Tidelands Page 25

  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.”

  Alys shook her head. “We don’t know what ship he’s on. He might be on the ships that stayed loyal to parliament. My father’s a parliament man, like my uncle Ned. You know my uncle Ned!”

  “We’re a parliament household too.” Alinor struggled to join the conversation, tried to drag her eyes away from the old red leather purse.

  “Then shouldn’t they delay marrying till he returns?” Mr. Stoney turned to Alinor. “If he’ll come home when there’s peace, and the parliament are talking to the king right now?”

  “Perhaps—”

  “No!” Alys said quickly. “That wouldn’t be right at all. My da gave me his savings to use for my dowry so that we didn’t have to wait for him! He told me not to delay my wedding. And there’s no way of knowing when the king will agree to peace.”

  Alinor nodded, but found she could not speak.

  “So is it enough?” Richard pressed his father. “If we both work without pay on the farm, and give you our wages from everything else? It is enough with the dowry? Zachary Reekie’s dowry?”

  The farmer looked at his son, and decided in his favor. “It’s enough,” he ruled. He picked up the purse, hefted it in his hand, judging the value from long experience. He pulled open the drawstring and peered inside at the coins of gold and silver. “Sixty pounds—I didn’t expect it; but yes, it’s enough.”

  “We could have got more,” Mrs. Stoney reminded him stiffly.

  “We could.” He smiled at his son. “But I’d rather see you happy.” He handed the purse to Alys with a warm smile. “I’ll give you this back now,” he said, “as I should. And you give it to Mrs. Stoney at the church door on your wedding day, with your mother’s savings, and with your wages between then and now, and Richard will give you a ring and his word. It’s agreed. You’ll have your share of the farm on his death, and your seat at this fireside for all your life. And your son will have the farm after Richard, and his son after him.”

  Alys burst into tears as Richard pulled her into his arms and kissed her. Mr. Stoney rose to his feet and kissed first Alinor and then the weeping girl. Mrs. Stoney put her hand on her son’s head in blessing and then kissed Alys.

  “So that’s that,” she said to Alinor begrudgingly. “He’d set his heart on her, and she pulled a dowry out of her pocket that no one would ever have dreamed. You’d think he was enchanted.”

  “Yes, yes . . .” Alinor was lost for words, still stunned at the sight of Jane Miller’s dowry purse in Alys’s hands. Alys palmed it back into her pocket without looking at her mother.

  “And your son doing so well!” Mrs. Stoney said, allowing herself some warmth. “Apprentice to an apothecary in Chichester! What a start for a young man!”

  “Yes,” Alinor said. She realized she was nodding, still speechless. “Yes.”

  “How ever did he get a place like that?” Mrs. Stoney invited her to explain.

  “They like him at the Priory.” Alinor found her lips were so stiff that she could hardly form the words. “He’s been companion to Master Walter and they paid for his apprenticeship. He’ll start when Walter begins at the university. They call it the Lent term.”

  “Shall we have a glass of wine? And will you take your breakfast with us?” Mr. Stoney urged hospitably. “Now we’re to be family? And I’ll show you round the barns and the orchards, Mrs. Reekie, and I daresay you’ll want to see the herb garden.”

  “Yes, please,” Alinor said faintly. “I would like that. I would like that. Thank you.”

  The two women waved good-bye to the Stoney family, and walked together in silence up the road to Chichester. Alinor felt a gripping pain in her belly, which she thought was fear, and had the taste of sickness in her mouth, which she knew was dread.

  The farm was half a mile behind them and out of sight before Alys spoke. “Say something. Please say something.”

  “Are you mad, Alys?”

  “I know! I know! I must be!”

  They walked a few more steps in silence, then Alinor felt Alys’s cold hand creep into her own.

  “Help me, Ma.”

  “How can I? This is a hanging offense. This is theft.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “It’s Jane Miller’s dowry, isn’t it? In her mother’s red leather purse?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Put the purse back. I just had to show it. I’m not going to steal it. I’ll earn what I need for my wedding day. I’d never steal for it.”

  “It’s only six months away! We’ll never earn enough. We wouldn’t earn enough in six years. And if Mrs. Miller goes to her hiding place and finds Jane’s dowry missing, she’ll turn the mill upside down and accuse everyone. You and me first. Alys, how could you!”

  “I’ll get it back in hiding before she misses it. But I have to marry him.”

  “Because you’re lovers already?”

  The girl gave a little gasp, which was a confession in itself. “Because I love him so much. I’d rather be hanged as a thief at Easter than lose him now.”

  “I would not!” Alinor cried out. “I’ve spent my life trying to keep you safe and now you’ve lain with a man before marriage, and stolen—” She cut off her cry and dropped into a whisper though they were alone under the wide sky, and the empty track stretched north ahead of them.

  “I haven’t stolen. I’ve borrowed. He loves me. And she won’t catch me. It is worth the risk.”

  “You think that now . . . you’ll think differently later.”

  “I do think this now. So I acted now.”

