The coins were hot from being stored behind the fire. Alinor thought that anyone who touched them would have guessed their hiding place at once. But she said lightly: “I’ll look for lace for you, and bring it tomorrow afternoon.”

“Very good,” Mrs. Miller said. “Alys can help you pick the herbs now and then go home with you if you want. I don’t need her for anything else today.”

“Thank you,” Alinor said, and went to fetch her daughter to come to the herb garden and pick comfrey and basil for Mrs. Miller.

In his bedroom at the Priory, James was packing a clean shirt and clean hose in a saddlebag with his Bible and a purse of gold coins, all that was left from the queen’s money to buy her husband’s freedom. Sir William was standing by the window and looking down into the orchard below.

“You can leave your sacred things here,” he said. “I’ll keep them safe for you, until you return to claim them.”

“Thank you,” James said. “If I don’t come back, you can be sure that another priest will.” He tried to smile. “My replacement. I pray that he does better than I.”

“Don’t take it so hard,” Sir William said. “You did what you were asked to do. You reached him with a good plan and a waiting ship. You didn’t miscarry. You didn’t steal the gold, you didn’t betray him. Half the people he employs would have sold him to our enemies. If he had wished it, he would be free now, and you would be the savior of the kingdom.”

“Yes,” James said. “But he did not wish it, and I am very far from the savior of the kingdom. I am a Nobody. Worse than that, I am a Nobody with no home and no family and no faith. No king either.”

“Ah! You take things hard when you’re a young man. But listen to me: you’ll recover. You’re not even well yet, just up from your sickbed. When you get back to France, tell the Fathers that you need some time. Rest for a while, eat well, and only then tell them about your doubts. It all looks better when you’re well. Trust me. It all looks different when you’ve had a good sleep and a good meal. These are hard times for us all. We have to get through them one step at a time. Sometimes we fall back, sometimes we press forward. But we keep going. You’ll keep going.”

James straightened up from tightening the straps on his bag and looked at Sir William. Even the lord of the manor, a cheerful thoughtless man, was struck by the bleakness of his pale young face.

“I wish I could believe it, but I feel as if everything that I know, and everything that I am, has been knocked out of me. And all I can pray is to be allowed to do something else and live another life entirely.”

“Ah, well, perhaps your road lies that way, who knows? These are times of great change. Who knows what will happen? But there will always be a welcome for you here. If they send you back to England you can return here as Walter’s tutor until he goes to Cambridge, and as a welcome guest anytime after that.”

“What will become of young Robert?”

“I’ve taken care of that. We owed Goodwife Reekie a debt, don’t you think? She came as soon as I sent for her, and she went in with you when we didn’t know what was wrong. She could’ve been locked up with a dying man, for all we knew. She risked taking the plague and God knows what would have been the end of that. She nursed you well, didn’t she?”

James turned away and opened a cupboard door to hide his face. “Perfectly adequate,” he said to the empty shelves.

“And she made it clear that she’ll keep her mouth shut. She never said a word about finding you when you first came here. She can be trusted. I’ve promised her that her boy will have an apprenticeship. Mr. Tudeley will arrange it. Apothecary in Chichester. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it for her silence, and it will keep her indebted and silent forever.”

“I’m glad!” James said, turning back to Sir William. “That’s generous and good of you, sir. She’s a woman who deserves some good luck. I didn’t tell you, but I ran into her husband at Newport. He told me he was never coming home to her.”

“Zachary Reekie.” His lordship named his missing tenant with aristocratic distaste. “No loss, if you ask me. Better for her if he’d drowned.”

“Maybe, but it leaves her in an awkward position.”

“No, it doesn’t. Not if she doesn’t see him, and no one sees him. If no one ever reports seeing him, then in seven years’ time she can declare him dead, and herself a widow.”

“Seven years?”

“That’s the law.”

“Would she know that?”

“No! How would she? Doubt if she can read.”

“She can read. But I doubt if she knows the law. I didn’t. If no one sees him in seven years she’s free?”

“Exactly.” His lordship tapped his nose, indicating a secret. “Seven years from when he first went missing. So, he disappeared—when?—last winter, I think, when the navy was still commanded by parliament, before we got the ships back. He ran away to serve them, as a rogue like him would, and never came back. So, he’s been gone nearly a year, at least. In six years’ time she’ll be free and can take another husband. She’s a young woman. If she can get through six years with her name untarnished, then she’ll have a life ahead of her. There’s more than one man who’d be glad to have her. I should think more than one would even marry her.”

“She could remarry?”

Sir William closed one eye in a slow wink. “As long as no one has seen Zachary alive. You might remember that. If you want to do her a favor, you might remember that.”

