Tidelands Read online

“My husband’s missing,” she remarked, as he joined her at the door. “He’s been gone for more than half a year.”

  “God bless him, and keep you,” he said, making the sign of the cross over her head. She had never seen the gesture before, and she did not know to bow her head and cross herself. Nobody had publicly crossed themselves in England for nearly a hundred years. The people had lost the habit, and those who were still Roman Catholic were careful to keep their faith hidden.

  “Thank you,” she said awkwardly.

  “Do you have children?”

  She opened the heavy door to the porch, looked out to see that the graveyard was deserted, and then beckoned him to follow her. They walked in single file between graves where the stones were so thick with old moss and lichen that only a few letters could be seen.

  “Two still living,” she said over her shoulder. “I thank God for them. My daughter is thirteen and my son is twelve.”

  “And does your boy fish in his father’s place?”

  “The boat’s missing too,” she said, as if that were the greatest loss. “So we can only fish with a line from the shore.”

  “Our Lord called a fisherman before he called anyone else,” he said gently.

  “Yes,” she said. “But at least he left the boat.”

  A laugh broke from him at her irreverence, and she turned and laughed with him and he saw, again, the bright warmth of her smile. It was so powerful and so illuminating he wanted to catch her hand and keep her smiling at him.

  “The boat matters so much, you see.”

  “I do see,” he said, taking hold of the shoulder straps of his pack, keeping his hands away from temptation. “How do you manage without boat or husband?”

  “Poorly,” she said shortly.

  At the low wall of rough stone flints at the edge of the graveyard she hitched up her brown skirt and hemp apron and swung her legs over the stile, as lithe as a boy. He climbed after her and found himself on the shore, on a little path no wider than a sheep track, with quickthorn hedges closing in on both sides and meeting over the top, so that the two of them were hidden in a tunnel of thick leaves and twisted spiky boughs. Walking ahead of him, she bent her head and wrapped her elbows in her shawl, striding out in her wooden pattens, following the erratic course of the narrow path. The sound of the sea grew a little louder as she scrambled down a bank, and then they were suddenly in the open, lit by the fitful moon in the pale sky, on a beach of a white shingle. Behind them the bank was topped by a big oak tree, its roots snaking through the mud, its down-swinging branches bending low to the beach. Ahead of them was the marsh: standing water, sandbanks, tidal pools, mud, reed islands, and a wide winding channel of water with branching silted streams swelling and lapping over the mud, flowing in little waves that broke at their feet.

  “Foulmire,” she announced.

  “I thought you said it was called Wandering Haven?”

  “That’s what they call it in Chichester, because it wanders. They never know where the islands are, they never know where the reefs are; the rivers change their beds at every storm. But we, who live on it and know all its changes, who change our paths in obedience to its moods, who hate it as a hard taskmaster, call it Foulmire.”

  “For the birds? Fowl-mire? Bird-marsh?”

  “For the mud: foul,” she said. “If you misstep it holds you till the sea comes for you and you are foully drowned. If you get free you stink like a foul thing for the rest of your life.”

  “Have you always lived here?” he asked, wondering at the bitterness in her voice.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I am mired. I am bound as a tenant to a neglectful lord and I cannot leave. I am wife to a vanished man and cannot marry, and I am sister to the ferryman and he will never carry me across to the mainland and set me free.”

  “Is all the coast like this?” he asked, thinking of his landing, when the captain had steered them in the dark, past reefs and over shallows. “All so uncertain?”

  “Tidelands,” she confirmed. “Neither sea nor shore. Neither wet or dry, and no one ever leaves.”

  “You could leave. I will have a ship,” he said lightly. “When I finish my work here, I will sail back to France. I could give you a passage.”

  She turned and looked at him and once again she surprised him, this time by her gravity. “I wish to God that I could,” she said. “But I would not leave my children. And besides, I have a terror of deep water.”

