Dark Tides Read online

  Alinor said nothing but looked steadily at her daughter till Alys ran out of words and stood, furiously silent.

  “Even if all this were true, I would still be a mother missing a son,” Alinor said steadily. “Even if it were all true, I still would know in my heart, in my bones, Alys, that my son is alive. Even if it were all true, I would not believe that Rob is dead. None of this smells like truth to me, I don’t feel it in my heart, I don’t feel it in my bones.”

  “How should you know it?” Alys raged. “How should you feel it in your heart? In your bones? You were ducked for a witch—have you learned nothing? These are false gifts. You have no sight! These are nothing but the fancies of a sick woman. You were a fool once for love! Are you going to be a fool for spite?”

  Alinor gave a little gasp, put her hand to her heart as if she would hold her breath in her body. For a moment she could say nothing. Then she raised herself from her chair and went to the door. One hand on the ring of the latch, she turned back and drew a shaky breath. “It’s not witchcraft and never was. It’s my ma’s gift. I had it from her and gave it to my children. Rob had it and it guided him in his healing; you had it, but you put it from you. Now Sarah has it from me. And I tell you this—if my son were no longer in this world, I’d know it. Just as if Livia were a true daughter to me, I’d know it. Just as if her son was my grandson: I’d know it.”

  “These things are unknowable,” Alys insisted, frightened at her mother’s ashen certainty. “But money at the goldsmith’s is real.”

  “It’s not at your goldsmith’s,” Alinor said with the accuracy of a poor woman.

  “Ma, sit down. Forgive me, I spoke in anger… I was…”

  Alys pressed Alinor into the chair, and she sat still until she had gained her breath. Alys hurried to the kitchen and came back with a tot of brandy in a little glass and watched her drink till a little color came back to her drawn face.

  “I shouldn’t have spoken so,” Alys whispered.

  The older woman gave a wry smile. “Don’t take it back just because I can’t breathe. I’m not going to be one of those tyrants who faint to make people obey them.”

  Alys gave a shaky little laugh. “You’re no tyrant, and I shouldn’t have abused you. But you’ve done me very wrong, Ma.”

  “I haven’t,” Alinor said steadily. “I’ve done something I know to be right. And don’t you go telling Livia where Sarah’s gone. Nor what she’s doing.”

  “I’d be ashamed to tell her!” Alys retorted, her voice low. “What could I tell her? That the mother-in-law that she loves doesn’t believe her? That she’s sent her granddaughter miles away, on a long sea voyage, to spy on her? Without telling me?”

  A little smile twisted Alinor’s mouth, but she was unrepentant. “Very well. We’ll both of us say nothing. You can say, if she asks, that Sarah’s staying in the country for a month. And in a month we’ll find another excuse.”

  “You want me to lie to her,” Alys accused. “The only person who has loved me since my husband abandoned me?”

  Alinor nodded. “Do you think she doesn’t lie to you?”

  NOVEMBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

  One icy cold day in late November there was a gentle tap on Ned’s door and Red lifted his head and gave a short welcoming bark. Ned opened the door to Wussausmon who was dressed in his thickest winter jacket, and grinning under a hat of muskrat fur.

  “Come!” he said. “I’m going to take you fishing!”

  “The river’s full of ice,” Ned protested.

  “I know, I’m taking you to a lake. Have you ever been ice fishing?”

  “No,” Ned said with no eagerness. “Never.”

  Wussausmon hesitated. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Ned lied, putting on his big coat and tying his oiled cape on top.

  “No—tell me?”

  “No, no.” Ned hid his embarrassment in irritation. “Nothing. Nothing, I tell you.”

  Wussausmon laughed at Ned’s bad temper. “Ah, Nippe Sannup!” he said, putting his arm around Ned’s shoulders. “Tell me what is the matter, for I can see you don’t want to come fishing with me, though I thought it would be a great treat for you. And you could take a fish to your woman: Mrs. Rose.”

  “Don’t speak of her like that,” Ned warned him.