“No one has seen him,” James confirmed. He felt his spirits leap up at the thought that she might be free, that he might be released from his vows, that despite what she had said, they could have a future together. “No one has seen him at all. He’s dead, and she could declare herself a widow in six years.”

“That’s the way,” Sir William said. “Pretty woman. Shame to have her wasted on the edge of the mire like that.”

“I hadn’t really noticed,” James said cautiously.

“You must have done!” his lordship exclaimed. “She’s known from here to Chichester as the most beautiful woman in Sussex. Some fool wrote a song about her a few years ago: ‘The Belle of Sealsea.’ I’d have tupped her myself if it weren’t for having Walter in the house, and his mother not long dead, and everyone in this damn island knowing everyone else’s business and turned so godly.”

James felt his familiar sense of distaste at the trouble that seemed to follow Alinor even here, among her betters. “Better to leave her alone,” he advised rapidly, “and then she might make a good marriage and change her luck.”

“Oh, aye,” Sir William conceded. “And her brother is an army man and as free with his opinions as a dog with his piss, and times so changeable. It’s not like the old days when you knew where you were. My father would take a tenant’s wife behind the haystack and no one would say a word but ‘Thank you, your lordship!’ ”

“Yes,” James said repressively. “It’s not like the old days at all.”

“Anyway, they say you can’t force her,” Sir William confided. “They say some fool tried to take her against her will, when she was coming home from market, and she whispered something to him that completely unmanned him. He said his cock went limp and his blood froze. He said she ruined him, before he ruined her.”

“Really?”

“Gossip. Sort of gossip that collects around a beautiful woman. Especially a cunning woman. They say she can do all sorts. They called her a cock whisperer after that; said that she could blast a man with ice or harden him like a rock. Must say, I’d like to know.”

James was sickened by the repetition of Alinor’s uncanny skills. “It was probably nothing but that she spoke godly to him and he lost the will,” he said.

“Who knows what she can do?”

“Surely, she just knows the healing herbs,” James insisted.

“Maybe. They believe all sorts of nonsense on this island. Her mother was half witch for sure. But she’s dead and buried in holy ground and nobody actually tried her. Her sister-in-law died in childbed; but of course the brother hushed it all up. Anyway . . . makes no difference to us. The woman, whatever she may be, has obliged us and we’ve paid her. And you know you’re welcome back anytime. You can stay on now, if you wish.”

“I’ll go tomorrow,” James said, glad to change the subject. “I have to go to London, and then I’ll take a ship to France. I will go to my seminary and confess. If they release me, perhaps I will be able to come back to England. Perhaps next time we meet I shall have my old name and my old house back again.”

“I hope you do, by God, I hope that you do. You deserve it,” Sir William said gruffly. “Remember that it wasn’t your fault. His Majesty chose his own path. Pray God that he chose rightly and it gets him to his throne. Pray God that both you and he get safe home.”

Alinor and Alys soaked their best caps and their linen in a bowl of water and urine as soon as they got home from the ferry-house herb garden. They left them to bleach all evening, rinsed them in cold water from the dipping pond, and then pinned them on a string beside the herbs to dry.

“I’m never going to be able to sleep,” Alys said.

“You should,” Alinor warned her. “I don’t want to be taking a pasty-faced girl to her new in-laws.”

“Pasty!” Alys objected.

“With dark shadows under her eyes like old drunk Joan.”

“All right, I’ll sleep, I swear it.”

“I’m stepping up to Ferry-house to see your uncle. I won’t be long.”

“All right,” Alys said. She took off her work skirt and jacket and laid them on top of the blankets. Wearing only her linen shift, and with her hair in a plait, she slid under the covers and drew them up to her shoulders. She looked like a little girl again, and Alinor stepped back to the bed to kiss her on her forehead. “Are you sure about this? You seem very young to be talking about your wedding?”

Alys’s smile was radiant. “I’m sure, Ma. I’m absolutely sure. And I’m the same age as you when you married my da.”

“It wasn’t a very good choice,” Alinor said quietly.

“But I’m as old as you were then.”

“Yes.”

“D’you think he’ll come home?” she asked. “My da. If he hears from someone that I’m to be married, will he come home for my wedding day?”

Alinor hesitated. “Alys, I don’t think he’ll ever come home.”

At once, Alys clapped her hands over her ears. “Don’t tell me anything!” she begged her mother. “The Stoneys can only just about bear me if they think my da is missing and might come home wealthy. If I tell them he’s run off they’ll never consider me for Richard, I’ll be next to a pauper for them.”

