Tidelands Page 34

  Alinor, waking in her childhood bed, seeing once again the familiar painted beams on the limewashed ceiling, felt as if she had never been married and never left home to live with Zachary in the little cottage. Sometimes she woke and thought that her mother was in the little bedroom next door and her brother, Ned, snoring in the bed beside her own, but then she felt the baby move deep in her belly, and remembered that she was a girl no longer; she had given birth to two children and was now expecting a third.

  The two women worked side by side during much of the day, weeding the winter garden, brewing ale and selling it at the kitchen window to people crossing on the ferry, baking bread with the yeast from the ale froth, dipping rushlights in the wax from the bees, and sorting seeds for spring. Their pregnancies were easy to hide. The growing curve of Alinor’s belly was disguised under her voluminous winter skirt and aprons, and Alys spent her days wrapped in her uncle Ned’s canvas cloak to keep her warm and dry on the water.

  There was little hard laboring work to be done on Mill Farm in the winter months. The men did most of the hedging and the ditching. Plowing and harrowing would not start till spring. Alinor took her daughter’s place at the mill, working in the kitchen and dairy: breadmaking, ale brewing, and cheese making.

  Before sunrise in the morning, and at sunset every winter afternoon, Richard Stoney walked down the track from the mill to sit with Alys in the ferry-house kitchen, or to pull the ferry for her so she could stay indoors and spin. Alinor came upon the two of them, wrapped in each other’s arms, when it was time for Richard to go home.

  “Soon you won’t be parted,” she told them.

  “And then we’ll never be parted again,” Richard promised.

  Alinor was cooking dinner, a fish stew made from Alys’s catch from Broad Rife, when there was a sharp bark from Red, and then a loud knocking on the back door of the ferry-house. Her first thought was of James, but when she threw open the door, it was one of the Sealsea Island famers standing on the stone doorstep.

  “It’s my mother,” he said. “Granny Hebden. She’s sinking fast.”

  “God bless her,” Alinor said at once.

  “We want you to sit with her, and then . . . all the rest.”

  “Is she sick?” Alys demanded over her mother’s shoulder. “Does she have a fever?”

  “I’ll come,” Alinor said. She said to her daughter: “It’s the wrong time of year for plague, but I’ve got to go and see. She’s an old lady; she’s likely just slipping away.”

  “I can’t have you bringing sickness back here,” Alys said stubbornly. “You know why.”

  “I wouldn’t risk it for myself,” Alinor replied with a faint smile. “You know why!”

  “I’ll get your basket,” Alys said, and while her mother put on a shawl and her cape around her shoulders, the younger woman picked up Alinor’s basket of herbs and oils. “I’ll leave you some of the stew.”

  “I mightn’t get back tonight,” Alinor warned. “Shall you go to the Priory and get Rob?”

  “Richard will stay with me,” Alys said confidently.

  Alinor went out into the darkness. The young man had a horn lantern and he held it before them. As she closed the door, Red slipped through, determined to come with her.

  “I’ve got the dog,” Alinor called. With the dog at her heels, her path illuminated by the dipping light, Alinor and the farmer hurried down the track running south. The road was frozen, the ruts were white with frost, the winter moon encircled by a yellow haze in the cloudless sky. They could easily see the way. They went at a brisk pace, their breaths coming in misty puffs, until they reached a gateway and the farmer said: “Here we are,” and guided Alinor through the orchard to the little house.

  He opened the door and they went into the hall of the farmhouse. Alinor said, “Wait here, Red,” and the dog lay down on the threshold.

  Alinor went towards the fireside where an old lady, bent double with age, shrunk to the size of a child, was seated on a stool beside the fire. The farmer’s wife rose up from her stool on the other side of the stone hearth.

  “How is she?” the farmer asked his wife.

  “Just the same.”

  “Here’s Mrs. Reekie, come to see her.”

  “I doubt she’ll know her.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Alinor said gently. “Let me talk to her.”

