Tidelands Page 28

  “I was, Father Professor.”

  “Then why did you fail?”

  Haltingly, ashamed of himself, James explained the trip to the Isle of Wight, the associates who met him, the boys who concealed his mission, the boatman who failed him, and the replacement: Zachary. He said that Mr. Hopkins’s house was completely unguarded and that the king could have left with him but would not do so.

  The professor sat, his fingers steepled together as if he were praying. “Why would he not leave with you?”

  “He did not explain himself to me.”

  “But he would not leave?”

  “He laughed,” James said bitterly. “And then he was angry that anyone should doubt that he could save himself. He was confident that he would be able to make an agreement with them. He told me to come again in future, if he needed me. I warned him that it was dangerous for me, and for others—that we might not be able to come again—but he didn’t take me seriously. I couldn’t make him take us seriously.”

  “You told him you were obeying his wife and son? That it was their plan?”

  “I said the password, and I told him they had paid me, and given me money to bribe the boatman. He said he would not go at their bidding.” James could not easily convey the king’s petulance and maintain the respect that he must show for God’s ordained leader on earth.

  “But you got back to Sir William without detection?”

  “I’m certain that I did.”

  “And then you were ill?”

  James flushed. The professor could see the deep color at the neck of his robe.

  “I was. Some sort of fever that they have on the marshes there. It didn’t last long.”

  “Was it a sickness of the body only? Or was it of your faith, my son?”

  James dropped his head. The older man could barely make out the muttered words that his faith was shaken and indeed lost.

  “This is not surprising,” Dr. Sean said gently. “You were very alone, a young man, and in danger of your life for weeks and weeks before you even got to the island. We gave you the greatest task that anyone from this college has ever been set, and it failed.”

  “I’m so sorry,” James whispered. “I am shamed.”

  “It sounds as if no one could have persuaded the king. If he did not want to come you could not make him. I believe that you did your best and I imagine that no one could have done more.”

  There was a silence.

  “Could you have done more, my son?”

  “I have questioned myself,” James admitted. “I cannot see what more I could have done. I wish I could have got him away. I think if he had come with me I would have got him safely away. I even dream of it. I go over and over in my mind. But there’s no certainty. There’s no knowing what would have happened out at sea, or even at the quayside. I don’t think I could have done more—not without his consent. But I fear . . . I fear that I should have insisted. But how could I insist to him?”

  “One setback may shake your faith but not break it,” the senior man remarked. “Your vows remain intact?”

  There was a long silence in the sunlit peaceful room.

  “They do not,” James confessed, his voice a whisper. “Father, I have sinned. I met a woman and I love her. I am so sorry, Professor. I am deep in sin.”

  The older man nodded. “We are all of us in sin. We were born in sin and we sin every day. But the Lord is merciful. He forgives us if we confess and return to God. You will confess and return to God.”

  James’s head came up. “I ask to be released from my vows,” he said quietly. “I will confess, and serve any penance that is asked of me, of course. But I pray that I may be released. Father Professor, I love her. I want to be with her.”

  The abbey bell struck the hour and in the town, beyond the window, the other church bells rang too. James listened to the competing chimes, all of them announcing the hour of prayer in this devout town. When the last had fallen silent, Dr. Sean looked kindly at the young man. “Go to the church and confess your sins and we will talk again next week.”

  “Next week!” James exclaimed.

  The older man smiled patiently. “Yes,” he said. “Of course. Did you think you would leave tomorrow? You and I will talk again next week. And in the meantime, you will speak of this only in the confessional, to the confessor that I appoint to talk with you. Nowhere else, to no one else, and you will not write to anyone either. You are still under your vow of obedience, my son, and this is how you will spend your week.”

  James rose to his feet, bowed, and went to the door. Dr. Sean bent his head over his paper, knowing that James would hesitate at the door.

  “Father Professor, I have given my word to her that I will return to her. She is waiting for me.”