  She walked on ahead of him, scrunching on the shingle beach that wound between the bank and mud where the water was seeping inwards. A roosting seagull whirled up ahead of them with an unearthly call, and he followed her shadow over shingle and mud and the driftwood, hearing the steady hiss, as the sea, somewhere out in the darkness to his right, came constantly closer, flooding mudbanks, drowning the reeds, always coming unstoppably on.

  She scrambled up another bank to a path that ran higher, above the tidemark, and he followed her between gorse bushes where the nighttime flowers were drained of their color and glowed silver rather than gold, but he could still smell their honey scent on the air. An owl hooted near him and made him start as he saw it, dark in the darkness, wheeling away on wide silent wings.

  They walked for a long time, until the pack on his back became heavy and he felt as if he were in a dream, following the wooden heels of her pattens, the dirty hem of her skirt, through a world that had lost meaning as well as color, on a winding track through desolation. He pulled himself up, and whispered an “Ave Maria,” reminding himself that he was honored to carry the word of God, the precious objects for the Mass, and a ransom for a king; he was glad to have to struggle on a muddy path through an unmapped shore.

  The sea seeped farther inland as if it knew no boundary. He could see the water creeping through the driftwood and straw on the shingle below them, and on the other side of the bank the ditches and ponds were swelling and flowing back inland as if it were, as she had said, a place that was neither sea nor shore but the land itself that ebbed and flowed with the tide. He realized that for some time he had heard a strange hissing noise overlaying the sound of the lapping water, like the seething of a giant stewpot, like the bubble of a kettle.

  “What is that? What is that noise?” he whispered, stopping her with one hand on her shoulder. “Do you hear it? A terrible noise! Strange, like the water is boiling.”

  She halted, quite unafraid, and pointed out into the middle of the moving water. “Oh, that. Look, there, out there, in the mire, can you see the bubbles?”

  “I can see nothing but waves. God save us! What is it? It sounds like a fountain?”

  “It’s the hushing well,” she said.

  He was absurdly frightened. “What is it? What is that?”

  “Nobody knows,” she said indifferently. “A place in the center of the mire where the sea boils as it comes in. Every high tide, so we pay no attention. Sometimes a stranger takes an interest in it. A man told my brother it was probably a cave, underneath the mire, and the bubbles pour from it when the sea fills it. But nobody knows. Nobody’s ever seen it.”

  “It sounds like a seething pot!” He was horrified by the strangeness of the sound. “As if it were hell boiling over!”

  “Yes, I s’pose it’s fearful.” She had no interest in it.

  “What does it look like when the sea goes out?” he asked curiously. “Is the ground hot?”

  “Nobody’s seen it when the tide is out,” she repeated patiently. “You can’t walk to it. You’d sink and the mire would hold you till you drowned on the next tide. P’raps it’s a cave—and you’d fall into it. Who knows? P’raps there really is a cave that holds all the sea, the waters that ebb and flow underneath all the world. P’raps it’s the end of the world, hidden away here in Foulmire, and we’ve been living on the doorstep of hell for all these years.”

  “But the noise?”

  “You can take a boat over it,” she offered. “It bubbles like a cauldron and it hisses loudly. So
metimes it’s so loud that you can hear it in the churchyard on a still night.”

  “You can sail out to see it?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t,” she specified. “But it can be done, if you’ve nothing else to do.”

  He guessed that there was never a day in her life when she had nothing else to do.

  She turned and walked on again. She had no interest in the threatening hiss that grew louder as the bank curved towards the harbor, and fainter as they moved away.

  “Were you ever at school?” he asked, trying to imagine her life, living here in this desolate landscape, as ignorant as a flower. He lengthened his stride and walked beside her as the path widened.

  “For a few years. I can read and I can write. My mother taught me her recipe book, and the herbs, and her skills.”

  “She was a cook?”

  “A herbalist. A healer. I do her work now.”

  “Did anyone ever speak to you of the old faith? Did anyone teach you the prayers?”

  She shrugged. “My grandam preferred the old ways. When I was a girl sometimes a traveling priest would come to the village and hear confessions in secret. Some of the older people say the old prayers.”