Alinor took Alys’s hands from her ears and held them in her own work-worn palms. “All right, I’ll say nothing. And you can say you know nothing for sure.”

“And that’s true.” Alys nodded. “This is the tidelands, there’s nothing sure.”

Alinor pulled on her cape, for the evening mist was blowing off the harbor, damp and cold, and she went out of the cottage garden and turned to the left, as if she were going to the ferry-house, as she had told Alys, but then, when she reached the top of the bank she turned again, and entered along the hidden footpath that ran behind the cottage towards the Priory and the sea. It was high tide and the smell of sea salt blew in with the ribbons of mist. When she looked to her right, inland over the low-lying fields behind the bank, she could see the white silhouette of an owl hunting along the hedgerow, silent as a ghost, its great eyes seeing through the darkness.

Alinor stayed on the high-tide path, dropping down to cross the narrow strip of dry beach above the lapping waters, back up the muddy steps to the top of the bank, tracing her way across the gray stepping-stones where a marshy field oozed into the mire: gray stones set in gray mud under a gray sky. She skirted the headland where the bell tower stood like a warning fingerpost against the darkening sky, and then she turned inland at a sunken mooring post, its base in deep water, green with seaweed. She crossed the foreshore, her boots crunching on a drift of tiny shells, and mounted the bank to the Priory sea meadow. She lifted her gaze from the uneven steps and saw him at once. He was waiting in the shade of a hayrick, hidden from the Priory windows, facing the sea path, looking for her.

Without a word, she went into his arms and they clung to each other.

“Alinor,” was all he said, and then he kissed her.

Alinor leaned back against the hayrick, her knees weakening beneath her as if she might fall to the ground. She made a little movement and he released her. “Not here,” was all she said.

“Not here. Will you come to the Priory?”

“I don’t dare.”

“Can we go to your cottage?”

“Alys is at home.”

He was silent. “Is there nowhere we can go? You know the woods, the mire, the little pathways?”

“I couldn’t lie with you on the mire.” She gave a little shudder and at once he put his arms around her and drew his cape around her. “Not with the tide high,” she said. “It’d be like drowning. Could we go to the chapel? We could sit in the porch?”

He shook his head. “I have lost my faith, but that would be too much. I couldn’t—forgive me, my love—I can’t.”

“Of course,” she said, and thought what a loose slut he must think her to even suggest it. “I didn’t mean . . .”

“I want you so much I think my heart will stop,” he said. “Anywhere, anywhere!”

“I don’t think there is anywhere for us,” she said quietly, and then she was struck by the words. “Oh, it’s true. D’you see? There’s nowhere for us, not on Sealsea Island, not in all the tidelands, not in the world.”

“There must be!”

“And besides, aren’t we here to say good-bye?”

“I can’t bear to say good-bye to you in this meadow again!”

“Last time you came back, as you had promised,” she reminded him shyly.

“Last time I was ordered to come back. Next time, I will come back a free man. I will come back for you.”

“I don’t think that can ever be.”

“It will. I will be freed of my vows. I will go and see my parents, I will buy back our house in Yorkshire, and I will come for you.”

Her hands twisted in his and she tried to pull away. “You know—”

“No, listen to me. I can confess my sins and be released from the priesthood.” He tightened his grip as she shook her head. “That is my choice. It is what I want.”

“But you were risking your life for your faith! You told me that it came before everything.”

“I did. But that was before Newport. My love, I failed in my mission and I lost my faith. I lost my faith in everything: king and God. I will leave the priesthood whatever happens, and I will never again come to England as a spy. I will not serve the king again—God bless him and may he have better servants than I. I have failed him and I cannot bear to fail again. That part of my life is over.”

“Even so . . .”

“Alinor, I won’t change my mind. I have lost my faith, I have lost everything. I can’t tell you, but there is a darkness where once there was a burning light. The only thing I care about now is you.”

“Oh, my love,” she whispered. “That’s not how to choose a wife.”

“But the thing that you don’t know and that I have just learned—it is good news—you will be free of your husband. I will never say that I saw him. Robert must be silent, too. I’ve told Walter. In six years, if nobody sees him, and nobody tells the parish that they saw him, then your marriage is dissolved as if it never was. He passes for dead and you are a single woman.”

She had not known this. She raised her eyes, clouded with doubt. “Is this true? Really? Can it be true? Six years and I am free?”

“It’s seven years by law, and the first year has nearly passed.”

“This is the law?”

“It is. Sir William told me himself. You will be free, Alinor, I swear it. You will be free to marry me. And I will be free to marry you.”

“We only have to wait six years?”

“Will you wait?” he demanded.

“I’d wait sixty!” She pressed herself against him. “I’d wait six hundred years. But you should not . . .”

