Dark Tides Read online

  “She’ll never have you with nothing to offer but a half plot and a half-year ferry,” Tom Carpenter said, his gaze resting on Mrs. Rose. She nodded a greeting to them both, and her color rose slightly, as if she knew they were talking about her as she walked past them, following her master.

  “How would you know?” Ned asked curiously.

  Tom grinned at him. “This town!” he said. “Everyone knows everything. Everyone knows you visit her, that she walked down with your letter in the summer. And everyone knows that she wants a full plot, and a life as far from service as possible. She wants her own servants, that one. She wants her own slaves!”

  “I know,” Ned said. “But I can’t see how to change my ways.”

  “That’s the very thing we came here for!” Tom Carpenter exclaimed. “Came here to change our ways. To be in one communion, one people before God. To make a good living, not scrape a wage. To marry and found a family, to build a town and make a country. For me, this is the greatest chance at a new life, in a new country, and make it better than the old one!”

  “God bless you,” Ned said as they turned and followed the minister’s family into the cold shade of the church, from the icy brightness outside. “It’s a great ambition.”

  “But you don’t share it?” his neighbor suggested, lowering his voice as the two of them took their place, as single men with only a half plot, at the back of the church, ahead of the servants and apprentices, but behind the masters and planters.

  “I want a new life,” Ned agreed, lowering his voice too. “I want a communion and a town and a new country just like you. I thought this would be an earthly Paradise, a place without sin. I didn’t expect to jostle my neighbors for a living. I just don’t know what I’d have to give up, if I wanted to truly belong here.”

  “What d’you give up?” Tom Carpenter whispered as John Russell took his place at the front of the congregation and opened his Prayer Book.

  Ned shrugged. “Being a law to myself,” he muttered. “Living of my own. Being no one’s bane.”

  “Aye, Ned, you’re a funny one,” Tom said, and turned his attention to the service as John Russell started the opening prayers.

  The service was winter-short; the meetinghouse, even with the little stove at one end, was too cold for a long sermon, and those whose homes were at the far end of the town were conscious that they would have a hard walk home with the cold wind against them. As soon as prayers were finished the congregation agreed the names of the selectman and the different town officers who would be appointed at the town meeting, and someone mentioned there was a cow in the town pound that must be claimed at once. A young father announced the birth of his child who would be baptized at home, with none of the papist trappings which had been reintroduced to the church in England.

  As the congregation filed out, Ned fell into step beside Mrs. Rose.

  “Is it cold enough for you?” she asked him, smiling. “Out on that cold riverbank beside that cold river?”

  “It is,” he said. “But I think it will be worse before it’s better.”

  “You can be sure of that,” she said. She hesitated. “Would you take a glass of mulled ale before you walk home?”

  There was something about her self-consciousness as she invited him, something about the way that Tom Carpenter watched them, the way that the whole town seemed to pause as they spilled out of the meetinghouse into the lane, that turned Ned away.

  “I have to get back to the Quinnehtukqut,” he heard himself say.

  “Connecticut,” she corrected him, her voice hard, “Remember, we say Connecticut,” and Ned bowed his head in farewell.

  OCTOBER 1670, LONDON

  Johnnie and Sarah followed their mother, Livia, and the two maidservants up the muddy lane to St. Olave’s Church.

  “Time served!” he congratulated her. “Senior milliner.”

  “A few pennies more a week,” she pointed out. “Maybe a customer of my own if she’s lowly and poor. A higher seat up the table at dinner and served after the older girls instead of at the very last. Nothing else. It’s not much.”

  “Steady work,” Johnnie advised. “A wage paid on time once a quarter, and your mistress makes no deductions, now that you don’t have to live in. What would you rather do? Run the wharf?”

  The girl put her hand on his arm. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, but it’s a secret,” she said.

  “What?” He glanced up the lane to where their mother, Livia, Carlotta, and Tabs were entering the church. “What? We can’t be late for church.”

  She dropped her hand. “All right then. But don’t complain later that I didn’t tell you.”

  “You’re planning something stupid,” he predicted as she walked on. “You’re never leaving the millinery shop? You’re never leaving without another post to go to and some mad idea, like sewing herb tea bags with Grandma? Or the statues… oh God, Sarah… not the statues…”

  She turned back to him, and he crowed with laughter. “I always know what you’re thinking. You’re going to go in with Aunt Livia and trade in statues!”

  She snatched at his hands to silence him, though there was no one near them down the narrow street that led to the church. “Don’t you say a word! Don’t you dare say one word, Johnnie!”

  “Tell me what you’re going to do.”

  “This is a secret,” she told him.

  He made the little hangman gesture of their childhood oath which said that either would be hanged on the gibbet at Savoury Dock before betraying the other. She leaned so close that the feather on her bonnet tickled his face. He listened intently till she finished.

  “You can’t go,” he said flatly.

  “Grandma herself is sending me.”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not safe for a girl,” he amended.

  “I’ll be with Captain Shore,” she pointed out. “And then I’ll go straight to Livia’s steward. She says he loved Uncle Rob like a grandson. He speaks English and I know a little Italian. He was her family steward. She says he has ten children. He’ll probably take me in to stay with them. Why not?”

