Tidelands Read online

  She repeated the words so often to herself that they came to lose their meaning. What was a woman “like her”? What was this place like, that her living here struck him as incongruous? Was there any sense that he meant the place was fine and she was not fit for it? But then she remembered his brown gaze on the neck of her gown, the warmth in his eyes, and she knew exactly what he meant and she felt the joy of his words over again.

  It never occurred to her that his words were wrenched from him, that it was a sin for him to voice them, even to think them. She had been baptized into a church where ministers were allowed to marry: there had been no celibate priests or monasteries in England for a hundred years. She did not understand that it was a sin for him to even look at a woman, let alone to whisper to her with desire. She heard the words forced from him as if he could not help but speak them; but she had no idea that he would have to confess them when he returned to his monastery; he would have to tell his confessor he had fallen into a mortal sin: he had felt desire.

  She did not know herself, what she was feeling. She had been married young and given birth to two children, feeling nothing but pain. She did not know what it was that made her whisper his words as if they were an invocation, what kept the words in her mind as if it were a phrase of music that sang to her, over and over.

  Her son, Rob, came back from crow-scaring with three pennies for the day’s work, and her daughter, Alys, contributed her week’s wages of two shillings and sixpence. They both handed over their earnings without complaint, knowing that the household had to pay cash for goods: fleeces for spinning, butter and cheese since they had no cow, bacon and lard since they had no pig, a fee for baking bread in the mill oven, a payment to the miller for grinding a peck of wheat, a fee to the Priory for the right to gather driftwood from the shore and terns’ eggs from the beach, a fine for failing to dig the harbor ditches last spring. Rent, when it next fell due, the tithes to the church every month, new soles for Alys’s boots.

  “I’m going to buy a boat,” she told them. “If I can.”

  TIDELANDS, SUNDAY, JULY 1648

  On the first Sunday in July, all the parish attended church and looked at the blank white walls while the preacher prayed in the austere words that were all that was left of the Prayer Book since parliament had pared it away. He preached for more than two hours, that they should all become saints and witnesses to the coming of the Lord. He told them that the king, at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, was mortified by his sins, and that God would bend his stubborn heart to submit to a parliament of saints. They could be assured that God would never permit the Scots to march south—though the wicked king had summoned them, and they were mustering, even now, to plunder and ravish innocent English towns. God would prevent them, and God would especially smite the Irish, if they too invaded in support of the king. The parishioners need not fear. Alinor, covertly looking around at her neighbors’ faces, noted that this assurance made them particularly uneasy. These were simple people: when someone told them that they had nothing to fear they knew that they were in trouble.

  It was true, the minister told them, “verily true” that traitors were taking arms all over the country, royalist uprisings were happening in every county and two foreign armies invading; but the godly army of parliament would defeat them, the royal cavaliers could not win against solemn men, good men, saintly men. There would be no more papists at court. The king would beg forgiveness and be restored, and his papist queen would learn to be godly, forbidden from bringing in heretic priests. Her chapel, which had been the very center of heresy and misrule, would close, and the king would turn aside from his temptations and accept the rule of honest advisors. The royal family would be reunited, like a godly family should be. The father ordering the mother and the children, the sons obeying him; the little prince and princess, who had been abandoned by their parents, restored to them. Nothing could stop this, the preacher promised, though there was bad news from Essex and from Kent, where royal traitors were taking towns for the king. Worst of all, the whole fleet had gone over to the king, and now the prince his son commanded the ships, and would invade England deploying England’s own navy. But despite all this, despite these increasingly bad odds, the godly would prevail. The battle had been fought and won, the king was defeated, and he must learn he was defeated. He was honor bound to surrender.

  Alinor was conscious of Sir William Peachey, newly arrived from London where he had been demonstrating his newfound devotion to parliament, seated in his big chair, very still and attentive, his household ranged behind him. He never shook his head, no shadow ever crossed his weary face, he never even blinked. She would have thought that he was a parliament man heart and soul, he sat so still and quiet while their victory was predicted as God’s will.

  The minister recited the closing prayer and reminded them: there was to be no play in the churchyard, there were no Sunday feasts or sports anymore. The Sabbath was to be holy now, and holy was quiet and reflective—not church ales and dancing at saints’ days. Ill behavior by any parishioner was to be reported to the church wardens. Women especially must be obedient and quiet. A godly victory demanded a godly people. They were all soldiers in the New Model Army now, they were all marching in step to the promised land.

  As they filed out, sluggish with boredom, Mr. Tudeley, the steward, was standing behind Sir William at the lych-gate, naming the tenants as they went past dropping their bows and curtseys. Alinor waited her turn, her children behind her. As a deserted wife living on the very edge of the mire, on the very brink of poverty, she came behind nearly everyone. She curtseyed to the lord and to his steward in silence. His lordship looked her up and down unsmiling, nodded, and turned away, but Mr. Tudeley beckoned her with a crooked finger.

  “Sir William is to appoint a chaplain to serve in his private chapel and teach his son,” he told her.

  Alinor kept her eyes on the ground, saying nothing.