  “Not a word! Not a word!” his irrepressible friend promised him. “But what is wrong, Nippe Sannup? Waterman? Netop? Friend?”

  Ned sat to tie his moccasin boots, bending over them to hide his shame. “I’m not one of the People,” he confessed. “I’m not one of you. I’m not used to such hard winters that the ice freezes so you can walk on it, dig a hole in it.” His voice dropped lower. “It frightens me,” he confessed. “We have frost fairs in London some winters, but you can see that it’s frozen hard, and there are dozens of other people walking around. I can’t stomach the thought of stepping on a deep lake all on my own, and hearing it crack below me. I can’t bear to be all alone on the ice.”

  There was a silence and he glanced up, expecting more laughter, but Wussausmon’s lively face was compassionate. “Of course,” he said. “Why did you not tell me at once?”

  Ned shrugged. “It’s not the part of a man to be afraid,” he said.

  “Oh it is,” Wussausmon assured him. “We teach our boys and girls to know their fear and step towards it as their friend. To use it as a warning. Far braver to face it than go away. Was that not the path of the Lord? In the wilderness? Facing His fear?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s for Mr. Russell. I don’t know.”

  “Don’t choose to be stupid,” Wussausmon begged him. “What else do you fear here, in this land which is not yours and is so strange to you?”

  “The forest… the winter,” Ned admitted. “God help me, I don’t want to be a coward; but I keep thinking: what if I fell? Or a branch of a tree came down and pinned me down, or even something as little as I set my foot down wrong and turned my leg and couldn’t get home? It could be the smallest of things and in this weather I would die before anyone knew I was missing.” He took a breath. “They wouldn’t find me till spring,” he said. “They wouldn’t even know I was out there.”

  Wussausmon put a gentle hand on Ned’s shoulder. “Waterman, this is not cowardice, these are real fears of things that might really happen. It is true for me too: when I am sent all round the country on strange paths. Like you, I think: What if I were to make a mistake here and wander into country that I don’t know? What if my enemies are waiting for me? What if someone somewhere has lost patience with a man who lives in two worlds but belongs to neither?”

  “What d’you do?”

  The man grasped Ned’s hand and hauled him over the threshold and up the big bank of snow, helped him balance to put on his snowshoes. “Look around,” he said. “That’s what I do. I look around and I think all the time about what I am doing, not what I will do later or tomorrow, or any dream of tonight. I am here like a bird circling in the sky and always looking down, as the wolf going quietly through the woods, ears up, hackles up, scenting the wind, like the woods themselves always knowing. So I don’t misstep or let a branch fall on me because I am watching all the time where I step, what the wind is doing in the trees, what is around me, every moment of the time.”

  “You watch for accidents as if they were enemies?” Ned asked.

  “As if they were companions. They come with me everywhere I go, everything can always go wrong. I walk in a world where I am safe at this moment but who knows what happens next? I watch to see that accidents don’t surprise me—but I know they are always there. I make sure they do not creep up on me while I am dreaming of something else.” He looked into Ned’s face. “You be the same. Don’t be in a hurry, like Coatmen always are. Pause, watch, listen, smell, taste, hear, and use that other sense, wolf sense that tells you that something strange is happening even hundreds of miles away, bird sense that guides hundreds of them to move as one, turning at an in
visible moment. You have to be dead to your wandering thoughts, never thinking of what has gone or what is coming next year, you have to forget the last step or the next, you have to be locked into here, now.”

  Ned thought. “Now? The wind now and the trees now?”

  “Now, and now, and the next now after that. Where your feet are, and the snow under them, what is above your head and is anyone behind you?”

  Ned nodded, thinking of awareness of the world around him, suddenly vivid and bright.

  Wussausmon took his arm and looked into his face. “Now, can I teach you to fish?”

  Ned grinned. “Yes, you can. And teach me how to watch all the time, as you do.”

  “You can try,” the man promised. “But you are a people whose mind never stays on one thing at a time. Unless it is money.”

  “I will try,” Ned promised.