  He made a face, took off his hat, and scratched his head. “I should go with you,” he said.

  “Really, Johnnie, you know you can’t. You’ve got to finish your time and your master would rip up your indentures if you upped and left.”

  “I can’t let you go on your own.”

  “Yes, you can. You know I’m no fool. I can look after myself. And if Grandma’s happy, you can’t object.”

  He nodded. “You can run faster than any girl I know. And fight like an alley cat. But Venice! All that way?”

  She took his arm and they walked together towards the church. Over their heads, the first-story windows leaning towards each other made the street like a tunnel. Their footsteps echoed and Sarah lowered her voice. “If something were ever to go wrong for me, d’you think you’d know?” she asked. “Would you know without being told?”

  “Oh yes,” he said at once. “But that’s being a twin, isn’t it?”

  “Grandma says she’d know if her son was dead. I believe her. I think she would.”

  That made him pause. “Grandma does not believe Livia that he drowned?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s a terrible accusation,” he said slowly. “That Aunt Livia is a fraud? Not Rob’s widow? Perhaps not even our aunt?”

  “I know,” the girl said. “It’s that important. That’s why I’m going.”

  * * *

  All through the service and the long sermon Johnnie wondered if he should tell his mother of Sarah’s plan, but a lifetime of loyalty to his twin through all the little adventures of wharfinger life silenced him. By the time they filed out of the church and walked home with the minister, Johnnie’s mind was made up. As Mr. Forth went upstairs to pray with Alinor, Johnnie turned into the counting house with his mother to balance the week’s books, fully decided
to say nothing.

  As soon as he was seated on the high clerk’s stool, he saw the address of Signor Russo, written in Livia’s large dramatic scrawl. He knew at once it must be the directions to the steward’s house in Venice, and without saying a word, silently palmed it as his mother came into the room and opened the ledgers.

  One glance confirmed his fears. “I see she’s started another debt, and still paid us nothing from her last voyage,” he remarked. He did not say who it was, owing money to the warehouse. Only one debt had ever been left to run in the two decades that they had been in business.

  “She’s sending for more antiquities,” his mother said tightly. “She’s so sure of selling these that she wants more. We’ll stand the charges again. She’s doing it for us, for all of us. She wants to buy a bigger warehouse, somewhere better for your grandma, and we’ll all live there together. It’ll be a home for you, when you finish your apprenticeship, and for Sarah.”

  “We only need more bedrooms because she’s here,” he pointed out. “We never needed a bigger house than this before. It’s been good enough for twenty years.”

  “She has plans for us…”

  “How does she get to make plans for us?”

  His mother flushed. “She’s family, Johnnie. She’s your aunt. She has a right to…”

  “Not like family at all,” he said gravely. “She brings in nothing. Nobody in the family is idle. Sarah brought home her pennies the day that she started work. You’ve always had my wages. Even Grandma grows herbs and makes her teas. Uncle Ned is on the other side of the world and yet he still sends us goods. Nobody takes money out. Nobody spends the family money. We never risk it. We’ve always earned, not speculated.”

  “Livia’s not making pennies on lavender bags, she’s on the way to a fortune.” His mother bridled. “And as Rob’s widow and our kin we should support her. She thinks we could get a bigger warehouse and sell the antiques direct from Venice.”

  “Is she going to put up the money for a bigger warehouse?”

  “When she’s paid…”

  “Or does she mean that we should be her banker?”

  “We’d be in partnership,” Alys said defensively. “It would be a family venture. I trust her. I’ve come to love her as a sister indeed. I believe her word. I believe in her knowledge of the statues. She says she’s going to make a fortune, she says she’s going to buy a house and share it with us, she’s going to live with us. When I think of living with her, for the rest of my life, at my side—” She broke off. “It would change my life completely,” she said quietly.

  “You want a bigger wharf?”

  “A bigger wharf, a better house, somewhere with a garden for your grandma. And a companion, a friend for me. Someone to share the worry.”

  Johnnie had a painful sense of his mother’s long years of loneliness. “I should do more.”

  “No, Son, you do all I ask of you. But to have someone at my side, as a sister, now that you two have left home. It would be—”

  “But Ma, is she… reliable?” he asked, trying to find the right words. “She came so suddenly? With nothing but what she stood up in? We know nothing about her? All that we know is what she’s told us.”

  “Yes,” Alys said firmly. “We know she was Rob’s wife and the mother of his child. What more do we need to know? She has a true heart, I know it, Johnnie. And she’s found a family in us. We’re not going to fail her.”

  The young man felt acutely torn between his sister’s secret and his mother’s trust. “I hope so,” he said uncertainly.

  * * *

  Alinor came down for dinner after praying with Mr. Forth, and Tabs served the family in the parlor with several different dishes and a jug of wine from Paton’s with their compliments to Miss Stoney on the day of her completing her apprenticeship. They had roasted oysters and roasted beef from the cookhouse, and Alinor had made Sussex pond pudding with a lump of sweet butter in the middle. After dinner they played at riddles, and then Johnnie and Sarah sang the rhythmic chants that the lightermen sung as they unloaded their boats, with much-amended lyrics to cover the usual obscenities. Alinor recited a country poem from Sussex that her mother had taught her, and Livia sang an Italian folk song with a swirling little dance that she did in the corner on the worn floorboards. It was late when they banked down the parlor fire and took their candles up the stairs to bed.