  “Your boy is the same age as Master Walter Peachey, isn’t he?”

  “A bit younger,” she said, moving her hand to indicate her son standing stock-still behind her.

  “What work does he do, besides helping you with the herbs?”

  She answered him calmly, hiding her surprise at the sudden interest in Rob. “He goes to school in the mornings, and after school he works at Mill Farm: crow-scaring and weeding. He’s a clever boy. He can read and write. He will come with me next week to the Priory stillroom, as you ordered, and it’ll be him who writes the labels on the bottles. He knows the names of the herbs in English and Latin and he writes fair.”

  “Ever in trouble?”

  Alinor shook her head.

  “He will serve in the household,” Mr. Tudeley announced. “He will take lessons with Master Walter, and be his servant of the body, and his companion here at the Priory until Master Walter goes to Cambridge. He will be paid fifteen shillings a quarter, five shillings in advance.”

  Alinor could hardly breathe.

  “The tutor requested a companion for Master Walter,” he went on urbanely. “I suggested your boy. This comes to you as a favor from his lordship, to help you since your husband is missing. This is what it is to serve a good lord. Remember it.”

  She dropped a deep curtsey. “I’m very grateful.”

  He gave her a hard look. “If anyone asks, you will tell them that his lordship is generous to poor tenants.”

  She dipped a curtsey again. “Yes, sir. I know, sir.”

  She turned and walked to the lych-gate with Alys on one side of her, Rob on the other. The two women, mother and daughter, kept their eyes on the ground, and their white-capped heads bowed, the picture of submissive obedience.

  “He doesn’t know about the rabbit then,” Alys said with satisfaction.

  TIDELANDS, JULY 1648

  Rob did not have clothes fit to wear to the Priory and stubbornly resisted the preparations, saying that he did not want to go into service with the Peachey son and heir. He said that he di
d not know him, that they would not be able to play together, for how could a son of the Peachey family wrestle with the son of a fisherman, or race frogs? But when his mother told him of the food he would eat in the great hall, of the five shillings that would come to them at once, and that it would pay the next quarter’s rent, buy the family a boat, and pull them out of the poverty that always yawned before them like the trough of a drowning wave, he stopped complaining and went to the ferry-house after dinner to borrow a jacket that had once belonged to Alinor’s father, and a pair of Ned’s old boots.

  Ned walked back with his nephew at low tide, his dog, a water dog with a bright rufous coat, trotting at his heels.

  “Sister,” he said brushing Alinor’s forehead with his lips.

  “Brother,” she replied.

  She poured him a mug of small ale and he drank it sitting on the bench at the doorway with his back against the cottage wall, overlooking the harbor, his dog, Red, sitting at his feet, looking longingly at the hens as they pecked along the scum at the low waterline.

  “I brought you one of those little tokens that you like so much.” He dug into the pocket of his jacket, bringing out a tiny metal disc, snipped into shapelessness and tarnished black.

  “Oh, thank you, Ned,” she said with pleasure. “Where did you find it?”

  “In the dipping pond behind the house. It’s been so wet, I think it must’ve washed out of the ditch. It caught my eye. How would anyone lose a coin beside a pond?”

  “So long ago,” she said, turning the little token over in her hand. “It makes you wonder what they were doing there, doesn’t it? So many years ago. Standing there, with this coin in her hand. Perhaps she threw it in for a wish.”

  It was a coin from the time of the Saxon kingdom, from when the Saxons had ruled the tidelands, pushing through the reed banks and the mud in their longboats, building their farmsteads on the islands. Alinor had collected the tokens since childhood, and kept them in her treasure box. Her mother had laughed at her as a miser with a hoard of fool’s gold, but had praised her sharp eyes and told her to watch carefully in case one day she found a coin of value. Only once had Alinor found a beaten coin of silver and they had taken it to be assayed and weighed in Chichester. The goldsmith had given her sixpence for it, a fortune to the little girl. All the other coins in her collection were made of bronze or enameled silver, the valuable metal rubbed off over the years. But she had never wanted them for their value. She loved them for their age, for the sense of them belonging to a forgotten time, to people who were not remembered anymore, the coins engraved with strange symbols and shapes rubbed to invisibility.

  The people of Sealsea Island called the coins “faerie gold” and told stories of treasure hoards of priceless coins and the dark horsemen who guarded them, who would strike a thief blind and seal his eyelids with molten silver, but everyone knew they were just sea wrack: washed in and out by the sea, found in waterside mud, and valueless.

  “Why would his lordship take Rob into service?” Ned asked as Alinor spat on the little coin and polished it on the hem of her gown, held it up to the setting sun and tried to decipher the blurred image. “Why pay him so well?”

  “This looks like a lion,” she said, admiring the little token. “It really does. Do you think it’s a coin from old England?”

  “Aye, perhaps. But why Rob?”

  “Why not?” she demanded. “Don’t you remember when I cured Master Walter of his croup last May? Rob came with me then. He picked the herbs from their garden and helped me in their stillroom. We’ve been there a few times since the death of her ladyship. We’re going back tomorrow to harvest their herbs and dry them. Mr. Tudeley said it was to help us since the disappearance of Zachary.”