  She knelt on the stone floor before the old woman and waited while the milky eyes turned to her and the old lady smiled. “Oh, Alinor, my dear. Why have they sent for you?”

  “Hello, Granny Hebden. They tell me you’re not very well?”

  The old lady reached out her hands. “Oh, no, my dear, they’re all wrong, as usual. I’m quite well: just dying.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes. But I want to go here, at the fireside, warm. I’ve lived in this house for more than eighty years, you know.”

  “Have you?” Alinor asked gently. She could see that the old woman had no fever: her face was pale, her hands cool. But her breathing was labored, with a little catch in every pant.

  “Or longer. They have no idea.”

  “Course they don’t,” Alinor whispered. “I remember coming here with my mother to see you when I was just a little girl.”

  “And your grandmother. She brought you when I broke my leg falling from the apple tree. Three generations of wisewomen in your family, and faerie blood, no doubt. Does your daughter have the sight?”

  “We don’t speak of it now, in these days.”

  A grimace showed what the old lady thought of the mealy-mouthed generation. “Faerie crafts are a great thing to have in the family. But these days—well, nothing’s allowed, is it?”

  “The minister must guide us,” Alinor said tactfully.

  The old lady shrugged irritably. “What does he know?” she asked. “It’s not as if he’s a proper priest. He doesn’t even read the Mass.”

  “Hush, Grandmother.” Alinor gave her the courtesy title for an old woman. “You know, he’s the minister appointed to guide us. And the rest of it is against the law now.”

  “I think I can say what I like with my last breath.”

  “Does your breath hurt you?” Alinor asked.

  “I’ve had something pressing on my belly for years,” the old woman said. “It’s been squeezing the life out of me.”

  “Why didn’t you send for me before?”

  “What could you have done, my dear?”

  Alinor nodded. If the woman had a growth in her belly then nothing could be done. A physician might dare to cut a brave man or woman for a gallstone, a barber surgeon might cut a tongue tie, or slice the gum to pull out a rotting tooth. Alinor herself had once cut a live baby from the belly of a dead woman; but a growth deep in the belly of a living patient was untouchable.

  “I could’ve given you something for the pain.”

  “I take a little brandy,” the old lady said with simple dignity. “And then sometimes I take a little of the Scots usquebaugh. And sometimes—on bad days—I take them both together.”

  Alinor smiled at her. “Would you like some herbs to ease the pain now?”

  “I’ll take a little brandy,” she agreed. “In hot water. With your herbs. And you can ask the girl—what’s her name?—if the minister comes out these days, and if there are prayers for the dying, for I think I’m ready.”

  “I’ll ask Mrs. Hebden, your daughter-in-law,” Alinor reminded her.

  “Yes, that’s her.” The old lady nodded. “Ask her what the minister does for the dying, if he does anything these days? Or if that’s all changed as well?”

  Alinor rose to her feet and found that William Hebden was hovering at the scullery door. “She wants some brandy in hot water,” she said.

  “We’ve got a little keg of brandy,” he said. “It was a gift. Not bought.”

  Alinor understood at once that it was contraband: smuggled brandy. “No matter to me,” she reassured him. “And she wants to know if the minister w
ill come to say the prayers for the dying?”

  “Not to the likes of us,” he said shortly. “We’re not grand enough for him. We don’t pay enough in tithes for him to come out to us. The chaplain at the Priory, that Mr. Summer, he’d have come for asking. He came out for free, came twice.”

  Alinor flushed scarlet at his name. “Did he?” she asked. She thought that anyone would be able to hear the love in her voice. “Did he go to people for free?”

  “He came and prayed with her.” William shifted his feet. “Old prayers,” he said. “Those that she likes. Probably not allowed now. But she was that ill . . .”

  “Anyway, Mr. Summer has gone away,” Alinor said.

  “Aye. But he left his Prayer Book here. He said she could hold it in her hand if there was no one that could read them. He said to keep it hidden, but she could hold it if it comforted her.”

