Tidelands Read online

  He had surprised her with his vehemence. “You’ve never spoken of this before.”

  “My nephew was never apprenticed to the service of a royalist lord before!” he exclaimed angrily. “With the king held, but plotting as if he’d never lost a battle, and cavaliers up in arms all around the country, the Scots coming down on us, the Irish raising troops! Have you heard the news from Essex?”

  She shook her head. “Only what the minister said.”

  “They’ve declared for the king, the fools. The army’s had to march on Colchester and set a siege against royalists.”

  She looked aghast. “They’ve never started fighting again?”

  “And the ships of the parliamentary navy have gone over to the king. We’ve lost the admiral’s own flagship and half a dozen others.”

  “What will they do? Will they sail into London?”

  “Who knows what they’ll do, the traitors? Ship in the Irish? Rescue the king from the Isle of Wight?”

  “Oh, Brother, don’t say it’s war? Not again.”

  “It’ll be war forever until the king agrees to make peace, and keeps to his word,” Ned predicted. “He says one thing to parliament and then sends for the Scots and the Irish. Even the Welsh. The army should take him themselves, force him to swear peace, and then make him keep his word.”

  “I thought he was in prison at Carisbrooke Castle?”

  Ned shook his head in disgust. “He’s holding court as if he were at Whitehall. He drives in his carriage all around the island, visiting the lords and ladies as if he were newcome to his throne. They say that he’s welcome everywhere he goes. He never stops writing his letters and planning his escape. I thank the Lord that the commander of the castle is Robert Hammond. He’s a good man. I know him myself; he had his own troop in our army. At least he can be trusted to keep the king safe, and in the end, I swear we’ll put him on trial for making war against his own people.”

  “On what charge? Wasn’t it parliament that rebelled against the king?”

  “He raised his standard first. He turned his guns on apprentice lads and clerks. He armed his lords and set them up on great horses to ride us down. He turned against us. You’re signing your boy up to the wrong side, Sister. Nobody is going to love a cavalier at the end of this summer, when they’re all defeated.”

  “I don’t want him on any side,” she said fretfully. “I just want him in a good place, and my daughter with a dowry, and a fishing boat to earn my own living.”

  He subsided and took a deep draft of ale. Red put his soft chin on his master’s knee. “Ah, I can talk. Talk is all I do now. For all that I marched and prayed and fought, as soon as Da died I came home to the ferryboat. I was on the winning side with my heart set on it, and now I ship a cavalier lord to and fro whenever he hails the ferry. And he never pays me a penny because the ferry is his, and I am his tenant, and he probably thinks the water of the mire is his too, the mud beneath it, and the sea beyond it.”

  “You had to come home.” She wanted to comfort him, her only brother and only neighbor. “And we’d have lost the ferry if you hadn’t, and the house and our livelihood with it. There were plenty who would have been glad to take Father’s place. In Sealsea alone were dozens. They would have been queuing at the Priory gates begging for the right to it. You kept it for us, and you kept our house too. And—as it’s turned out with Zachary gone—I’d be a beggar without it. We eat out of your kitchen, and we drink out of your brewhouse.”

  “Ah, it’s your home, not just mine. I don’t even want it. My troop is marching north against the Scots and I’m not there. I feel like a coward.”

  “You’re no coward,” she said fiercely. “It takes courage to do the right thing. And it was the right thing to come home and keep Ferry-house and the ferry in the family. Where would we be now, if we had lost it?”

  “We’d all be relying on you,” he said with a wry smile. “You and your new boat. But I did come home, and we’ve kept the ferry, and you don’t have to take a boat out if you can’t bear it. I know it’s the last thing you want to do, a woman like you.”

  She heard the echo of the words: “a woman like you in a place like this” and he was surprised to see her face light up, as he had never seen her look before, not since their childhood.

  “You say everything in the world has changed,” she said, and she did not sound fearful. “Perhaps I will change too.”