  Slowly the older man raised his head, his quill poised in his hand. “My son, she will have to learn patience, as will you. We serve an eternal God, not one who counts the minutes. God took a week to make the world, now He demands that you consider this important choice for a similar time. I don’t think you can refuse Him.”

  James, baffled, bowed his head. “I can’t,” he agreed.

  “If she is a good woman, then she will be praying too. She will need time to consider her situation.”

  “She is a good woman,” he said, thinking of her pale face in the church porch as she waited for ghosts. “She is not of our faith, not of our beliefs, but she is a good woman.”

  “It is your faith that concerns us now,” Dr. Sean said firmly. “Meditate on that. Take it to our Father.”

  “But she—”

  “She does not concern us now. God bless you, my son.”

  “Amen.”

  TIDELANDS, OCTOBER 1648

  Even with both of the women spinning, and both of them picking the last of the herbs that were still growing in the late October sunshine, even with Alinor selling her oils from the summer, attending every birth, and drying the herbs that were still growing green, even with Alys working all the hours they would pay her at the Millers’ farm, the money was slow to come in and hard to keep. The little household had always lived off its own—growing their own food, brewing their own ale, fishing, making and mending and never buying new. But as winter came closer the price of everything went up: tallow for soap and candles, meat of any sort, cheese and milk, wheat or rye. Even the things that they foraged—the teazels for felting, the willow twigs for sweeping—took longer to find. Alinor spent more and more time picking up driftwood for her fire, walking on the shore, which started to crackle with freezing dew, as the wintry days grew shorter, and the nights dark.

  As if winter did not bring trouble enough, Alinor was ill, exhausted before she started her day, sick before she got out of their shared bed. She could not eat before midday, she could not bear the smell of cheese or bacon, and when Ned brought a boiled lobster over one evening, a payment for ferry fees from one of the Sealsea fishermen, she could not even sit at the table while he and Rob and Alys feasted.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Alys asked irritably, her mouth full of lobster meat. Ned sat opposite Rob, who had come from the Priory to visit and had brought a loaf of white bread with compliments from Mrs. Wheatley. Alinor, opposite Alys, had a slice of the bread and a cup of small ale. Red, the dog, under the table, fixed his brown gaze on her, as if he thought she might slip him the crust.

  “I don’t know,” Alinor said. “I thought it was the quatrain fever but I have no signs; I expect it will pass. Perhaps it was something that I ate.”

  “It’s been weeks,” Alys pointed out. “Surely it’d be over by now if it was rancid cream or spoiled meat.”

  “Don’t,” Alinor said, the back of her hand to her mouth. “Don’t even speak of them.”

  Ned laughed shortly. “She was always sickish,” he said unsympathetically. “You should’ve seen her when she was breeding you.” He bent his head and cracked one of the claws. “Here, Rob,” he said. “Try this.”

  The young man and his
uncle picked at the meat. “It’s good,” Rob said. “The claw’s always the best.”

  “D’you get lobster at the Priory?”

  “No,” said Rob.

  “Folk look down their noses at it, as poor man’s meat, but I like it better than beef,” Ned said, his speech muffled by a mouthful.

  Alinor heard them as if they were far away. Her brother’s careless words echoed again and again in her head. She heard a noise in her head like the rush of the waters in the millrace as she looked up and saw Alys’s dark blue eyes on her, and heard a distant voice say: “Ma?” as she went down into the darkness.

  She woke on the bed in the cottage, Alys at her side. She raised herself on her elbow and Alys held a glass of small ale to her lips. “Where’s Rob?”

  “Uncle Ned’s walking back to the Priory with him. I said that you’d be fine. I said that you’d send to tell him tomorrow. I said it was women’s troubles.” Alys scrutinized her mother’s face. “It is, isn’t it?”

  Dumbly, Alinor nodded.

  “The worst kind? You’re with child?”

  Alinor swallowed. “I think so.”