He wrapped himself around her, he pressed her back against the rick and, with his mouth on hers for silence, he made her moan with pleasure until his head dropped into the crook of her neck and she heard him gasp: “I swear. I swear it.”

Alys and Alinor rose early, at first light. Alys was determined to look as smart and as clean as a town girl, and the two women took a jug of soapwort tincture, and some lavender oil, and walked up to Ferry-house before sunrise. Red, the dog, bounced to the door to greet them and sniffed the jug.

“You’re up early,” Ned remarked, seated at his kitchen table, a loaf of bread beside him and a mug of ale to hand.

“We’ve come to wash. We’re visiting the Stoneys,” Alinor explained. “Before we go to Chichester market.”

“And why do they deserve a wash?” Ned glanced, smiling, at Alys and saw her deep blush. “Oh, I see. I’ll get the copper out.”

He rose to his feet and went to the scullery for the big iron pot for the Ferry-house monthly laundry. He slid the worn pole through the two carry loops at the top of the pot and he and Alys lifted it onto the kitchen hearth, while Alinor took two buckets and went to the well at the back door. When they’d set it on the little fire she poured bucket after bucket of water into it, going back for more.

“Will you have some breakfast while it heats up?” Ned offered, cutting two slices of bread.

“I couldn’t eat a thing!” Alys said, though she took a slice and ate it while watching the water.

Ned raised an eyebrow at his sister. “Greensickness,” she whispered. “Please God we can agree on a dowry. She’s set her heart on him.”

He nodded. “He’s walked her to the ferry every evening since harvest home. They sit on the pier, talking and talking like there was any news here. He doesn’t go till I tell her it’s the last crossing of the day.”

“It’s hot enough,” Alys interrupted. “Surely that’s hot enough!”

Alinor and Ned threaded the carry pole through the loops again, took the heavy pot out to the scullery, and set it down on the brick floor.

“I’ll see you later,” Ned remarked. “You can leave the water in the copper for me. I can’t recall when I last had a proper wash, and your water is always so sweet.”

He closed the door on the two of them and they both stripped naked, washed each other’s hair, and then took it in turns to pour jug after jug of water over each other. The tincture of soapwort made the water as cloudy and as slick as soap, and the oil of lavender scented the whole room. They were both shivering when they dried themselves, standing on the cold brick floor, and then they toweled their heads, dressed themselves in their clean linen and brushed gowns, and went out through the kitchen with their damp hair tumbled down over their shoulders.

Ned was on the bench outside the door, smoking his pipe and watching the bright water lapping at the pier. The tide was coming in fast, washing over the cobblestones of the wadeway, foaming in the rife against the outflowing river water. “Going to be a nice day,” he remarked. “You two look as fresh as daisies.”

Alys and Alinor, holding their skirts bunched up so that not a speck of mud should mark the hems, walked gingerly back along the bank and down the steps to the cottage. Their linen caps were dry and pressed smooth on top of the earthenware fire cover. They plaited each other’s damp hair and then pinned the caps on top.

“How do I look?” Alys asked, turning towards her mother.

Alinor looked at her daughter, the perfect skin of a girl tinged with a rising blush, her golden hair hidden by the white cap, her wide blue eyes and her mischievous smile. “You look beautiful,” she said. “I don’t think anyone could resist you.”

“It’s his mother I’m worried about. His father’s very kind to me; but she’s hard-hearted. Ma, we’re going to have to talk her round. Can’t you take a potion, or something?”

“A love potion?” Alinor laughed at her daughter. “You know I don’t do such things.”

“She has to agree we can marry,” Alys said again. “She has to.”

“He’s an only son: they’re bound to want the best for him. But everyone says he can wrap them round his little finger. Will he have told them that we’re visiting today?”

“Yes, and he’ll have told them why. He said they’ll give us breakfast. We can’t be late.”

“We don’t want to arrive at dawn. We don’t want to look too eager.”

“I am eager!” Alys insisted.

Alinor had a sudden flash of memory of James’s touch, and the taste of his mouth, the thudding of his heart as he pressed her against the hayrick. “I understand eagerness,” she said, turning away. “I do. But first we’ve got to put out the herbs and the oil, and feed the hens and cover the fire.”

“I know!” Alys said impatiently. “I know. I’ll do the hens.”

As Alys shooed the hens out of the door, took two eggs from their nests, and put them in the crock, Alinor poured flaxseed oil from the jug into a big glass pitcher packed with the last of the fresh basil leaves, and corked it tight. She made another pitcher filled with comfrey and put the two of them on a shelf outside the cottage where the rising sun would strike them, and warm them all day long till the spirit was drawn from the herbs and into the oil. Alinor went to the corner cupboard where she distilled her oils and dried her herbs, and she took a dozen little bottles and put them in her basket.