  “Did he?” She was swept by a longing to see anything that had belonged to James.

  “He said anyone could read the prayers to her. You’re a midwife, you could say them, couldn’t you? It would be as good as a minister?”

  “I can say them,” Alinor offered. “I could read them from his book. It wouldn’t be as good as him, but it’s his prayers.”

  She went back to the fireside with some brandy in an earthenware cup, added a tincture of fennel, and topped it up with hot water from the pot that stood on a trivet by the fire.

  Greedily, the old lady took it into her hands, wrapping her cold fingers around the cup. “Now,” she said. “Now I’m ready.”

  Alinor took up James’s missal and started to spell out the beautiful old words in Latin, not knowing what they meant; but hearing the music of the sounds, knowing that he would have known them by heart, knowing that this was his faith and his God, believing that his child in her belly could perhaps hear them and feeling closer to him now, reading the office for the dying to an old lady, than she had been in all the long weeks that he had been away.

  LONDON, DECEMBER 1648

  James, not knowing that his prayers were being whispered by the woman he loved, went quietly through the darkened streets of the city of London, keeping to the center of the street, picking his way through the frozen muck and rubbish rather than risk walking close to the dark doorways and shadows. He turned into a grand gateway and nodded to the silent watchman, and then went down the side of the house where a single lantern was hung on a bent nail outside a narrow door.

  The door opened easily when he turned the ring of the handle, and he stepped into a stone-flagged corridor, which led to the kitchen one way and to the great hall of the house the other. Before him was a small storeroom with a lighted candle on the table. James went in and seated himself at the scrubbed table.

  “You’re John Makepeace?” The man came in so quietly that James had not heard his footfall.

  “Yes.”

  “Password?”

  “Godspeed.”

  “God Will Not Fail Us,” the man replied. “Have you come from the queen?”

  “Yes. I have this.” James passed a thick letter.

  The man broke the seal. “It’s in code,” he said irritably. “D’you know what it says?”

  “Yes, I was ordered to memorize it in case I had to destroy it. It instructs you to reach the king and get him to Deptford. There’s a ship waiting for him, a coastal trader, that will take him to France. She’s called the Dilly. If you tell me when it will be, I can send a message to His Highness’s fleet and see that you are met by them, to give you safe passage on the seas.”

  “And the two royal children?”

  “I have no instructions for them.”

  Startled, the man looked up from the sealed letter. “What? Do they understand that the army will never let the children out of the country, if he gets away? He will never see them again? Are they to be abandoned among their enemies? Are we to just leave them here?”

  “Those are the instructions,” James said steadily.

  The man dropped into a chair and glared at James. “He was supposed to get away at Newport.”

  “I know it.”

  “It failed.”

  “No one knows that better than me.”

  “And from Hurst Castle.”

  “Hurst?”

  “Yes, there too. That miscarried as well. And at Bagshot he was supposed to have the fastest horse in England, but it went lame the day he was to go, and nobody had a second horse. Or a second plan.”

  James forced himself not to reveal his contempt for these half-baked plots. “You speak as if it is hopeless.”

  “I think it is. My hope has drained away month after month. No one decides what to do and does it. All we can do now is pray that they give him a fair trial and that they listen to what he has to say. That he can put the case for all that he has done.”

  “And then?”

  “God knows. That’s the madness of failing to get him away. We don’t know what they intend or even if they have any intention beyond shaming him. Will they limit his power as they think best? Or will he agree to hand the throne over to Prince Charles? Is he to live quietly and let his son rule? Will Prince Charles be bound by them? And will both king and prince swear never to raise an army, outside the kingdom or inside it? Parliament won’t stand for anything less.”

  “It is to unmake royal power. For him—and for his sons. For all kings everywhere?”

  “I think he has no choice. This is the army in power now, not parliament, and they are ill-disposed to the man who killed their comrades, surrendered, and then marched out again. They’re men of action, not endless words. The army is a different beast again. They speak a different language, they come from different worlds.”