  TIDELANDS, JULY 1648

  Alinor walked with her boy on the seashore path to the Priory through a haze of midges and mosquitoes that rose as their steps crushed driftwood and dried reeds at the high-water mark. The tide was coming in; they could hear the bubble of the hushing well as they turned inland, away from the rising waters, across the Priory meadow, the haystacks as pale as straw in the late summer sunshine.

  She said: “You’ll come home on Michaelmas Day and I’ll see you every Sunday in church.”

  He was pale with fear. “I know,” he said shortly. “You’ve said it a dozen times.”

  “I’ll come to the kitchen and ask after you on Friday. You can tell the cook if you want to see me before then, and she’ll tell me.”

  “You said.”

  She nodded. “If you really don’t want to go, you don’t have to. We can manage.”

  “I’ve said I’ll go.”

  She turned the handle on the wooden door set in the flint wall and suddenly remembered leaving the priest, Father James, to hide behind the haystack while she spoke to Mr. Tudeley. The metal handle was warm from the sunshine, the timbers of the door dry to her touch, just as they had been on that day last month. She felt that she was wrong to think of that moment, of that man, when she was sending her own son into service.

  “Come on then,” she said, giving him a smile for courage, dismissing the day that a priest had looked at her with desire and said: “a woman like you.”

  They went through the garden, to the kitchen door. The cook looked up from the table where she was kneading an enormous ball of dough, floury to the elbows. “You’re expected,” she said. She looked Rob up and down. “Good lad,” she said. “You mind your manners here and this will be a great chance for you.”

  He pulled his hat off his head. “Aye, mistress.”

  “You say ‘Yes, Mistress Wheatley,’ ” the cook corrected him.

  “Yes, Mistress Wheatley,” he repeated.

  “Stuart will take you up,” she said, turning her head and shouting towards the hall. “Where is that man?”

  Stuart appeared in the doorway, a thin man dressed in the Peachey livery with down-at-heel shoes.

  “Look at the state of you!” she scolded, without any hope of improvement. “Take Goodwife Reekie’s boy in to Mr. Tudeley. He’s expecting him. In his room. And then come straight back here. You’re wanted to get the platters down.”

  He nodded to Rob and turned towards the door that led to the steward’s room.

  “Wait! Say good-bye.” Alinor caught her son as he was following obediently, without another word to her.

  He turned back to her, his face pale and closed, and dropped to his knee before her. She put her hand on his curly head in her blessing and then she bent down and kissed him. “Be good,” she said inadequately. She had no words for how much she loved him, how much she hated leaving him here. “God bless you, son. I will see you at church on Sunday.”

  He rose up, his cheeks red with embarrassment at the emotion in her voice, yet anxious not to reveal his own feelings, and picked up the little sack of his belongings. He had almost nothing: a change of linen, his spoon and his knife. He followed Stuart out of the door.

  Mrs. Wheatley laughed at Alinor fighting her tears as she watched her son leave. “Ah, give over,” she said kindly. “He’s not going to sea to fight against the prince. He’s not pressed for the army and marching into the wild North to fight Scotsmen.”

  “I thank God for it.”

  Mrs. Wheatley thumped the dough into a bowl and set it under a cl
oth beneath an open window to prove in the sunshine. “Will you take a glass of small ale before you go?” she asked. “Put a smile back on your pretty face?”

  “Thank you,” Alinor said, taking a seat on the bench at the table. “Can I come at the end of the week, to ask how he’s doing?”

  “Yes, you can bring me some samphire.”

  “I will. And, Mrs. Wheatley, will you keep an eye on him?”

  The cook nodded. “It’s a great chance for the lad.”

  “I know it. But will you send for me if he doesn’t suit? If there’s any the least sign of trouble?”

  “What could there be? He’ll get his schooling for free—his own tutor, not the day school—and his board, and he gets paid, and all he has to do is put up with the young master.”

  “Is he difficult? I saw him last year when he was ill and he was a lamb then . . .”

  “He’s a Peachey,” was all the cook said. “He’s the next lord. He was born to be difficult. But he’s not vicious. Your boy has fallen on his feet, to be sure.”