“Are you ready?” Alys demanded. “D’you have everything? Can we go now?”

“Is the fire covered?”

“Yes, yes!”

“And the marks against fire?”

Alys bent to the hearth, took up a twig of kindling, and drew the runes against house fire. “There!”

“We want it nice . . .” Alinor began.

Alys completed the phrase, laughing: “to come back to.”

“I know! I know!” Alinor admitted her predictable instruction. “But it’s what my mother always said, and it’s always true.”

“It’s perfect to come back to. Mrs. Miller herself would admire it. Let’s go.”

The two women walked in single file back along the bank to Ferry-house. The tide was high, and a farmer was leading his big cob horse off the ferry and climbing into his saddle off the mounting block.

“Going to Chichester market, Goodwife Reekie?” he greeted Alinor.

“Yes. Are you keeping well, Farmer Chudleigh?” she called up to him.

“I am,” he said. “But I’ll thank you for that goose grease of yours when the cold gets into my old knees.”

“I’ll bring you a jar,” she promised him.

“You two look like you’ve been new-minted,” Ned complimented them. “So clean you’re shiny.”

Alys giggled and raised her skirt away from the muddy hoofprints on the quayside.

“Not taking any wool to market?” Ned asked his niece, holding the ferry steady for them against the pier.

“Not today,” she said. “Ma is buying some lace for Mrs. Miller if she sees anything nice, and selling some of her oils.”

“Ribbons for you?” he asked.

“Vanity is a sin, Uncle,” she said with a toss of her pretty head that made him laugh.

The tide was flowing slowly and smoothly inward, but even so, Alinor gripped the side of the boat with both hands, and when Red, the dog, jumped into the boat beside her she gave a little gasp of fear.

“That tutor, James Summer, went north in the middle of the night,” Ned observed. “Over the wadeway on Sir William’s second horse by the light of the moon. Didn’t call me, but I saw him. Going to London, I suppose. Didn’t call for a light. Didn’t stop for a chat. Doesn’t talk much. Doesn’t do much teaching either, does he?”

“I don’t know,” Alinor said.

“Does Rob know when he’s coming back?”

“He didn’t say.”

“He looked better than when he arrived. He was sick as a dog, wasn’t he?”

“Fever,” Alinor said shortly, keeping her eyes fixed on the horizon.

“Will you buy a sheep’s cheese for me at the market?”

“Yes,” Alinor said. “We’ll be back before dinnertime.”

He handed her out of the boat on the far side. “You might get a lift in a wagon. You could wait here for anyone crossing.”

“We’ll start walking,” Alinor said, and she and her daughter made their way up the road as Ned pulled the ferry back to the island side to wait for customers going to Chichester market.

After a little way, the two women turned left off the road to Chichester and took the footpath towards Birdham. The ground was marshy, but the unmarked path ran on the top of raised banks at the edges of the fields, and on stepping-stones over the streams. Climbing over stiles that crossed the hedges from one low-lying marshy field to another, they made their way to the little village, a handful of houses clustered on the road.

They both paused on the grass verge of the one-track road. “Do I look all right?” Alys asked nervously.

Alinor straightened her daughter’s cap, set her cloak a little more evenly on her shoulders. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s wipe our boots.”

Despite all their caution, the hems of their skirts were dirty from the walk, and their boots caked with mud. Carefully, they lifted their skirts and wiped the sides and toes of their boots on the grass of the verge.

“I’m sweaty,” Alys said nervously. “And muddy. Damn this place, I’m always muddy. He’s never seen me in a clean petticoat!”

“You’re beautiful,” Alinor reassured her. “And he’s seen you a lot worse.”

Stoney Farm stood back from the road, a low wall of knapped flints between the house and the lane, to keep the stock from straying. A grassy track led to the front door through a small orchard of fruit trees, the apple trees bowed low with ripe fruit, a picker’s triangular ladder leaning against one of them.

It was a good-sized house, one of the best in the little parish, two bedrooms and a lumber room for storage under the reed-thatched roof, and below them a kitchen and two rooms: one used as a parlor and one used as a store. The kitchen ran the length of the back of the house, the brewhouse and the dairy were across the stone-flagged yard from the kitchen door, the barn and the stables made the fourth side of the square. As the two women walked towards the front door, Richard Stoney, in a suit of dark brown, and good riding boots, muddy from the stable yard, came bounding round the corner of the house and ran towards them.

