Tidelands Page 4

  “Isn’t it very dangerous to come to England?”

  He hesitated. There was a death sentence for spying, and a death sentence for heresy. His college were proud of their history of martyrs, and kept candles burning before a wall of their carved names. When he was young he had longed to be one of the sainted dead. “My college has sent many martyrs to England, ever since King Henry turned from the true Church. The Church was changed, despite people’s wishes, more than a hundred years ago; but we never changed. I am following where many saints have trod.” He smiled at her wondering gaze. “Truly, I choose this. And there are many safe houses and many friends to help me. I can cross the country and never leave Roman Catholic lands. I can pray in a hidden sacred chapel every night. Now, the parliament has gone too far against the king, the army even more so. Now is our chance. All over the country, towns and villages are declaring for the king and saying that they want him back on the throne. People want peace, and they want to be free to worship.”

  “Won’t you go back to your college till then?” she asked doubtfully, thinking that the day would never come.

  “No. There is one thing, a great thing, I have to do before I can go home.” He resisted the temptation to tell her more.

  She guessed at once. “You’re never going to the Isle of Wight?” she whispered. “Not to the king?”

  His silence told her that she was right.

  “So you see why you should not be seen with me,” he said. “And I will never admit that I met you, that you hid me. Whatever happens, whatever befalls me, I will never betray you.”

  Gravely she nodded. “If you want to go to the Priory, we should go through the mire while it’s low tide. We can see the steward as he has his breakfast, and if he won’t have you in the house, there’ll still be time to walk back through the mire before the tide gets too high.”

  He got up from his seat on the nets, brushed down his jacket, and swung his cloak around his shoulders. “We go through the mire?”

  She nodded again. “We shouldn’t meet anyone. Hardly anyone comes here. As we get to the Priory we’ll be in the hollow lane of bushes. If you meet anyone there you can just drop over the bank into the ditch and hide. If you have to run, follow the line of the ditch and it will take you inland. You can hide in the woods.”

  “And what will you do?”

  “I’ll say that I never saw you following me. That I was going out to the beach for tern eggs.” She turned and opened the door. “Wait here.”

  Suddenly, like a cannonade on the still air, there was an explosion of noise, a cascade of water, and then a terrible rumbling sound.

  “What’s that?” he demanded, starting up, hand to his precious pack.

  “Just the mill,” she said calmly. “They’ve opened the millrace and now the millstones are grinding. It’s noisy on a calm day.”

  He followed her out into the brightness of the morning. The mudbanks and the water pools gleamed like tarnished silver, stretching to the horizon, dazzling and strange. The grinding and the clanking noise went on, as if someone were rolling back the iron gates of hell on a stone pavement.

  “So loud!” he said.

  “You get used to it.” She led the way down the bank onto a little spit of shingle that went into the mud of the mire and then petered out at a shallow riverbed. He walked at her side, his pack on his back, the heels of his riding boots sinking into the cloying mud and coming free with a horrid little sucking sound. Suddenly the shallow ditch beside him rushed with a gout of water that made him jump.

  She laughed. “That’s the millrace, the water from the tide mill.”

  “Everything is so strange here,” he said, ashamed of flinching from the water, which was now pouring along beside them, in the landscape that was otherwise so still. “My home is in the North, high hills, moorland country, it’s very dry. . . . This is like a foreign land to me, like the Lowlands.”

  “The miller opens the sluice gates on the millpond, so the water pours in to turn his wheel,” Alinor explained. “And then the water rushes out to sea.”

  “Every low tide?” he asked, watching the torrent beside them.

  “He doesn’t mill every tide,” she said. “There’s not enough demand for flour. But he stores grain and sends it to London when the price is right.”

  He heard the resentment in her voice. “You mean that he profiteers? He buys the corn cheap and sends it away to sell at London prices?”

  “He’s no worse than anyone else,” she said. “But it’s hard to see the grain ship going out with her sails spread when you don’t have the money for a loaf yourself, and you can’t earn enough to buy flour.”

  “Doesn’t his lordship set the price of the loaf? He should do.”