  “When we get to the net shed, I should like to pray with you.”

  He saw the ghost of her smile. “You’d do better to pray for your breakfast,” she said. “We don’t eat well.”

  The path narrowed and they went single file again, the thorns pressing on either side of them. Somewhere in the woods away to his left he could hear the piercing song of a nightingale, singing to the pale sky.

  He thought he had never traveled through so strange a landscape with so alien a companion. He had followed his vocation throughout England, going from one wealthy house to another, hearing confessions and celebrating the Mass, usually in hiding, but always in comfort. His dark good looks had served him well. He had been petted by the richest ladies of the kingdom, and respected by their fathers and brothers for risking his life for his faith. More than one beautiful girl had sunk to her knees and confessed to disturbing dreams of him. Their desire had never touched him. He was sworn to God and never distracted. He was a young man of only twenty-two years old; he reveled in the chance to test his fervent convictions, and in the sense of his own righteousness.

  He had been promised to the Church since boyhood, and his teachers had trained him and inspired him, and then sent him out into the world to travel in secret, meeting with royalists and sharing their plans, going from one besieged palace to another, carrying funds from the exiled queen, plans from the imprisoned king, promises from the prince. He had been in some dangerous and frightening places—slept in priest’s holes, hidden in cellars, served the Mass in attics and stables—but he had never before spent the day with no refuge, alone on an unmapped shore, or followed the footsteps of a common woman who held his safety in her roughened hands.

  He felt for the gold crucifix that he wore under his fine lawn shirt and gripped its awkward outline. Superstitiously he glanced at the mud beneath her feet to be sure that she was making footprints like a mortal. Even though he could see the sharp tracks of the wooden pattens, he crossed himself, thinking that she was an unearthly guide to an ungodly land, and if it were not for the power of his faith he would think himself lost indeed, walking through a world of ancient elements: water, air, and earth.

  They walked on, for perhaps an hour in silence, and then she turned sharply left and scrambled up the harbor bank and he saw, dark against the dark sky, a ramshackle hovel, walls of driftwood infilled with dried mud, thatched with reeds from the marsh. It looked like sea wrack thrown up by a high tide. She leaned against the ill-fitting door that creaked as it opened.

  “The net shed,” she announced.

  It was pitch-dark inside, the only light from the moon coming in glimmers through the cracks in the walls.

  “Do you have a candle?”

  “Only in the house. You can’t show a light here. It’d be seen from the mill on the other side of the mire. You’ll have to sit in darkness, but it’ll be dawn soon and I’ll bring you breakfast and some ale.”

  “Is your house nearby?” He was apprehensive at being left here alone in the dark.

  “Just along the bank. And it’ll soon be light,” she reassured him. “I’ll come back when I can. I have to set the fire and fetch the water. I have to wake my children and give them breakfast. Then, when they’re gone for the day, I’ll come back. You can sit here on the nets; you can sleep.”

  She took his hand—he felt the roughness of her scarred palm—tugged at it so that he bent down, and she pushed his hand against the rough twine of a heap of nets. “There,” she said. “The old nets. It’s not good enough for you but I don’t know where else you can go.”

  “Of course it’s good enough for me,” he assured her, his voice eager and unconvincing. “I don’t know what I would have done if I had not met you. I would have slept in the woods and been washed away by the hissing waters.” He tried to laugh; she did not.

  “If you hear anyone coming, or if anyone tries the door, you can kick out the back wall. We’re on the edge of the ditch; you can roll down into it. If you run along the bank to the right, it’ll lead you inland to the ferry and the wadeway, left to the woods. But nobody ever comes here, nobody should come here.”

  He nodded, but in the dark, she could not see him.

  “I know it’s not fit,” she said uneasily.