“You’ve come! Oh, you’ve come!” He skidded to a halt and stopped himself embracing Alys. He made a little bow to Alinor. “Mrs. Reekie, thank you for coming. Alys . . .” He shot her a warm conspiratorial glance. “Good day, Alys.”

As soon as she saw the warm intimate look that passed between him and her daughter Alinor knew their secret as clearly as if they had told her. She was certain that they were lovers, that Alys had defied all her warnings, all the teaching from school and church, had evaded Mrs. Miller’s suspicious glare, had followed her heart and not her head, and had lain with this young man.

Now Alinor understood why Alys was so determined that the betrothal should go ahead. If Richard could not persuade his parents to agree to the marriage then he and Alys would have to part, and his parents would probably take him away from the tide mill to make sure that the couple never met again. Alys would be known as a girl who had lost the man of her choice, and her eventual marriage would be widely known as second-best. If it was ever known that she had lost her virginity it would be hard to find a reputable young man for her to marry at all, and Mrs. Miller would be within her rights to turn her away from work. Most village betrothals started with a promise and a bedding, but times had changed, and godly people and families on the rise condemned young love as both unchaste and bad for business.

“Oh, no,” Alinor whispered under her breath.

“What’s the matter?” Alys tucked her hand in Richard Stoney’s arm and turned to her mother. Defiantly, she met her mother’s reproachful gaze and, in the face of her happiness, Alinor could not be angry. The young couple were beautiful together, so well matched in height and looks; she could not blame them for being unable to wait for the reluctant consent of his parents. He was dark eyed and brown as a hazelnut, with a tumble of dark curls to his plain white collar. Alys beside him looked fair and delicate, her hair, a paler gold than her mother’s, modestly tucked beneath her white cap, her features as regular and pretty as a painted china doll.

“Nothing,” Alinor said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

Alys met her eyes and flushed as if she realized that her mother had guessed her secret. “Ma?” she said uncertainly.

“We’ll talk later,” Alinor ruled.

Alys blushed deeply, and drew closer to Richard, as if she were claiming him. “Ma, this is the man I’m going to marry,” she announced.

Richard flushed like a boy but stood with pride. “If you permit,” he said politely. “I have promised. I have given my word. We are betrothed.”

“Let’s see what your father says,” Alinor replied cautiously.

Holding Alys’s hand, Richard led the way up the path to the house. Alinor followed, thinking guiltily that Ned must be right, and the wildness that he saw in her had come out in her daughter. She had failed to control the lust that lived in every fallible woman since Eve, and she had failed to teach Alys any better.

The front door opened with a creak from disuse, and Mrs. Stoney stood in the doorway, her maidservant behind her.

“Good day, Mrs. Reekie,” she said formally.

“Good day to you, Mrs. Stoney,” Alinor replied, struggling for calmness.

The woman turned to her son. “Go and fetch your father,” she said. “He’s in the barn.”

Richard looked as if he did not want to leave Alys, but he went obediently as Mrs. Stoney led the mother and daughter into the best room at the front of the house. It was furnished sparsely with solid dark furniture; a large cupboard laden with expensive pewter took up all of one wall. There was one great chair with a woven back and arms, which was clearly for the master of the house, and a second chair beside it. Alinor put her basket of oils down by the door and moved tactfully to a smaller chair beside the dark wooden table, laid with a small piece of tapestry, anchored by a bowl of heavy pewter. Mrs. Stoney seated herself in the second-best chair; Alys stood beside her mother and was not invited to sit at all.

They heard the men coming in the back door and the noise of Mr. Stoney knocking mud off his boots. Then he came into the room. He was a short, bluff, red-faced man with a ready smile and a handshake for Alinor, who rose to greet him.

“How do?” he said to her. “How do?” Then he turned to Alys. “And how’s the prettiest maid in Sussex today?”

Alys curtseyed and went to him for a smacking kiss on both cheeks.

“Will you take a glass of ale, Mrs. Reekie?” he invited.

“Bess is fetching it,” his wife said.

“And the young people can walk round the orchard, I suppose,” he said.

Bess entered with a tray of pewter mugs, and Richard and Alys escaped.

“He loves to walk her round the farm,” Mr. Stoney confided. “He’s that proud of it. Our only child, y’know.”

“I know.” Alinor took a cup and sipped. It was home-brewed small ale and Mrs. Stoney had sweetened it with apples from her orchard. Alinor could taste the fruit. “This is very good, Mrs. Stoney.”

The woman smiled at the polite compliment. Alinor observed her smugness and wondered if she would be a kind mother-in-law to Alys, who would live with them at this farm and share a house with this woman for life.