  “Your orders are to rescue him,” James insisted. “Whatever the case. You can decode and read them; but they’re as I say. I have to take a reply. What am I to tell them when I report back?”

  “Tell them I’ll try,” the man said miserably. “But I won’t send a message to you, to tell you when. I won’t fix a date. The fewer men who know, the better.”

  “You’re never going to risk him at sea, without the protection of the fleet?”

  “What protection? What fleet? Who’s to say the prince’s sailors wouldn’t kidnap him, and sail right back to London to claim the ransom money? They changed their tune once; they’ll do it again, won’t they?”

  James recoiled from the man’s bitter cynicism. “You don’t trust the royal fleet? Under the command of the Prince of Wales?”

  “D’you think you are the only man in England who has lost faith?”

  “I never said I had lost my faith!”

  “It’s in your face and in every step you take,” the man said with contempt. “You look like we all do—whipped.”

  TIDELANDS, DECEMBER 1648

  Alys and Alinor walked along the harbor bank to church on Christmas Day, a hard frost turning the inland water meadows white as snow on their right hand, the harbor frozen like iron on the other. They were dressed in layer upon layer of winter clothes but they had no special ribbons or favors pinned to their capes. The new parliament had ruled that Christmas was not to be marked with any feasting or merrymaking, but must be a day like any day. Red trotted ahead of them and then circled back, the only joyful one.

  Alinor looked at the winter sun, casting shadows that underlined every bank and puddle and reedbed on the wet harbor. She wondered if James was with his family, if he were thinking of her. She hoped he was somewhere warm and merry. She loved him so much, she even wished him happiness without her.

  The church was cold and plain and bare, and there was no singing and no Christmas carols. The minister preached a sermon announcing that it was the birth of Jesus Christ and that the day should be filled with quiet reflection, that wassailing and Christmas ales and special puddings and roast dinners were nothing but worldly show and greed. The birth of our Lord should be considered reverently and thoughtfully. Godly work could and should be done; it was not a h
oliday for visiting and dancing and carousing. How would the birth of God be served by people sinning? How should the Lord be greeted, if not by quiet reflection and steady labor?

  The prayers for parishioners who were sick or dying went on for long minutes; the cold weather was always hard on the poor of Sealsea Island. Alinor bowed her head and thanked God that she and Alys were well housed in the ferry-house and Rob lived in luxury at the Priory. The minister prayed for the soul of old Mrs. Hebden, buried in frost-hard ground, and invoked God’s aid for other men and women who would not survive the cold season and were going hungry to save their winter stores. The church was freezing, the service dragged on and on, longer than ever, and when the congregation was finally released and spilled out of the porch, it started to snow.

  “The dog looks for you,” the minister complained to Alinor as she went past him. “He sits in the church porch and looks for you.”

  “He does not harm, he’s a good dog, my brother’s dog.”

  “People remark it,” he said.

  “It means nothing,” Alinor said quickly. “Just a dog missing his master.”

  “It’s ungodly how he attends to you,” the man complained.

  “I’ll leave him at home next Sunday. I apologize. He’s pining for my brother.”

  “Is Edward still in London?” the minister asked.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, glad to change from the dangerous topic of a loyal animal, a familiar.

  “He wanted to be with his old regiment in these important times, I suppose?”

  “That was his plan.”

  “Godly work,” he said. “Witness to the end of days.”

  “Yes,” Alinor said. “He’s very devout. Praise the Lord.”

  She curtseyed to him and then went to the squire’s household. Alinor curtseyed to Sir William and to Walter and then kissed Rob. “Happy Christmas,” she whispered to him.

  “You’d better come back to the Priory,” Mrs. Wheatley invited her. “We’re going to be having a good dinner: Christmas or no Christmas.”

  “Do come,” Rob supplemented.

  “I’d better not,” Alinor said. “My brother wouldn’t like it. And Alys has to keep the ferry.”