Tidelands Page 32

  James’s mother rose from the table and looked out of the window again as if the little market square in the small provincial town had anything to interest her. “Don’t speak like that,” she said quietly. “Not while James is risking his life.”

  “Has he escaped?” James asked his father very quietly. “I heard he was to ride away, that there was a ship waiting for him. Is he safe?”

  His father shook his head. “It didn’t happen. The plot was discovered.”

  “Hardly surprising,” James said sourly.

  His mother turned back from the window. “Don’t be bitter,” she said quietly. “Don’t let these times spoil you.”

  “They have spoiled me,” James confessed. “I have lost my faith. Lost my faith in the cause, and lost my faith in God, too. But I suppose you know that? I suppose Dr. Sean sent for you? That is why you are here?”

  His father was too honest a man to lie to his only son. “They sent for us the moment you came in,” he said. “They said you had been brought very low. Is it your faith in the king and God that is troubling you? Or is there a woman in it too?”

  James hesitated, as his mother came to the table and rested her white hand on it, the beautiful lace from her cuff reflected in the polished wood. “You can speak in front of me,” she said. “I’m very sure I have heard worse over the last few years. We have been in a ragtag court in exile, with the morals of stable cats for long enough for me to hear everything.”

  “Are you spoiled?” James asked her with a crooked smile.

  “I’m hardened,” she admitted. “You can’t tell me anything new.”

  “There is a woman,” he confessed. “A workingwoman, not a lady, but she is very beautiful and very brave and very . . .” He tried to think of a description that would do justice to Alinor. “Interesting,” he said. “She’s interesting. She is a herbalist, but quite uneducated. She is a simple woman but she has her own mind, her own thoughts. She lives—” He broke off, thinking that he could not describe the hovel at the side of Foulmire, and the ferry-house and the army brother. “She lives very simply,” he said, avoiding a description of her poverty. “But she saved my life the night that she first met me, and took me into hiding.”

  “Her family?” his mother prompted.

  “She has two children: a boy and a girl.”

  Her aghast face told him of his mistake.

  “I didn’t mean that! I meant to ask: is she of a good family?”

  “She has children? She’s a widow?” his father asked.

  James answered his mother first. “She has a little standing in her village, with her neighbors. There’s gossip—but there’s always gossip in these poor little places, you know that! Her husband has gone. He’s probably dead. They are poor people.” He hesitated, looking from one to another. “I’m not explaining this well. They don’t have land, or a family, or a name.”

  He looked at his mother, as if willing her to see the mire as he saw it, a place of eerie beauty, and Alinor as a woman of the place, strange and beautiful too. “They are not people like us,” he tried to explain.

  “But she did at least have a husband? She was married once? She’s not a—”

  “No! Her parents are dead but she has a brother. He’s a good man.”

  “Did her husband die in the war?” his mother asked. “On our side?”

  “Er, no . . .” James said awkwardly. “He’s just missing.”

  “She’s a deserted wife?” his mother asked. “Abandoned?”

  “Yeoman stock?” his father asked hopefully. “This brother? Has he got his own land? Or is he a tenant farmer?”

  James shook his head, forcing himself to be honest. “He keeps the ferry. They have the tenancy to the ferry and the ferry-house, and they grow vegetables and trees and keep hens in an acre behind the house. They sell ale out of the window. They’re poor people, sir, on poor land, on the very edge of England as it turns into sea. It’s marshland, tidelands, neither one thing nor another. And it’s true to say, she owns almost nothing. She was given a few shillings for bringing me to safety and she used it to buy a boat.”

  He did not know that he was smiling at the thought of the boat and the courage of the woman he loved. “It meant everything to her. She fishes from the boat, and sells her catch. She said—” He broke off as he realized that he could not tell them of her joke that saving him was of the same value as catching a fat salmon. “She grows herbs and makes physic. She’s a healer and a midwife in the little village. It’s a little fishing village, very poor.”