“So, our young people want to make a match of it,” Farmer Stoney said to Alinor. “Richard came to me after harvest home and said he had plighted his troth without a word to me.” He chuckled, shaking his head. “Boys, eh? And he’s brought her back here a few times, and we like her very well. But I should really be talking with her father.”

“As you know, my husband’s at sea,” Alinor said cautiously. “He’s been gone nearly a year now. All the arrangements fall to me.”

“Your brother doesn’t act for you?” Mrs. Stoney inquired.

“I decide about my own children,” Alinor said with quiet dignity. “My brother advises me when I need it.”

“Does he know you’re here today?” Mrs. Stoney demanded.

“He does.”

“Well, you’re no fool, I know that,” the man said encouragingly. “But you must realize that we could look very high for Richard. He’s our only son and he’ll inherit all of this, when we’re gone. There’s nothing owed on the farm. I had it entire from my father, and I improved it, and I will pass it on entire. It’s a tidy inheritance.”

“I know,” Alinor said. “It’s a beautiful farm. But Alys was taken with your son even before she knew who he was, when she first saw him at the mill. She had no thought of all of this.”

Mrs. Stoney sniffed, as if to say that she doubted it.

“It would be a love match,” Alinor pursued. “But of course, she will bring a dowry.”

“Does she have her own linen laid away?” Mrs. Stoney asked.

“No,” Alinor said, thinking of the corner of the room of the little cottage, the box of treasures that held nothing but a paper contract and a red leather purse of dross. “Not yet. But by the time of the wedding, I will be able to send her with some sheets . . .” She saw the disapproving look on the woman’s face. “And some wool,” she added.

“This is what comes of sending him to the Millers’ farm,” Mrs. Stoney complained aside, to her husband. “You sent him to learn milling, but all he has learned is disobedience.”

“He can make his own choice,” her husband rejoined. “She’s a pretty girl and she knows all that she needs to know to be a working farmer’s wife. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Reekie?”

“She does everything at the tide mill,” Alinor confirmed. “Mrs. Miller keeps a very good place and Alys has learned housewifery there. She works in their dairy, she can milk cows, she can brew, she bakes bread, she cooks, she spins of course, and she sews. And I’ve taught her the herbs and the uses of them. She can read and write. You’ll find her very able in the dairy and the brewery, in the bakery and even outside.”

“Would she bring your recipe book?” Mrs. Stoney demanded.

Alinor flinched. She had a recipe book inherited from her mother with cures for all known ailments and injuries, the proper uses of herbs and how to grow them, use them, and distill them. It was her greatest treasure and the bedrock of her practice as a healer. “I will copy them,” she promised. “I will copy them for her. And, of course, if there were any illness or trouble I would come to you for free, as family.”

Mrs. Stoney looked as if it was not enough. “And these savings?” she inquired. “What dowry will she bring?”

“I have thirty-five shillings saved just now,” Alinor said with quiet pride. But obviously, this was not enough; the woman merely raised her eyebrows. “I will have another ten by their wedding day if they marry at Easter,” Alinor added. “And my son, Rob, will have his quarterly wages from the Priory at Candlemas. That’s another fifteen shillings.” Alinor tried to speak calmly about these tremendous sums of money, far more than she had ever earned before, but she saw Mr. Stoney’s glance at his wife and her firm shake of her head, her down-turned mouth.

“We can’t let him throw himself away,” he explained.

“I can add from my fees as I earn them,” Alinor said. “I attend almost all the births in Sealsea Island. I could promise a monthly payment in their first year of marriage—say—from my fees.”

Mrs. Stoney pursed her lips.

“My son is to be apprenticed to a Chichester apothecary,” Alinor said, her voice level, but her heart pounding. “He’s to go in the Lent term when Master Walter leaves for his university. I know he would want to see his sister happily settled . . .”

“An apothecary?” Mrs. Stoney asked, and when Alinor started to explain, she interrupted: “But what use is that to us?”

“She and Rob will inherit the right to the ferry, and Ferry-house—”

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Stoney said finally, “but we’re looking for a bigger dowry, to be paid in full on the wedding day. Maybe with land adjoining, maybe one of our neighbors. Not pennies as and when. Not as and when, Mrs. Reekie. It’s a pity that you don’t have a husband to earn a living for you. A great pity. But we can’t let Richard throw himself away. For all that she’s a lovely girl, and we like her very much. She would have been our choice, if the money had been right. We thought you’d have had more, to be honest. I’m sorry. We thought you were in a better way.”

Alinor gritted her teeth to stop herself exclaiming that once she did have more: her inheritance from her mother, her dowry in her mother’s red leather purse; but Zachary had taken it, as a husband’s right, and wasted it as a husband can do, and now Zachary was not here to answer for it, and the red leather purse held only shavings of old coins.