  Johnnie stopped Sarah with a hand on her arm and slipped the scrap of paper with the address into her pocket without a word. Nobody noticed and the twins moved as one: Sarah to her bedroom that she shared with Carlotta and the baby, Johnnie up the narrow stairs to his attic room.

  “Did you draw the runes?” Alinor confirmed with Alys as they went to her room.

  “Of course, Ma.” The younger woman helped her mother into bed and went to her own room.

  Livia was already in bed with her candle blown out. “It’s sad when a girl leaves her childhood,” she said into the shadowy bedroom.

  “Not sad for her! Sarah is glad to have completed her time.”

  “But now she will have to marry, and her life will be decided for her. Children and a husband, and she will never be able to do what she wants.”

  “Not in England,” Alys said, lifting the sheet and sliding into bed.

  Livia turned to her and put her head in the warm crook of Alys’s neck. “Ah, that’s good.”

  Alys drew the younger woman to her and stroked her smooth braided head, inhaling the warm perfume of roses. “You know, in England, a wife can have her own business, earn her own money, she can declare herself independent of her husband—a feme sole—and her money is hers, and her business is hers too.”

  “Is that so?” Livia asked, suddenly alert. “A husband does not take everything on marriage?”

  “They have to agree, of course, she cannot do it without his agreement. She has to go to the City fathers and they have to give her a deed to say that she is a feme sole. But if she declares herself to be so, and everyone agrees, then she can own her own house, keep her own fortune, and run her own business. Ma is a widow, I am a feme sole, the business is our own.”

  “But the child of a marriage between a feme sole and a man with money still inherits his father’s estate?”

  “He would. And his mother can leave her fortune to him if she wishes. It is in her gift.”

  “And they are still married—she would get her widow’s dower if the husband died?”

  “Yes. Livia—why does this matter to you? What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing! Not at all,” the younger woman said rapidly. “It’s just so unlike my home. In Venice, if you are a woman, your life is ended at the church door. I was a nothing. Nothing. Until Roberto saw me and then I came into the light again.”

  “His loss must have been terrible for you,” Alys said sympathetically.

  “It was the end of everything; but he showed me what I might be and now I am in England, with you, and with your family, and I can hope again.”

  “Do you hope?” Alys asked, a sense of something like desire rising up in her.

  Livia slid a little closer. “I have more than hope,” she whispered, her lips against Alys’s shoulder. “I have found my heart and my home.”

  “My love.” Alys drew the younger woman closer, so they touched, from lips down the long line of their bodies to their entwined feet.

  “And does the husband of a feme sole have to pay her debts?” Livia whispered.

  Alys sighed and released her embrace. “No, she is responsible for her own debts.”

  “Interesting,” Livia remarked, and turned on her side and went to sleep.

  OCTOBER 1670, LONDON

  Johnnie was up early on Monday morning, to get to his City merchant house on time, and was surprised to find Sarah in the kitchen, heating his small ale and cutting the bread for his breakfast.

  “No Tabs?” he asked.

  “I said she could lie in,” Sarah said. “Ma will be down in a minute. I
wanted to see you. Before I go.”

  He looked directly at her and made a little grimace that she understood at once as anxiety for her, guilt that he was not going with her, and pain at their separation. She stepped towards him, gripped him, and they held each other tightly.

  “Take care!” he said urgently. “Don’t do anything stupid. For God’s sake come home. We can’t stand another loss. It would kill Grandma—especially as she sent you.”

  “Lord! I hadn’t thought of that,” she exclaimed. “I’ll come back safe and sound. Don’t worry!”

  Their mother’s step on the stair made them break apart and Sarah turned to the fire.

  “You’re up early, Sarah,” Alys remarked.

  Sarah turned and smiled. “I know. I couldn’t sleep.”

  After Johnnie left, and Sarah and her mother cleared the dishes, Sarah kissed her mother good-bye, surprising her by the warmth of her embrace, and ran up the stairs to see her grandmother. The older woman pressed a guinea into her hand. “Keep it safe,” she said. “If you need anything.”

  The girl hesitated. “How d’you have this?” she asked. “A whole guinea?”

  “It’s my burial money,” Alinor said. “I saved it up over the years and kept it for myself. To pay for my burial at Foulmire, beside my ma, in the little churchyard at St. Wilfrid’s.”

  “I shouldn’t take your burial money, Grandma.”

  “You take it. I won’t need it. I’m not going to die until I see my son again,” Alinor said confidently. “You’ve told them at the milliner’s that you’re leaving?”

  The girl nodded. “I told them I’d be away for a quarter. They weren’t happy, but they’ll take me back when I return. Ma thinks I’m going to work as usual.”

  “And you have the money for your passage?”

  Sarah nodded. “I’ve got enough. It feels wrong not giving it to Ma. And Johnnie’s given me some.”