  “You think so?” Alys was pale and furious in a moment. “You must know if you laid with a man or no. Or are you going to tell me you were forced by a faerie lord? God save us, have you been dancing with the faerie lords again?”

  A deep shamed flush rose from Alinor’s belly to her hot cheeks. “Of course I know. What I don’t know is if I’m with child. I hadn’t thought of it till Ned said . . . what he said.”

  “And you tell me to beware of the gallows!”

  “I’ve done very wrong,” Alinor confessed to this new, authoritative daughter. “Very wrong.”

  Alys rose from the bedside and stepped towards the door, flinging it open as if she would summon the icy sea breeze to blow the words from the little cottage. “You must be mad,” she said bitterly. “After all you’ve said to me!”

  Alinor bowed her head in shame.

  “How could you?”

  “I know, Alys. Don’t scold me.”

  “And you dare to let my uncle tell me that I must wait for months to be married? When you’ve not even waited a year since our da left?”

  “It’s a year. It’s nearly a year.”

  “Who is it? Mr. Miller?”

  “No!” Alinor exclaimed.

  “That horrible man who has the physic stall at Chichester market?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Mr. Tudeley, who’s getting Rob his apprenticeship? Is that why Rob gets his chance?”

  “No! No! Alys, I won’t be questioned like this!”

  “You will be!” The girl rounded on her mother. “This is nothing! Don’t you think the parish will question you like this as soon as your belly starts to show? Don’t you think you’ll have to name the father and then stand before the congregation in your shift, in your shame? Don’t you think Mr. Miller will ask you, all the churchmen will ask you, they’ll demand that you say, and they’ll bring in a midwife from Chichester to put her dirty hands all over your belly, and peer at your privates like you were a whore suspected of the pox?”

  Alinor shook her head, her golden hair falling around her white face. “No, no.”

  “They’ll go on and on and on at you until you give them his name and then they’ll find him and make him pay his fine to the parish. And you’ll go to the workhouse, and when the bastard is born they’ll take him off you and send you back here as a named whore.”

  “No,” Alinor said. “No, Alys, don’t say such things.”

  “Back here!” Alys gestured wildly at the interior of the little cottage and the vast desolate mire outside. “Back here, as a named whore. Who’s going to give Rob an apprenticeship then? Who’s going to marry me? Who’s going to buy anything from you but magic and love potions?”

  “I’m going to be sick,” Alinor announced. She stumbled to her feet and got to the open front door. She vomited on her own doorstep, sobbing at the pain of her empty belly heaving on nothing.

  Like a blessing, she felt a cold cloth scented with lavender oil laid gently on the back of her neck. “Thank you,” she said, and wiped her face and hands. She stepped back and sat on the bed, looking up at Alys as if her daughter were her judge.

  “Were you forced, Ma?” the young woman asked more gently. “Is that what happened?”

  Alinor turned from the temptation of a lie. “No.”

  “They won’t stop asking. You’ll have to tell. Did you not think of this?”

  “I didn’t think . . . till this very moment . . . that I was with child. I hadn’t thought—” She broke off. There was no way to explain to this new challenging Alys that she had thought her sickness was heartache, that her inability to eat was pining for the man she loved, that she had embraced it, like a penance, as he too might be fasting as punishment for his love for her. She had thought the two of them were working their way to be together, he fasting in Douai, and she here, on the edge of the mire, aching for him too, eating only bread and small ale, sick for love.

  “Well, think it now!” Alys flung at her. “Think now that you’re ruined. And I’m ruined too. You’ve ruined me. For Richard can’t marry me if my mother is a named whore. They won’t want our money, if they think you earned it on your back behind a haystack. They won’t stand for a missing father and a mother of shame. A deserted wife was a long stretch for them; a pregnant whore will be too much. You are ruined and I am ruined, too.”

  “Alys, I would never do anything to hurt you,” Alinor said.

  “You have destroyed me! You could have done nothing worse.”