  They heard footsteps in the stone-flagged passageway to the kitchen and Mrs. Wheatley immediately fell silent, picking up a jug of buttermilk and measuring it into a bowl. Mr. Tudeley put his head around the kitchen door.

  “Ah, I thought I might find you still here, Mrs. Reekie. I have this for your boy’s first quarter.”

  Alinor took the purse, heavy with five shillings, in her hand and tucked it in the pocket of her apron. “Thank you,” she said. “And thank you very much for the opportunity for Rob . . .”

  Mr. Tudeley waved away her thanks and withdrew. Mrs. Wheatley nodded at Alinor. “No more than you deserve,” she said stoutly. “With two young children to bring up and no husband to be seen. And Rob’s a good boy, I’m sure. I’ll keep an eye on him, don’t worry.”

  “Yes, I know,” Alinor agreed, reluctant to leave even now.

  She bobbed a curtsey to Mrs. Wheatley and went out through the door to the walled kitchen garden, and crossed it, looking back at the house, searching the windows of the tall building in case her son was looking out. There was no one there. The leaded panes of glass reflected the dazzle of the sun high in the noon sky. She could see nothing. She raised a hand in case he was looking out for her and turned to walk home. She felt as if she were leaving a part of herself behind.

  On Friday morning Alinor left a sleepy Alys in the warm bed, and went out in the dawn light to pick samphire on the shingle seashore while it was still fresh, damp and salty with the sea fret. The tide was on the ebb. She could see the little waves breaking on the sandbar, far out to sea, and the horizon was a glorious line of gold with low-lying banks of cloud catching the light of the sunrise. The little birds ran back and forth in the shallow water, sometimes wheeling away in a flock, to settle a few yards farther down the beach. At six o’clock by the stable clock she tapped on the kitchen door of the Priory and when Stuart opened it, his hands dirty with wood ash from the fire, she walked in and put down her basket on the dresser.

  “Aye, there you are,” said Mrs. Wheatley, flushed from the heat of the bread oven where she was shoveling in rolls with a long-handled wooden peel. She closed the door with a thick woolen cloth over her hand and came over to look at the basket, pulling away the fresh green leaves from the top to make sure that the crop underneath was as good.

  “Tuppence?” she offered.

  “Certainly,” Alinor said pleasantly, though it was cheap.

  “You’ll be hoping to see your boy,” the cook guessed. “You can come up to the chapel with me for morning prayers. You’ll see him then.”

  Alinor shook her wet shawl out of the door and put it on a hook, then pulled her cap lower over her fair hair. “If I may,” she said.

  “I knew you’d be desperate to see him,” the cook said shrewdly. “But he’s well. He’s not pining. At any rate, he eats well enough, he’s not off his feed.”

  Stuart gave a short laugh. “He’s not that!”

  “Did I ask you?” the cook demanded, and Stuart ducked his head and went out to stock the wood basket, as a bell in the hall sounded three times.

  “We can go now,” Mrs. Wheatley said, rinsing her hands under the pump at the kitchen sink and drying them on the cloth at her waist. She laid aside her stained apron, revealing a clean one underneath, and led the way out of the kitchen.

  The two women went down the stone-flagged corridor towards the entrance hall. Three dairymaids were waiting outside the carved wooden door to the Peacheys’ private chapel, lined up before the wall in silence. Alinor and Mrs. Wheatley joined them. His lordship’s valet, Stuart, another footman, a couple of grooms, and two gardeners took the opposite wall.