  “You’ll change. You’ll look back and this’ll seem like madness to you. And you’ll think I was mad not to stop you. I was wrong not to stop you. I should’ve taken the purse off you, the moment you brought it out.” Alinor choked on the rising bile in her mouth. “I thought it was my purse! My red leather purse filled with nothing but my little coins! I thought I was going mad.”

  “Then I would have lost him. You heard them.”

  “Even so. Better to lose him than—”

  “I knew you wouldn’t go against me, Ma. I knew you’d never let me down.”

  “I shouldn’t have gone along with you. This is a hanging matter, Alys. If you’re caught with that purse on you, they’ll hang you for a thief.”

  “They won’t catch me. I’ll put it back. But I swear to you, that if I can’t marry him, I will die. If you forbid me, I’ll run away. If he were to leave me, I’d drown myself in the millpond.”

  Alinor thought that she was the last woman in Sussex to argue against a desire that was more than life itself. How could she blame her daughter for doing nothing worse than she had done? Alinor had risked her life, going into the locked room above the stables with James, and since then she had lied to everyone.

/>   “We’d better go back now to the tide mill, and put it back at once. If I call her into the yard, and you hurry into the house—”

  “No. I know how to do it, really I do. I know when. She always goes out at dusk, every evening, to shut up the hens. She likes to shut them up herself. She’s afraid that I’ll steal the daytime eggs. She’s so mean. She goes out at dusk, and there’s never anyone in the kitchen then. I can put it back then.”

  “How d’you know her hiding place?”

  “I was in the yard when the corn merchants came, and she sold them corn that should have gone to the poor of the parish. They paid twice the price and the poor went hungry. It’s dirty money, Ma. Every time she does a deal that she knows Mr. Miller wouldn’t like, she keeps the money from him, and puts it into Jane’s dowry purse. Now and then, she sneaks it out to buy herself something special, or something for Jane’s bottom drawer. Once, she asked me to buy some gilt chains from the pedlar at the gate and the coins were hot and she had sooty fingers. I didn’t know where she kept the purse, but I knew it must be in the chimney. I just jiggled the bricks till I found the loose one.”

  “This is a terrible risk.”

  “I know. But I had to take it, Ma. I had to stop the Stoneys from saying no today. They won’t go back on their word, even if I can’t get the money. Richard will help me, and Mr. Stoney loves me—he’ll let me off. I’ll put the purse back, Mrs. Miller will be none the wiser, and when we get to market I’ll get some more wool for spinning. I’ll earn as much as I can before my wedding day, and I’ll give them all that I have at the church door. It won’t be sixty pounds, but it’ll be too late by then. They’ll never cancel the wedding. I’ll tell them then that I’ll owe the rest.”

  Alinor shook her head at this solution. “It’s false dealing. Alys, it’s bad for us to be seen as cheats. If you cheat them on your wedding day, they’ll throw it in your face every quarrel you have. They’ll never trust you again.”

  “Richard’ll never throw it against me.”

  “His mother will.”

  Alys shrugged. “Who cares? Once we’re married, she can say what she likes. I don’t care. It’s him I’m marrying, not her. And he’s worth stealing for, and cheating for. He’s worth anything.”

  Alinor put a hand over her eyes as if the morning sun was too dazzling to bear. Vividly, in her mind’s eye, she saw Alys at the church door offering an underweight purse, the Stoneys’ white-lipped resentment, and her own shame.

  “It’s no way to start a marriage,” she said miserably. “It’s not how you should be on your wedding day.”

  Alys hugged her arm. “Ma, I know this is terrible for you, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but I can’t be stuck here, getting nowhere. I have to marry Richard. I have to be with him. I’m young, I want my life! I can’t be patient under misfortune like you. I can’t wait and wait for our da to come home, as if that would ever make anything better, when we know it’d be worse! I can’t creep about all humble, and hope that the neighbors are kind to my face while calling me a pauper and a faerie bastard behind my back.”

  “They don’t say that!”

  “It’s exactly what they say. Look how you have to fawn on Mrs. Miller. Look how you bow to Mrs. Wheatley. Look how you cringe to Mr. Tudeley, and that horrible tutor! We’re on the edge of charity all the time. We’re always leaching off someone’s goodwill. I can’t stand it. I’d rather be a thief than a beggar. I’ve got to take my chance now. I’ve got to live my life now!”

  “Oh, don’t say that of him!”

  “Mr. Tudeley is a monster!”

  Alinor silenced her response, shamed by her own daughter, looked at Alys but could not find the words to reprimand her. “I’m not craven,” she said, her voice very low. “I don’t cringe. I don’t leach.”

  “Yes, you do,” Alys said mercilessly. “Anyone can say anything to you, if they’ll only buy a bottle of plums.”

  “I didn’t know you felt like this.”

  “I’ve always hated being poor.”

  “Rob, too?”

  “Rob doesn’t matter!” Alys exploded. “This is not about your precious son, for once.”

  Alys’s jealousy and her resentment stretched before Alinor for the first time, as if she was seeing the waste of Foulmire for the first time, in its vast emptiness, and smelling its mud.