  His mother was blanched with horror. “A fisherwoman?” she repeated. “A midwife? Like a cunning woman?”

  “Yes,” he said steadily. “She’s no grander than that.” He turned to his father. “But she saved me when I had nowhere to go. And then, later, she nursed me when I was near to death, when anyone else would have locked the doors and abandoned me, for fear of plague. But she chose to stay with me, and be locked up with me. And I have asked her to marry me.”

  His mother gave a suppressed moan and put her hand over her mouth, closing her eyes.

  His father’s face was dark. “This is not what we planned for you,” he said shortly.

  “Sir, I know it. But we did not plan a world like this.”

  “We are exiles and all but penniless. We’re defeated in this world, but we have not sunk so low that you can break your vows to the Church to marry a village midwife with a brace of lowborn children.”

  “I am sorry, sir. I am sorry, Lady Mother.”

  She shook her head, her hand shading her eyes, as if she could not bear to look at him.

  “We allowed you to go to the Church,” his father said begrudgingly. “That was not easy for us. We gave up all hopes of grandchildren and a daughter-in-law then. That was your choice. You said you had a calling and we believed you. That was the hardest thing I ever did—to give up my only son to the Church. And now you tell us that was for nothing? And we are to give you up again? But this time, for something of no value at all? For a woman who—by your own description—is valueless?”

  James heard the rising volume of his father’s anger. “I know. I know. You were good to let me go to the Church. I longed to be in the Church then. I was certain. But . . . going back to England, and seeing the defeat of everything that we believe and the king so—”

  “The king so what?” His mother rounded on him in a cold fury. “Is all this—all this!—because you have discovered that the king is a fool? I could have told you that ten years ago!”

  Her husband moved his hand to silence her but she went on. “No! I will speak. The boy should know. He knows already! Yes! The king is a fool and a cat’s-paw, and his son is two parts a villain. But still he is the king. That never changes! And you are a priest, and that never changes. Whether he is a good king or a bad one, that never changes. Whether you are a good priest or a bad one, that never changes! Just as your father is and always will be Sir Roger Avery of Northside Manor, Northallerton. It never changes. Whether we live there, in our house, or not, whether it is overrun with rabble or not, whether you live there or not. It is still our name, it is still our house. England never changes and neither will you.”

  There was silence in the little room. Sir Roger looked from his son to his wife.

  “Did the woman accept you?” he asked as if it were a matter of secondary interest.

  “Whyever would she not?” Lady Avery demanded angrily. “D’you think she would prefer to stay where she is? In nowhere? Half drowned in the tidelands?”

  James raised his head. “No, she did not. She said it was not fitting.”

  “She’s right!”

  “Did she really say that?” his father asked, interested.

  James nodded. “Yes, I told you she was unusual. But I said that I would be released from my order, that I would ask you if we might pay the fine to parliament and return to Northside, and that I would ask your permission to marry her, and bring her to our home as my wi
fe. She has to wait until she can be declared a widow.”

  “Pay the fine to parliament and live beneath their rule? Deny our service to the king?”

  “Yes,” James said steadily. “He does not want my service. I don’t want to offer it ever again.”

  “Betray your oath of loyalty to him?”

  “Break it.”

  Lady Avery took an embroidered handkerchief from her lace-trimmed sleeve and put it to her eyes. Her husband looked steadily at the down-turned face of his son.

  “Does she even know your name?” he asked.

  The young man looked up and for the first time his father saw his boyish smile. “No,” he said. “She knows me as Father James. I pass as a tutor called Mr. Summer. She has risked everything for me and she doesn’t even know my name.”

  TIDELANDS, NOVEMBER 1648

  Alinor knocked on the door of the Mill Farm dairy and entered on Mrs. Miller’s irritated shout. Richard Stoney was carrying in extra pails of milk, the maid ahead of him with the yoke on her shoulder.

  “I’ve come for two pails of milk, if you’ve any for sale,” Alinor said.