  “I am grateful for it. I am grateful to you,” he said. He realized that he was still holding her hand and he pressed it to his lips. Instantly, she jerked her hand away, and he flushed in the darkness for his stupidity in showing her a courtesy that she would never have known. The wealthy ladies of the safe houses were accustomed to being kissed. They extended their white hands to him and raised their fans to their eyes to hide their blushes. Sometimes they would go down on their knees in a flurry of silk and kiss his hand, hold it to their damp cheeks in penitence for some trivial sin.

  “Excuse me,” he tried to explain. “I just meant to say that I know this is a great gift. God will remember what you have done for me.”

  “I’ll bring you some gruel,” she said gruffly. He heard her backing towards the doorway and saw the crack of moonlight as the door opened. “There’s not much.”

  “Only if you have some to spare,” he said, knowing that there would not be any spare food in her house. She would go without to feed him.

  She closed the door quietly and he felt for the pile of netting and tugged at it a little to spread it out. The stink of old fish and the foul harbor mud rose with a buzz of sleepy flies. He gritted his teeth against his repulsion, and sat down. He drew his booted feet up and tucked his cape around him, certain that there were rats. He found that even though he was desperately tired, he could not bear to lie down on the ill-smelling knots. He reproached himself for being a fool, an unfit priest without wisdom or experience, a foolish boy sent out to do mighty work in great times. He was afraid of failing, especially now, when so much depended on him. He had confessions to hear and secrets to keep, and in his mind, battened down, he carried a plan to free the king. He was afraid that he had neither the courage nor the determination to carry it through and he was about to pray to be a strong emissary, a good spy, when he realized that he was mistaken: he was not afraid of failing, he was afraid like a child, afraid of everything, from rats in the net shed, the hushing well outside, and somewhere beyond it all the vengeful armies of Cromwell and the tyrant’s black-eyed stare.

  He sat in the darkness and waited.

  Alinor hesitated outside the door of the net shed, listening for him moving inside in the dark, as if he were a strange animal that she had penned. When he was quiet, she turned and ran along the bank to where her own cottage stood, facing the mire, a one-story building thatched with reeds, set square in a little herb garden fenced with driftwood.

  Inside her cottage everything was just as she had left it, the embers of the fire
on the hearth under an earthenware lid, the runes drawn in the ashes to prevent a spark, the children in the bed in one corner of the room, the pot of gruel by the fireplace with the lid clamped on, to keep it from rats, and the roosting hens in their corner, who clucked sleepily as the cool air, smelling of mud and brine, blew in with her.

  She took a bucket from the fireside and went out, inland, along the shoreline where the high tide was lapping at the mud and the reeds. She climbed up the bank, and down the other side using rough-cut steps, to the deep freshwater dipping pond. She held on to a worn post to fill her bucket, then lugged the slopping load back to her own cottage. She poured a bowl of water and set it on the table, took off her cloak and washed her face and hands, using the homemade gray fatty soap, rubbing her fingers with particular care, painfully aware that the priest had held them to his lips and must have smelled the lifelong scent of fish, smoke, sweat, and dirt.

  She dried her hands on a scrap of linen, and sat for a little while, staring out of the open door where the sky—pale throughout this white night—was getting brighter and brighter. She wondered why—since she had failed to meet a ghost—she should feel so bewitched.

  She shook her head, as if to pull herself back from the shadowlands, and rose up from her stool, to kneel before the fire, using a rag to lift the earthenware cover from the embers. With the back of her other hand she erased the runes against fire that were drawn in the cool ashes. She fed the glowing heart in the middle of the ash with little twigs, and then more driftwood, and when it caught she set the three-legged iron pot in the heat, added water from the bucket, and stirred the soaked oatmeal inside, bringing it slowly to the boil.

  The children, in the one bed, slept through the sounds of preparation. She had to wake them, touching each one on the shoulder. Her daughter smiled in her sleep and rolled over to face the rough wooden wall, but her boy sat up and asked: “Is it morning?”

  She bent down to hug him, burying her face in the warmth of his neck. He smelled of himself, sweet as a puppy. “Yes,” she said. “Time to get up.”