  “I can’t afford to offend anyone,” Alinor said quietly, the words forced from her. “If I want to earn enough to put food on the table for the two of you, I can’t afford pride.”

  “I know,” Alys said.

  “And Rob is not more precious than you.” She choked on her words. “Nothing in my world is more precious than you.”

  “I know,” Alys repeated. She put her arm round her mother’s shoulder and held her closely. “I know what you’ve done for us. I don’t know half of what you’ve suffered—for us. You’ve been mother and father to us, I know. And it was too much for any woman to do on her own. I’m grateful, I am—really. But I’m only saying that I can’t be like you. I can’t do what you do. I can’t bend under the wheel. I can’t stand it. I’d rather risk everything than settle for a poor life, like you have.”

  “You think I’ve settled for poverty?”

  “Yes,” said Alys with the blunt cruelty of the young.

  “I understand,” her mother said quietly. “I do understand wanting to be proud, being in love, being reckless.”

  “Do you?”

  She nodded, pressing her lips closed on her secret. Only last night she had been proud of her desire, entranced by lovemaking, and reckless. “I do know,” she repeated.

  They stood for a moment, holding each other close, then they turned and walked side by side up the road to Chichester.

  “I’m sorry,” Alys said quietly. “You know I love you. I didn’t mean to say all that.”

  “I know.”

  They walked a few minutes in silence then Alinor spoke: “This life isn’t what I intended for myself. It isn’t what my mother wanted for me. She thought Zachary was a man with his own boat, who’d do well. She thought we’d be neighbors, and she and I would work together, and he’d make a better life for me. She thought Ned would inherit the ferry, and have a good wife and a child of his own, and I’d have money coming in from Zachary and we’d live next door to my brother in our home. She couldn’t foresee that Mary would die, and that your father’d turn out bad.”

  They walked in silence for a while until they heard a shout from behind and turned to see a farmer with a wagon piled high with fleeces, his wife sitting up beside him with baskets of cheeses.

  “Going to market?” he asked as they paused on the side of the road and turned to him. “Ah, Mrs. Reekie, I didn’t recognize you, out of your way, on the Birdham road. Are you going to Chichester market?”

  “Yes,” Alinor said, smiling brightly. “And this is my girl, Alys.”

  “Grown like a weed,” he said. “I remember you when you were a little tot. Would you like a lift?”

  “Come up and sit on the bench beside me,” his wife said to Alinor. “Alys can go in the back on the fleeces if she doesn’t object.”

  “Thank you,” Alinor said gratefully, as the goodwife leaned down and offered a hand to help Alinor up to the driver’s bench and Alys put one foot on the hub band, the other on the spokes, and clambered up.

  “Are you selling some of your oils?” the woman asked, looking at Alinor’s basket.

  “Yes,” Alinor said. “And buying some lace for Mrs. Miller, if there’s anything good to be had.”

  “Terrible dear,” the farmer’s wife said. “I wonder she doesn’t make her own.”

  Alinor, knowing that anything she said would be repeated, smiled and made no comment.

  “But I suppose they’re doing so well, she can afford to buy,” the woman said.

  “I don’t know,” Alinor said levelly.

  “Oh, weren’t you there at harvest home? Didn’t we all see the best wheat harvest they�
��ve ever had? And don’t they sell half of it for profit and send it out of the county? And her yaddering away all dinnertime with Master Walter’s tutor from Cambridge, as if she were as good as him? As if she would have anything to say to him that he would want to hear!”

  Alinor blandly smiled again.

  “Still, she’ll make no ground there. I hear he’s going back to Cambridge when Master Walter goes. Taking the young lord back there, to teach him all about law or whatever it is that they do.”

  “I don’t know,” Alinor repeated.

  “Such a handsome man!”

  “I didn’t really see,” Alinor said, thinking that the thudding of her heart was so loud in her own ears that it must be audible to the woman sitting beside her.

  “You must have done! He went right up to you after dinner. We were all wondering what he had to say to you.”

  “He was telling me about Rob. My boy is taking lessons with Master Walter. He is his server.”

  “Did you hope that they would send Rob as a companion to Cambridge?” the woman speculated. “Was that why you walked away from him at the dinner without a curtsey? Did you ask for Rob to go, and did the tutor refuse you?”

  “No, no,” Alinor said. “Nothing like that! I was unwell. I was so afraid of being sick before the company. I had to get myself home. I begged his pardon and dashed for home.”

  “She doesn’t cure her hams properly, for all she’s so proud of them,” the goodwife said. “I felt queasy myself.”

  “What brings you on this road, Mrs. Reekie?” the farmer interrupted his wife. “Will you be wanting a lift back this way after the market?”

  “No, we’ll take the usual road home,” Alinor replied. “We’re only out of our way because we were visiting.”

  “Visiting who?” the wife asked curiously.

  “Stoney Farm,” Alinor replied.

  “Aha!” The goodwife was thrilled at finally extracting a nugget of gossip. “I saw the two of them dancing at harvest home. They made a lovely pair. Am I to listen for the banns?”

  “Yes,” Alinor conceded. “Yes. Alys and Richard are to be married.”

  “In our church at Birdham?”