  “We’ve more than we can use today,” Mrs. Miller said. “Bessy’s calf fell into the ditch and broke her neck. Bessy’s still in milk.”

  “Oh, poor thing,” Alinor said. Mrs. Miller looked at her askance.

  “Poor me,” she said. “I’ve lost a good calf. I’ll have to have it butchered for veal.”

  “Yes,” Alinor agreed, who had never tasted the luxury meat in her life. “I thought I’d make cheese for Chichester market.”

  “I’ll carry the milk to Ferry-house for you, Mrs. Reekie,” Richard said politely.

  Mrs. Miller scowled at him. “She’s not your mother-in-law yet,” she said coldly. “And you work for me.”

  The young man flushed. “I beg pardon,” he said shortly.

  “I can manage, if I may borrow the yoke,” Alinor said. “Will you take it off Alys’s wages?”

  “You’re asking for credit?” Mrs. Miller said nastily.

  “I can pay you now, if you prefer,” Alinor said steadily.

  “No, no, you can keep your ha’pennies. I’ll take it off her wages at the end of the week.

  “Thank you.” Alinor smiled, and put the well-worn wooden yoke on her shoulders, lifted the two brimming pails, and set her shoulders to find her balance. Richard opened the dairy door for her.

  “You get yourself into the mill,” Mrs. Miller ordered Richard. “He’s milling this morning and the tide won’t wait, not even for such as you.”

  Richard ducked his head and trotted across the yard. As Alinor walked slowly with the yoke across her shoulders, watching the milk slopping in the pails, she heard the miller shout to Richard to open the sluice. She stood for a moment at the yard gate to watch the lad lightly running along the pond wall to turn the great iron key to open the sluice. The water from the pond poured into the millrace, and slowly, the mill wheel started to turn. There was a roar of creaking wood as the rush of waters forced the wheel round and round, and then the tumble of water on the other side of the tide-mill quay as the millrace gushed like a waterfall out into the harbor, bursting like a tide of green foam into the muddy rife. Alinor walked towards the wadeway, her head turned from the raging water of the millrace as the miller engaged the grinding stones inside the mill and there was a deafening rumble of stone against stone. Alinor crossed on the wet cobbles of the wadeway, stepping around the puddles of icy water, to the ferry-house on the other side.

  Ned was felling an old apple tree in the garden at the rear of Ferry-house. The trunk was wide and knotted, and Ned had sharpened his axe and stripped to the waist to swing, and then hammer in the wedges so the spreading boughs fell away from the house. He raised his hand to Alinor as she came around the house and into the back door of the dairy.

  “The copper’s boiling in the laundry room for you,” he called to her.

  “Thank you!” she shouted back and went into the dairy.

  The room was freezing cold, and the floor still damp from washing. Alinor poured one pail of milk and then another into the wooden trough, and then went to and fro from the laundry with earthenware jugs filled with boiling water from the copper. She put the jugs among the milk until it was warmed through, and then poured in a small measure of rennet. Outside, she could hear the regular thud of the blade into the wood and the occasional pause when Ned rested on the handle and drew a breath.

  Slowly, the warmed milk was splitting into curds and whey, solidifying. Alinor took down a seashell, one of the cleaned clam shells that her mother had always used to test the thickness of the curds and whey. She spun it on the surface, and when it was steady, she rolled up her sleeves and drew her hands, her fingers outstretched like claws, through the thickening mixture. The curds were growing solid. It was time to drain them.

  The stink of the milk and rennet turned Alinor’s stomach and she opened the dairy door to take a few breaths of cold air at the doorway. Red, the dog, sat up and looked hopeful that he might get into the dairy and steal cream.

  “You sick?” Ned shouted from the yard. “Sick again? You’re white as whey!”

  “I’m fine,” Alinor lied, and went back to her work.

  From the front of the house she could hear the clang of the metal bar against the hanging horseshoe as a traveler on the far side of the rife summoned the ferry.