  She shrugged. A good landlord would set the price and make sure that the miller took no more than a scoop of wheat as his fee. “Sir William’s not always here. He’s in London. He probably doesn’t know.”

  The track she was following was invisible to him as it turned away from the mill stream, to the higher ground of a little island of shingle and then another, set amid a waste of soft mud. The harbor water was gurgling and receding all around them, all the time. Sometimes they were on the firm footing of a shingle spit, with a deep pool on the seaward side, where he saw shoals of tiny fish left by the receding water; sometimes they walked over sand ridged by the departing sea and he remembered the danger of quicksands and stepped in her footprints. Often, he thought she could not possibly know the way around deep creeks that ran through the featureless marsh. But she turned one way and then another, tracing her way through, sometimes on the seabed, sometimes through the reed banks, sometimes on the wavering shore where half-submerged stanchions and mud-buried groynes showed that someone had once built a dike and claimed land, but then lost it again to the indifferent sea.

  When she turned inland after more than an hour of walking, they went into an overhung lane where quickthorn trees pressed close on each side. He made sure that he was so far back that he could drop out of sight the moment that he saw someone, or heard her exclaim a greeting, and yet close enough that he could follow her as she took the twisting path that led them towards the high roofs of the Priory, just visible above the thick trees. Brambles trailed across the path, tugging at his sleeves. This path was rarely trodden: the farm workers preferred the road, and when the king was on his throne and Sir William had his favor, all the grand visitors drove their carriages from the mainland over the wadeway at low tide and entered by the ornamental gates to draw up to the double front door where a row of liveried servants bowed as the carriage doors opened. But the liveried servants had run away to fight for the New Model Army, and there had been no grand visitors since the war started and Sir William had joined the losing side.

  The trees gave way to a scrubby-hedged meadow of badly mown hay, and the two of them went quickly across the open ground to the shelter of the high wall of knapped flints banded with red brick. Alinor paused, her hand on the ring handle of the wooden door.

  “Is this your safe house? Were you expected? Shall I tell the steward your name?”

  “I did hope to come here,” James admitted. “Sir William said he would meet me here. But I don’t know how much he told his steward. I don’t know if you are safe going in there and speaking of me. Perhaps I should go in alone.”

  “Safer if you stay here. I can say that I met you by chance, and I’ve brought you to him. You wait here.” She gestured to a stack of hay, carelessly built of poor grass in the seashore meadow. “Get behind that, and keep a lookout. If I don’t come back within the hour then something’s gone wrong and you’d better run away. Go back along the shoreline; stay on the bank. You can hide until the tide’s low again this evening, and wade over the causeway at dusk.”

  “God keep you safe,” he said nervously. “I don’t like to send you into danger. His lordship assured me I would be safe here. I just don’t know if he will have told his steward.”

  “If h
e sends me to trick you, to bring you in for arrest, I’ll take my apron off as a signal,” she said. “When I’m coming, if I’m carrying my apron in my hand, run away.”

  She was pale with fear, her lips tightly compressed. She turned without another word and went through the door in the wall into the kitchen garden. She walked past the tidy beds of herbs and vegetables to the kitchen door of the Priory, stepped out of her wooden pattens, and tapped on the door.

  The cook opened the top half of the door, smiled to see that it was Alinor, and said: “I need nothing today, Goodwife. His lordship isn’t home till tomorrow and I don’t make eel pie for anyone else.”

  “I came to see Mr. Tudeley,” Alinor said. “It’s about my boy.”

  “There’s no work,” the cook said bluntly, lifting the lid on a giant stewpot and stirring the contents. “Not with the world as it is, and nobody knowing what will happen next, and no good coming to anyone, with the king missing, and parliament up in arms, and our own lord up and down to London every day of the week, trying to talk some sense into them, and nobody listening to anyone but the devil himself.”

  “I know,” Alinor said, following her into the hot kitchen. “But still, I have to speak with him.” She felt a pang of hunger bite in her belly at the waft of beef broth. She pursed her lips against the rush of water in her mouth. The cook raised her head from her work, mopped her sweating face with her apron, and shouted to someone inside the house to see if Mr. Tudeley would see Goodwife Reekie. Alinor waited by the door, and heard the servants ask if she was to be admitted, and then a footman put his head in the kitchen and said: “You’re to come in, Goodwife.”