  “Follow me then,” Wussausmon ordered. “And follow in my tracks, don’t wander like a child.”

  Feeling the reproof, Ned followed exactly in his tracks through the deep snow, around trees, through clearings, crossing frozen swamp smoothed white under the drifts of snow until they came to a clearing in the forest and a small frozen lake.

  “This is a good fishing lake,” Wussausmon told him.

  “I come here in summer,” Ned said uneasily, thinking how deep and still the waters were, even in the heat of summertime.

  “So in winter the fish are still here, under the ice.”

  Ned nodded. “I suppose so. I never thought.”

  “Of course. So watch: this is how we catch them.”

  Ned stood back as Wussausmon dropped his fishing pack, a buckskin bag, onto the snowy ice. He selected a tool like a long-handled hoe, showed Ned the bone blade on the end, and then scraped and stabbed. Ned flinched at the first blows, anxiously listening for a warning crack below his feet, but the ice was thick and silent, and as Wussausmon wore a hole through the ice he saw, disbelievingly, the black water slop into the hole inches below. The sides of the ice hole were clear and thick, little pieces of ice broke off and puddled in the bottom. Kneeling on his bag Wussausmon picked them out with a ladle.

  “Pass me the decoy,” he said over his shoulder, and Ned rooted in the open end of the bag till he found a piece of wood with twine twisted all around it and a little mock fish made of shells, wonderfully jointed so that it moved tail and fin. He handed it to Wussausmon who unwound the twine.

  “Spear,” he demanded.

  Ned drew out a three-pronged spear, on a long pole, and put it into Wussausmon’s hand.

  “First you look,” Wussausmon instructed, rising to his feet and stepping back so Ned could take his place, kneeling on the kit bag, peering into the wet darkness of the hole. He could see nothing; he felt the icy breath of the water frosting his hair, and blinked against the cold in his face. Then slowly, as his eyes made sense of shadows in darkness, he could see the outline of sleeping fish at the bottom of the lake, the pale flank of one, the outline of another. There was something extraordinarily beautiful in the silent sleep of the dormant creatures.

  “There are fish!” he whispered, lifting his face to Wussausmon. “I see them.”

  “Indeed,” the man confirmed with a smile. “Now, I am going to catch one, and then you are.”

  He took up his place leaning over the hole and released the decoy fish into the water, tweaking the twine up and down to make the fish move in the water as if it were swimming. Within moments the big fish had risen up from the depths, Wussausmon had the spear ready and in complete silence, barely even breathing, he made a steady thrust and plunged the spear into the water, brought it back, pulled it out, and laid it on the ice at Ned’s feet, a fat writhing large-mouthed bass, speared through the middle.

  “Give thanks and kill,” he said shortly.

  Ned, at a loss for an impromptu prayer, just said: “Thank you, fish, thank you, lake, thank you, Wussausmon,” and feeling like a fool clubbed it on the head so it lay still.

  “There,” Wussausmon said smiling. “You have your first fish of winter. Now you can catch your own,” and he stood up from the bag, gestured that Ned should kneel down, and waited, unmoving for a good hour, while Ned jiggled the decoy, speared into the darkness, cursed, got his hands wet, and tried all over again.

  NOVEMBER 1670, AT SEA

  Sarah had feared she would be seasick, and homesick, but she found that the movement of the boat lulled her to sleep and so the first night was quickly behind her, and when she woke in the morning she could walk easily on the moving deck, and she found the creak of the sails and the constant roll of the waves under the keel were exhilarating. Captain Shore allowed her to sit at the prow of the ship, as long as she did not distract the sailors from their work, and she spent days leaning over the side and watching the waves slide under the keel.