  “Alinor, can you do it?” Ned asked her, gesturing at his nakedness, and the tree half felled. “It’s low tide. It’s dead calm.”

  Alinor shook her head. “Forgive me, Brother,” she said. “You know I can’t.”

  “You’re like a cat agauwed of water,” he complained, pulling his shirt over his head. “And you should be like a ship’s cat that learns to keep itself dry but can go to sea.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alinor repeated. “But I stink of whey.”

  Ned went round the house to the rife, Red at his heels, and Alinor could not resist trailing after him to see the traveler. She saw a saddle horse on the far side, and a man standing beside it. Alinor’s hand went to her belly, her other hand felt her speeding heart. But even as she breathed James’s name, she saw it was not him. It was an itinerant preacher in a shabby cloak, with a weary old horse that James would never ride—a godly man come to encourage the puritans of Sealsea Island. Silently, she turned and went back to the dairy. She did not allow herself to feel disappointment. She knew he would come when he could. She trusted him to come to her.

  DOUAI, FRANCE, DECEMBER 1648

  James’s parents were leaving the guesthouse at Douai. Their horses, waiting outside in the damp cold of early December, stamped their feet and blew out clouds of breath on the freezing air. Lady Avery came out of the house, wrapped in a traveling cloak with a fur-lined hood, and her son helped her up the steps of the mounting block and onto her steady horse. She was riding sidesaddle, and she arranged her green wool riding habit so it fell over her leather boots. He climbed up on the block himself, so that they were level, head-to-head and she could hear his penitent whisper.

  “I beg you to forgive me, Lady Mother,” he said, but she would not even meet his eyes. She turned her head away and stroked her horse’s mane. “I cannot withdraw from this woman. She holds my heart. She truly does. I am going back to see her and I will marry her when she is free. I beg that you forgive me, and let me bring her to you as your daughter.”

  She turned her face to him and he could see from her pale pinched face and red eyelids that she had endured a sleepless night. “I shall pray for you and for me,” was all she said. “But I did not bring you into the world, and give you to the Holy Church for you to bed a fishwife.”

  He bowed his head for her blessing and he barely felt the light touch of her hand on his thick hair.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “I am promised to her.”

  “You are promised to the Church,” she said flatly. “You are promised to be obedient to me and your father, and we forbid t
his.”

  “I shall write to you,” he offered.

  “Not if you write of her,” she said steadily.

  The door of the abbey guesthouse opened and Sir Roger came out quickly, his thick cloak heavy on his shoulders. Dr. Sean hurried behind him, a sheet of paper in his hand.

  “Something’s happened,” Sir Roger said shortly to his son. “Changes everything.” He stepped to his wife’s horse, took hold of her bridle, and said quietly to her: “We can’t leave now. Get down and come in.”

  “Is it the king?” she asked, dismounting at once.

  He nodded, but his dark look warned her that it was not news of a successful escape from the Isle of Wight that Dr. Sean held in his hand. At once, without another word, she gave her hand to James, stepped down from the mounting block, and they hurried inside.

  “What now?” she demanded as Dr. Sean closed the door behind the four of them.

  “The army has taken over parliament,” he said. “I have this from one of our spies in London. One of the most radical wicked colonels captured the door of the House of Commons with his regiment, and only admitted those members of parliament who are sworn to Cromwell, bought and sold, wholly his. Such a house will never make an agreement with His Majesty. The true members are thrown out, the army has captured the House of Commons.”

  Lady Avery turned to her husband. “Is this to force an agreement on the king?”

  “God knows what wickedness they plan!” Dr. Sean exclaimed.

  Sir Roger nodded. “My dear, we’d better get back to court. The queen and the Prince of Wales won’t allow the king to fall into the hands of the army. This is worse than when he ran away from Hampton Court. Then the army had him, but at least parliament could defend him. Now there is no one to speak for him. Nothing like this has ever happened in the world before. A parliament to rule a king? It’s like the end of days.”