“But she has her own wages,” Alinor urged him, growing more anxious. “If you want her to keep working at the Millers’, she could bring home her wages. And she can spin.”

“Then he might as well marry our servant Bess!” Mrs. Stoney objected. “Maidservant wages as dowry! No, no, she’s a lovely girl but if she’s got nothing but thirty-five shillings and farm work wages. I look higher for my son than that.”

Mr. Stoney looked as if he regretted her sharp tone. “No disrespect,” he said.

“What did you have in mind?” Alinor asked. “For my brother would perhaps—”

“Nothing less than eighty pounds,” Mrs. Stoney said smartly. “I’d take nothing less.”

“Eighty pounds!” Alinor gasped at the unimaginable sum.

“We’re going to have to refuse,” Mr. Stoney said gently. “Regretfully but—”

“I have sixty pounds!” Alys interrupted suddenly from the door. She stepped into the room, white-faced, Richard behind her, gripping her hand. “I have it,” she claimed. “I have savings of my own that my mother doesn’t know about.” One fierce glance at Alinor warned her to say nothing.

“Were you listening at the door?” Mr. Stoney asked his son, frowning.

“We came past the window and we overheard,” his son replied. “We weren’t eavesdropping, sir, but my mother was speaking very clearly. We must marry. We love each other.”

“How much d’you have?” Mrs. Stoney asked the girl.

“I have sixty pounds,” Alys said boldly. From the pocket of her gown she pulled a fat red leather purse and put it down on the dark wood table before her mother. “Sixty pounds,” she said defiantly. “Sixty pounds down, and the rest to come. Is that enough?”

With a pang of terror Alinor recognized at once the heavy red leather purse that Mrs. Miller had pulled from its hiding place behind the brick in the millhouse chimney: it was Jane Miller’s dowry. She opened her mouth and found she could say nothing.

“Is that enough?” Alys asked, her voice shaking. “Is it enough?”

“It’s a surprise,” Mr. Stoney remarked gravely. “How has a maid like you got more savings than her mother?” He turned to Alinor. “How have you got a fortune like this? Did you know she had put this by?”

“My father gave it to me,” Alys spoke rapidly before her mother could reply. “His prize money from the navy. He won it serving in the navy, and when he came home last time, he gave it to me for my dowry. I was always his favorite. He gave it to me for my dowry if I wanted to marry before he came back.”

“I should think your mother could have used the money often, over the past year,” Mrs. Stoney said mistrustfully. “Everyone knows how hard she works. Shouldn’t you have told her? And given it to her?”

“My father and my mother didn’t always agree,” Alys said boldly, ignoring Alinor, her eyes only on Mrs. Stoney’s grim expression. “My father told me to keep his savings safe for his return, and use it only for my dowry. I have to be obedient to my father, don’t I?”

She turned to Mr. Stoney, certain he would support male authority. Solemnly, he nodded: “An order from your father? Yes, you had to obey it.”

“He hasn’t left you, has he?” Mrs. Stoney turned to Alinor. “Deserted you? If he gave his daughter her dowry before he went? Was he planning on never coming back?”

At once Alys saw that she had overplayed her hand. Before Alinor could reply, the girl interrupted: “Oh, no! My da would never leave us! He promised to come home. He just left his savings with me, in case I wanted to marry before he returned. He’s a sailor at war, he knew that he might be a long time away. There was no way of knowing how long his voyage might last. He was just trying to do the best for me.”

“But you said that they did not always agree?”

Alinor, knowing that Mrs. Stoney would have seen her at Chichester market with a blackened eye, with a bruised cheek, shook her head. “I’ve no complaint against him and I know that he is coming home,” she said steadily. “We disagreed sometimes, like many a husband and wife—nothing out of the ordinary. Zachary signed up for a voyage with a coastal trader, and then we heard that he had been pressed into the navy. Then the navy went over to the prince. But I don’t doubt that when the peace comes, the sailors and the soldiers will be released, with their back pay and prize money. I don’t doubt that he will come home then.”

She kept her face very still, expressionless, and thought that she had promised James that she would tell everyone that Zachary was not coming home, and that she was a widow, and now here, the very next day she was declaring the contrary. But there was nothing she could do about it now, while Alys was holding the floor of the room and lying like a mountebank.

“And his pay,” Alys added. “Who knows what pay he’ll bring home? If he’s captured a ship he’ll be rich!”

“So he’s serving with the prince now?” Mr. Stoney seized on another problem. “We’re a parliament household, here.”