  Alinor followed the lad along the corridor past the storerooms to the paneled door of the steward’s room. The footman swung it open and Alinor went in. Mr. Tudeley was sitting at the rent table, papers spread before him. “Goodwife Reekie,” he said, barely glancing up. “You wanted to see me?”

  Alinor bobbed a curtsey. “Good day, sir,” she said. “I did. I do.”

  The boy went out, closing the door behind him, and the steward waited, expecting that she would ask to be excused her rent for a quarter. Everyone knew that the Reekie woman and her children were hand-to-mouth; nobody had much sympathy for the deserted wife of a drunkard.

  “I was at church last night and I met a man who told me his name was James,” she said in a frightened rush. “Father James. I’ve brought him here. He’s waiting by the haystack in Seaward Meadow.”

  “You brought him for me to arrest, a recusant priest?” Mr. Tudeley asked her coldly, looking over his steepled fingers.

  Alinor swallowed, her mouth dry, her face frozen. “As you wish, sir. I don’t know the rights and wrongs of these things. He said he wanted to be brought here, and so I brought him, with no one the wiser. If he’s a friend of his lordship then I have to obey him; if he’s an enemy then I’m reporting him to you.”

  Mr. Tudeley smiled at her white-faced anxiety. “You’re not acting on principle then? Not joined your brother’s party, Goody Reekie? Become one of these prophesying preaching women? D’you want to see him burned for heresy? D’you want to see him hanged and drawn for treason?”

  “I ill-wish no one,” Alinor said rapidly. “And I believe as my lord does. Whatever Sir William thinks right. It’s not for me to judge. I don’t want to judge. I brought him to you, so that you’d do the right thing, Mr. Tudeley. I brought him to you, for you to judge.”

  Her pale earnestness reassured him. He got to his feet. “You’ve done very well.” He reached into his pocket and brought out a handful of pennies. He counted out twelve, a shilling in copper, two days’ earnings for a farm laborer like Alys. “This is for you,” he said. “For serving his lordship though you didn’t know, and you still don’t know what he wants. For being a good servant in the deepest of ignorance.” He laughed shortly. “For doing the right thing, though you don’t know what you do, as ignorant as a little bird!”

  Alinor could not take her eyes from the pile of coins.

  He reached into the drawer and pulled out a purse, opened the drawstrings, and put a small silver coin down beside the pile of pennies. “And look,” he said. “A silver shilling. To buy your silence. You’re a poor woman, but you’re no fool and you’re not a gossip. Not one word of this, Goodwife. It could not be more important. We’re still at war, and nobody knows who the victor will be.

  “If anyone speaks of this it will be the worst for you. Not for me—I will deny it and nobody would listen to your word against mine. Not for his lordship, who is not even here. Not for the man who waits by the haystack—he will be far away, as fleet as a hare before the hounds. It will be you that they throw in the water for false faith, for false dealing, for false speaking. It will be you that they say is a spy, a traitor, or at least a gossip. You that they swim in the rife with your skirts dragging you down and the sea coming in. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” Alinor croaked, her throat tight with fear. “Pray God it never happens. I swear I’ll say nothing. Yes, sir.”

  “So we will say that you came to me today to see if I had work for your boy, and I said the two of you could come and weed the herb garden, pick what needs drying this summer, and tidy the stillroom. And we will pay him and you the usual rate: sixpence a day each. You will spend these pennies carefully, one at a time, and never tell anyone where they have come from, and you will save the shilling and never say it came from me.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said again.

  He nodded. “And I will forgive you your rent for this quarter.”

  He turned the table on its central pivot till the drawer with the letter “R” was before him. He drew out Alinor’s rent book and put a tick beside her name. “There.”

  “Thank you,” Alinor said again, breathless with relief. “God bless you, sir.”