  “I won’t let this happen.”

  “It’s happened already.”

  “Alys, all my life I have lived for you.” Alinor stumbled over her words. “I tried to keep Zachary from you and Rob. I took blows so that he wouldn’t raise his hand to you. I wanted nothing but a good life for the two of you. I’ve done everything I could do to raise you up from this life. I’d never bring you down.”

  “Well, you’ve brought me down.” The girl slumped on the foot of the bed, facing her mother, panting and desperate. “It’s even worse than you know. For I am with child, too. Unlike you, I can name my lover, and we are betrothed to marry. We did not lie together until we were handclasped. But that’s why I’m determined that we marry in January before the baby comes in May.”

  “In May?” Alinor asked, shocked.

  “Yes. There’s no shame in being with child at the altar. We were betrothed. We were going to tell his parents and the minister next month. But if you’re proved as a whore then Richard won’t be allowed to marry me, and his family will never accept me! Then I’ll be ruined, too.”

  “Alys!” Alinor reached out to her beloved daughter, but Alys slapped her hand away and threw herself down on the bed, turned towards the wooden wall, and would not speak.

  Alys cried herself to sleep as Alinor lay sleepless, the cottage door wide open to the clear night sky, the stars sparkling like ice. The tide was coming in with an east wind behind it, the coldest wind of all. The sound of the lapping water filled the cottage as if the tide would climb the bank, wash them both away, and make the whole world into tidelands.

  At midnight Alinor got up, wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, ignored the protesting cluck of the drowsy hens, and went outside to sit on the rough bench against the cottage wall, closing the door on her sleeping daughter. She watched the moon high in the sky, shining a silver path on the water of the harbor, until she thought it was an invitation to her, a message from the old gods of the Saxon shore, who did not fear death but embraced it as their last voyage. She thought that perhaps the best thing she could do for her daughter, for her son, for herself, and for the man she loved was to walk down to the shore and fill her pockets with stones and follow that gleaming path, colder and colder, wetter and wetter, until the icy waters closed over her head and the sound of rushing water in her ears muffled the cry of the sleep
less seagulls.

  Quietly, she got to her feet and went through the garden gate, her hand lingering on the worn gatepost. She looked back at the shabby little cottage and then climbed the bank to the high path. Through the tunnel of thornbushes, she walked in moonlight and shadow, along the bank until she came to the white shell beach under the down-swinging branches of the oak tree. The bank had been built as a sea wall years ago, centuries ago, and the sea had worn it away at the foot and tumbled the foundation stones—river stones, rounded by water—on the white shell shore. Alinor lifted one and slid it in the pocket of her gown, and another, for the other side. She felt their weight drag her down. She picked up another—the biggest, the heaviest—to hold it tightly and walk into the icy water that lapped closer and closer. She thought that all her life she had been afraid of deep water and now, in her last moments, she would face that fear and not fear it anymore. She thought that it would drag at her poor skirt, chill her warm body, lap against her belly, her ribs, that she would shudder when it reached her warm armpits, her neck, but that finally she would dip her head and taste the brackish salt of it and know that she would go down into the muddy depths of it, without protest and without fear.

  She did not move. She stood at the edge of the sea, the stone heavy in her grip, and watched the moon’s dappled reflection, silver on the dark water as the waves crept up the shore, closer and closer. She heard the water lap at her feet and she stood still as the tide turned, and listened to it recede. But she did not move. She did not step along the silvery path of the moon, she did not walk into the water. She stood silent among the quiet sounds of the night, and certainty came to her.

  She did not weep for herself, not for Alys, not even for Rob. She did not yearn for James to rescue her, she did not think of him with anything but love. She had loved him and lain with him, she had trusted him and she believed in him still; but she did not expect him to help her in this dark night. She did not think that anything would be illuminated by the dawn, she did not pray to a forgiving God, for she did not expect Him to listen to a woman like her, in a place like this.