  Alinor heard the Peachey family descending the great wooden stairs. First, his lordship, magnificent in dark red velvet with a rich lace ruff, tall hat on his head, cane in his hand, gloriously overdressed for a country morning, for attendance at his own private chapel. His eyes flicked incuriously over his household and stable staff; he did not even notice Alinor. Behind him came his son, dressed more plainly in a brown suit of knee breeches, and a jacket over a linen shirt with a short white collar. He was bareheaded with his light brown hair brushed smoothly, falling to his shoulders. He recognized Alinor, who had nursed him in two illnesses, and he smiled at her and turned to speak to the boy who followed him down the stairs. It was Rob. Alinor would have known him in a heartbeat for her boy, her beloved boy, but he was transformed. He was wearing an old dark green suit of Walter’s with a clean white linen collar edged with a little lace, white woolen stockings to his knees, and black shoes with buckles. Everything was a little too small for his long legs and growing frame, the jacket sleeves showed his bony wrists, the breeches were pulled too high; but he looked nothing like the boy who had emerged unwashed from the cottage by the mire to play barefoot in the churchyard before school.

  When he saw his mother, his beaming smile was just the same, and Alinor’s face shone back at him. With a tiny lift of his shoulders he showed off the jacket and the white lace collar, and Alinor nodded her silent admiration. As Sir William arrived at the foot of the stair, Mr. Tudeley, the steward, stepped forward to greet his lordship, and Rob came to his mother, knelt for her blessing and then bounced up, and hugged her tightly.

  “I knew you would come,” he said with a giggle in his whisper. “I knew you would.”

  “I had to see you. I couldn’t wait till Sunday. Is everything all right?”

  “It’s well,” he said. “It’s very well.” He released her and fell into line with the Peachey procession. His lordship walked down the hall, his high heels clicking on the stone floor, his beribboned cane tapping a counterpoint to his stately progress towards the chapel doors, followed by his son, Mr. Tudeley, and then Rob. All the servants curtseyed or bowed as his lordship went by, and then followed in strict order of precedence as the double chapel doors opened wide for them, and there, bowing to his lordship in the doorway, in a suit of dark black with the austere white collar of the reformed preacher, was Father James.

  He rose up from his bow and preceded the Peachey family to the ornately carved seats in the chapel. He went past them to step behind the bare communion table, which was placed firmly at the crossways of the chapel. There was nothing on the table but the Bible in English, and the Prayer Book, approved by parliament, open at the morning service. There was nothing to betray him as a priest of the Roman Catholic Church: no vestments, no candles, no incense, no monstrance displaying the sacred host. It was as clean and clear as any chapel in the land. Oliver Cromwell could have prayed in the Peachey pew without troubling his conscience.

  His lordship took his place in his seat, his son beside him, Rob a little farther along, and the household assembled behind them. Alinor, standing beside the cook, a few pews behind Sir William, could not take her eyes from Father James as he bent his dark head and read the bidding prayer. He raised his head and, for the first time, he saw her.

  His expression
changed at once. She knew that her own face was frozen. It felt like a physical shock to see him after thinking of him with such secret delight for so long. She had thought that they would never meet again; and yet here he was, under the same roof as her son, just a few miles from her home. Dutifully, Alinor bent her head and repeated the new prayers. She watched him from under her eyelashes as he moved slowly and confidently through the phases of the service, from the bidding prayer to the declaration of faith.

  When he looked up from the Prayer Book and their eyes met again, he seemed intent only on the words of the service. He did not acknowledge Alinor, and she kept her head down, trying not to watch him, wondering if he had won a place for Rob in the Peachey household as a great favor to her, or if he had put her son in grave danger: in a royalist house with a recusant priest.

  The household took communion in strict order of precedence—bread only, no wine at the plain wooden table set square in the middle of the chapel like a dining place for common men. Sir William went first, his son next, the steward behind him. Alinor smiled to see her son follow the steward. As a companion of the young lord he went before all the servants. Alinor followed Mrs. Wheatley and found herself in front of Father James, her hands cupped to receive the holy bread from his steady hand. She took it and swallowed it and said “Amen” clearly before she moved away. Her mother had always been particularly observant of the ritual of the church service. A wisewoman should always make clear that she had swallowed the bread and was not smuggling it out for use in healing magic. Alinor could almost hear her mother’s voice as she went back to stand behind the Peachey family pew. “Take care. Never cause folk to question. You have to be—always—in the bright light of day.”