  “You can go now. Tell the man in the meadow to come in quietly by the door that the tenants use on rent day. Do you understand? Tell him to make sure that no one sees him. And you and I will never speak of this again. And you will never speak of it to anyone at all.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said for the last time, and she snatched up the money as quick as a thief, slid the coins into her pockets, and was out of the room silently in a moment.

  She went out through the side door that they used on rent days to make sure that it was unlocked for him, and back through the kitchen garden to pick up her pattens, and then, pushing her feet into the wooden shoe protectors, she walked through the gate and into the meadow. Anyone seeing her would think only that she was taking the most direct route back to her house at the far end of the harbor. Father James, watching from behind the haystack, saw her come out of the little wooden door in the flint wall, walking lightly, her head up, her apron tied around her waist, her skirt hushing on the cut grasses, releasing the scent of hay and dried meadow flowers. The moment he saw her, the easy grace of her stride, he knew that he was safe. No Judas could walk like that. She was as luminous as a saint in a stained-glass window.

  “I’m here,” he said as she came around the stack of hay.

  “You’re to go in,” she said breathlessly. “You’re safe. Through that door in the wall where I came out, and left through the kitchen garden. There’s a small door to the house—it’s black oak—at the side of the house on the left. You go in there. It’s unlocked. The steward’s room is just two steps down the corridor on the right. His window overlooks the kitchen garden. He’s waiting for you. His name is Mr. Tudeley.”

  “He did not . . . he was not . . . you are not in his power now?”

  She shook her head. “He paid me,” she said, trembling with relief, “for bringing you in. He’s on your side. And he paid for my silence. I’m richer by far for meeting you.”

  He took both her hands. “And I, you,” he said.

  For a moment they stood handclasped, and then he released her. “God bless you and help you to prosper,” he said formally. “I shall pray for you, and I shall send
you money when I am back in France again.”

  “You owe me nothing,” she said. “And Mr. Tudeley already gave me two shillings. A whole two shillings!”

  He thought of his seminary, the gold plate on the altar, the glitter of diamonds and rubies on the shrines, the gold crucifix on the gold chain around his neck. Tonight, he would dine off silver and sleep on the finest linen while someone laundered his shirt and polished his boots. Tomorrow or the next day he would meet Sir William and they would hire a boat and bribe men with the fortune that he carried. Meanwhile this woman celebrated earning two shillings. “I will pray for you.” He hesitated. “Who shall I name in my prayers?”

  She smiled. “I am Alinor. Alinor Reekie.”

  He nodded. He could think of nothing to keep her, but he found he did not want to let her go. “I shall pray for you. And that you get your boat.”

  “I might,” she said.

  They spoke together and both broke off. “Will you ever . . . ?”

  “If I come back here . . .”

  “I don’t expect to come back here,” he admitted. “I have to go where I am sent.”

  “I won’t look for you,” she assured him. “I know this is no place for you.”

  “You are . . .” he started, but still there was nothing that he could say.

  “What?” she asked. There was a slight blush on her neck just above the rough homespun gown.

  “I didn’t know . . .” he began.

  “What?” she asked softly. “What didn’t you know?”

  “I did not know that there could be a woman like you, in a place like this.”

  The smile started slowly, in her dark gray eyes and then her lips curved and the color rose in her cheeks.

  “Good-bye,” she said abruptly, as if she did not want to hear another word after those, and she turned and went across the meadow towards the sea, where the tide was coming in, a dark line against a cloudy sky.

  Elation at his words—“a woman like you, in a place like this”—lasted her for days, while she went about her work in the heat of the summer: weeding her garden, cutting herbs and drying them in the ferry-house stillroom, walking all the way to Sealsea village to see one of the farmers’ wives who was expecting her first child after the harvest. Her husband, Farmer Johnson, was well-to-do, owning his own lands as well as renting a share of the manor lands, and he gave Alinor a shilling in advance to visit his wife every Sunday, and promised her another shilling to attend the birth. She tied the two silver shillings in a rag and hid it under one of the stones of the hearth. “A woman like you, in a place like this” sang in her head through the long hours of summer daylight. She thought that when she had saved three shillings she would speak to her brother about buying a boat. “A woman like you, in a place like this.”