  “They could have helped before. He’s been gone more than six months.”

  She shrugged. “They don’t count the days like us.”

  “They don’t count anything,” he said resentfully.

  “I know, but if Rob can earn good money and get an education at the same time then perhaps he can do better than his father. Maybe he can get away from here, perhaps even to Chichester.”

  “If they don’t lead him into sin. Sir William was for the king, not for parliament. He might have surrendered and begged for pardon but he doesn’t serve in the new parliament, and he’s not mustered for the New Model Army. By rights, he should be calling up his men and marching north against the Scots. If he ever meant his promise to parliament, this is his chance to prove it. But I doubt it’s a godly household.”

  Alinor glanced sideways at her brother, at his shock of thick brown hair and his stocky shoulders. He was bitter at being called away from the army just as they were winning, forced to come back to pull the ferry over a muddy rife, when he had got away from the island and thought that the world was changing forever and that he was part of that change.

  “You’ll always guide Rob,” she assured him. “He won’t forget your teachings. He knows where he comes from, and what we believe.”

  “What d’you believe?” he challenged her. “I don’t know what you believe.”

  Her gaze slid away from him. “Ah, I’m like our mother and grandmother, Ned. I don’t always understand; but sometimes I feel . . .”

  “He’ll never be an army man,” he said regretfully. “He’ll never serve under Cromwell. He’s missed his chance at that. And now you’re putting him into service to a cavalier lord . . .”

  “His lordship was pardoned, and he paid his fine for backing the king,” she said, resolutely turning her mind from the memory of the priest walking into the Priory, confident it was a safe house for a papist, for a royalist spy. “Rob takes after you. He won’t forget what’s right. And Sir William will serve in a godly parliament, whatever regrets he has for the old days. It’s over for the king and his lords. You told me so yourself.”

  “I don’t trust him, nor any of them who say they’re sorry and get their lands back as if there’s no harm done, when hundreds of good men will never come home again. I’d have had Rob in the army; I’d have had him march to war on the side of God. If he was my boy, I’d send him out to my old troop now. There’s still a chance the Scots will come down on us. Some say the Irish are coming.”

  “Surely the war’s over?”

  “Not till the king signs a peace treaty, and means it.”

  “Ned, I can’t let my boy go,” she said apologetically.

  “Not even to serve the Lord?”

  “He’s all I have.”

  “And now, if he’s wearing Peachey livery, he won’t even take the ferry after I’m gone,” he said resentfully. “So I came back to keep the ferry and the house in the family for nothing.”

  “You might have a son of your own,” she said gently, though he was a widower at thirty.

  He hunched his shoulder. “Not me. We ferrymen make poor husbands.”

  “Ah, God bless her,” Alinor said quietly. Ned’s young wife, Mary, had died in childbirth, Alinor helpless to save her. “God forgive me that I couldn’t—”

  “Long ago,” he said, shrugging off the pain. “But I’d not take another wife and put her through that.”

  “Another wife might not—”

  “So Rob should be my heir and take the ferry!”

  “He still might! He won’t serve the Peacheys forever. It’s only till Master Walter goes to Cambridge. But even a few months in the schoolroom will be the making of him. He’ll be able to go anywhere, to any family, anywhere in England. That’s better for him than being stuck here.”

  “But you and I are still stuck here!”

  She frowned at the bitterness in his tone, and put her hand on his. “I’ve never hoped for better, I don’t hope to leave. But now, with Rob’s wage, I’ll be able to buy a fishing boat, and start putting something aside for Alys’s dowry. And just because we’re stuck here doesn’t mean we can’t dream of something better for our boy.”

  “I s’pose,” he said grudgingly. “But dream fo
r Alys, too. That’s a girl with high hopes! She’s going to make her way in the world.”

  “Perhaps,” Alinor said uneasily. “But it’s not a very good world for a hopeful girl.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. Red, the dog, glanced at them both as if wondering if anyone would throw something into the water for him to fetch.

  “You never thought like this before you went away,” she remarked. “You’d never have said ‘stuck here’ then.”

  “No. Because then I never knew there was a world north of Chichester. But when I was with the army at Naseby, I talked with the other men—men who had come from all over, all over the kingdom, all of us coming together to fight for what we believed, knowing that God was guiding us, knowing that the moment was then—it started me thinking. Why should the king own all the land, every acre of it, and you and I perch on a spit of shingle halfway into the mire? Why should the Peacheys have all the fields and the woods? Shouldn’t all the lands belong to all the people? Shouldn’t every Englishman have his own plot to grow his own food, so that nobody starves in a rich country?”

  “Is that what they say in the army?” she asked curiously.

  “It’s the very thing that they are fighting for,” he said. “The talk that started with the rich men of London complaining about their taxes turned into a roar from the poor men of England asking: What is right? What about us? If the king is not to own everything, then neither should the lords, nor should the bishops. If the king is not to own everything, then every Englishman should have his own garden and the right to fish his own river.”