  They ate well. Sarah was allowed to put out a line to fish. There were no vegetables or fruit after the first few days, but they took on extra stores in Lisbon. The seas were rough in the Atlantic and a buffeting wind drove the galleon through the water, making the sails strain and the sheets crack, but when they turned into the Mediterranean it grew calmer and even though it was winter in faraway England there were bright sunny days, and Sarah borrowed Captain Shore’s big tropical hat when she leaned on the edge of the boat to see dolphin playing in the bow waves. She hardly thought what lay ahead of her, she avoided thinking about it. The enormity of the lie to her mother, the secret voyage, and the task ahead of her, was too much for her to imagine. Sarah let herself revel in the time at sea and not worry about the destination.

  DECEMBER 1670, LONDON

  Johnnie, coming out of his master’s counting house with half a dozen other clerks for his weekly evening off, was astounded to find Livia waiting, the long-suffering Carlotta behind her, at the merchant’s door.

  “Aunt Livia!” he exclaimed.

  “Ooo-er,” shouted one of the clerks. “That’s not like any aunt of mine.”

  Johnnie flushed to the roots of his fair hair but Livia laughed at the impertinence. For one horrified moment Johnnie thought she might shout back.

  “Ignore them!” he said quickly. “Is Grandma ill? My mother?”

  He could think of no reason that his exotic kinswoman should penetrate Bishopsgate, except to take him home for an emergency. “Have you heard from Sarah?” he demanded, suddenly fearful for his twin, so far away at sea.

  “No.” She laughed happily. “Would I have come across London to a street like this, filled with these dreadful young men, to carry a message from your sister? No, everything is well at home. Nothing has happened. Indeed, I believe that nothing ever happens at home but the turning of the smallest of pennies. I left them playing with Matteo. I came for you. I have a surprise for you.”

  “What is it?”

  Confidently she took his arm and led him down the dark and dirty street, Carlotta trailing unhappily behind them. “Where are we going?”

  “Just a little way, for I have some good news for you. But first, I must tell you the price of it.”

  He felt an immediate sense of caution, as if—however charming she was—any price she might set on anything would be impossibly high. “I have no money,” he told her bluntly. “In my pocket I have enough for my dinner, but all my wages I give to Ma, to run the house and warehouse. And she’s been very short recently, as I think you know.”

  “She’s been paid,” she said sweetly. “She has no complaint. And anyway, I don’t want your pennies, darling boy, I want your friendship.”

  “Well, of course, you have that,” he said cautiously.

  “Let me explain,” she said. “You know I have been engaged in an enterprise selling my antiquities at the house of our old family friend Sir James Avery?”

  He nodded, saying nothing, keeping his gaze on her perfect profile as she watched her feet, stepping carefully, down the dirty street.

  “Sir James is in my debt,” she told him. “I have opened up his house
and made it a center for those with an interest in ancient and beautiful things. He has been visited by some of the greatest men at court. I have restored his name to importance.” They turned into Leadenhall Street. “You say nothing?”

  He felt that she was too flirtatious and clever for him. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Ah, you are wise to stay silent then. Allora—he owes me a favor and I have allowed him to settle his debt to me in the form of an introduction.”

  “You have?”

  “I have. I could have asked for anything, for myself, for Matteo, but I did not. Instead, I have this!” With a flourish she produced the letter from Sir James from under her cloak and pressed it into his hand. “An introduction for you, my dearest nephew.”

  “I don’t want to be intro…” he began; but fell silent as she turned him around to face the gloriously ornate facade of the East India Company headquarters. The lower level, facing the street, was conventional enough, a double-height door set to the right of the building, but then on the next floor there were heavy full-height windows letting on to an ornate balcony of wooden carved balustrades, with a great portrait of one of the Company’s famous ships in the center. A ship portrait was repeated on the next floor between high leaded windows, and the whole top-floor facade was a massive painting of a ship in full sail. Above that great boast, on the roof of the house, facing east, was a giant statue of a sailor, stick in one hand, hand on hip, as if to dominate the world.

  “The East India Company,” Johnnie whispered. “You’ve never got me an introduction into the East India Company?”

  She put the letter into his hand. “The East India Company,” she confirmed. “One of the writers will see you. That’s his name on the letter. I have made you an appointment, it is now. Go in and tell him that Sir James Avery is your patron and supports your application for a place.”