Dark Tides Read online

  “I will tell her at once. May I plead on your behalf? Is there anything I can say to help you?”

  He loosened his collar under her dark, sympathetic gaze. “No. I had better… I believe she will… at any rate. It is about the child. But she knows that, she will know that.”

  “Her grandchildren? Is there some way I can help you?”

  He let out an exclamation and turned from her. “I am afraid you cannot help me,” he said. “I am afraid nobody can. These are old troubles, and in my case, old sorrows.”

  “Is the boy yours?” she asked very quietly, coming to stand close to him, her face filled with compassion at his distress. “Do you think he is your own son?”

  He turned and she saw his mouth tremble. “Yes,” he said. “I believe so. I think he is mine. I think I have a son.”

  “Then he should know his father,” she whispered gravely. “And you should know him.”

  * * *

  Livia led Sir James up the narrow stairs, tapped on the door, and swung it open. He had to squeeze past her to enter the room but he was unaware of her perfume or the swish of her silk skirts as she drew them back; he saw nothing but Alinor, leaning on her high-backed chair, waiting for him, as she had waited for him in the meadow, as she had waited for him on the rickety pier.

  “We were almost always out of doors,” he blurted out, and he closed the door behind him.

  “We were,” she agreed. “There was never anywhere that we could go.”

  They both fell silent, looking at each other. He thought he would have known her anywhere, her gray eyes were the same, the direct gaze and the slight lift to her lips. Her hair, smoothed under her cap, was not the rich gold he had loved but bleached into a pale beauty. Her face was white, even her lips were cream; but she was the same woman he had loved and betrayed, the set of her shoulders and the turn of her head was instantly recognizable as the woman who lived, indomitably, on the edge of the mire and defied ill luck or high tides to wash her away.

  She regarded him carefully, looking past the gloss of his prosperity, the fine clothes, the thickened body, to the troubled young man she had loved with such a reckless desire.

  “You are ill,” he said, his voice filled with pity.

  She gave a little grimace at his tone. “I never recovered.”

  “You have a consumption?”

  “Something like drowning,” she said. “I drowned then, and I go on drowning. The water sits in my lungs.”

  He shut his eyes on the memory of the green water pouring from her mouth when they turned her limp body on her side. “I failed you.” He found that he was on one knee before her, his head bowed. “I failed you terribly. I have never forgiven myself.”

  “Aye,” she said indifferently. “But I forgave you almost at once. There was no need for you to set your own penance.”

  “I have served a hard penance.” He looked eagerly upwards, wanting her to know that he too had suffered. “I was restored to my home, to the lands that I loved, and I married, but my wife took no pleasure in our life, and she never conceived a child. I am a widower now. I am alone with no one to continue my name.”

  “And so now you come to me?” She sat down and gestured that he should rise and take a seat.

  “Now I am free to do what I should have done that day. I am free to claim you for my wife, my beloved wife, and to name your child as my child, and to give you both the home you should have had, and the future you should have had.”

  She said nothing for a long moment and the silence made him realize for the first time how arrogant he sounded. Outside the seagulls wheeled and cried. He heard the clatter of the sheets against the masts, and at that sound, which had always meant leaving and loss to him, his heart sank and he knew that she would refuse him.

  “I’m sorry, James, but you’re too late,” she said quietly. “This is my home, and there is no child of yours here.”

  “I’m not too late. I am not too late, Alinor. I never ceased to love you, I wrote to you every year on Midsummer Eve, I never forgot you. Not even when I was married did I ever forget you. I swore I would come for you as soon as I was free.”

  Her dark gray eyes gleamed with inner laughter. “Then you cannot be surprised that your wife took no pleasure in her life with you,” she observed.

  He gasped at the sharpness of her wit. “Yes, I failed her too,” he admitted. “I am a failure: as a lover to you, and as a husband to her. I have been wrong since the day I denied you. I was like Saint Peter: I did not own you when I should have done. The cock crowed and I did not hear.”

  She made a little tutting noise. “It was not the Garden of Gethsemane! I was not crucified! My heart broke; but now it’s healed. Go and live your life, James. You owe me nothing.”

  “But the king is restored,” he tried to explain. “I want to be restored too! I want our victory. It won’t be a victory for me until I am back in my house with you at my side.”

  She shook her head. “It’s no victory for us, remember? Not for people like us. Ned left England rather than be subject to this king. He left his home rather than live with my shame. And Rob went too, and now his widow comes to my door to tell me he’s drowned, and I can’t even make myself believe her. I can’t get back to my home. My brother can’t return, my son never will.”

  He hesitated, driven to honesty. “Alinor—I must have my son. I have no one to continue my name, I have no one to inherit my house, my land. I can’t bear to have a son raised in poverty when I should endow him.”

  “We’re not poor,” she snapped.

  “I own hundreds of acres.”

  She was silent.

  “They are rightfully his.”

  She sighed as if she were very weary. “You’ve imagined this boy,” she said gently. “All these years. You’ve got no son, no more have I. There’s no one here to inherit your fortune nor continue your name. You didn’t want the baby when he was in the womb, you denied him then. He was lost to you the very day that you said that you didn’t want him. Those words can’t be unsaid. You didn’t want him then, and now you don’t have him. You are, as you wanted to be: childless.” She put her hand to her throat. “I can’t say more.”

  He leapt to his feet and reached for her. “Can I help you? Shall I call someone?”

  She leaned back against the hard leather padding of the high-backed chair, her face as white as ice. She shook her head and closed her eyes. “Just go.”

  He dropped to his knees beside her chair, he took up her still hand and put the cold fingers to his lips; but when she did not open her eyes or even stir, he realized that he could say nothing, do nothing but obey her. “I’ll go,” he whispered. “Please do not be distressed. Forgive me—love. I’ll speak to Alys on my way out. Forgive me… forgive me.”

  He glanced back at her ashen face as he took two steps to reach the door, closed it behind him, and all but stumbled down the stairs. Tabs, the maid, was arduously climbing up with a tray of small ale.

  “D’you not want it now?” she demanded with a sigh.

  He brushed past her without an answer. Alys was waiting at the foot of the stairs, standing like a statue, her face like stone. The door to the parlor was ajar; he guessed that Livia was inside, eavesdropping.

  “She’s ill,” he exclaimed.

  Alys nodded. “I know it.”

  “She refuses me,” he said.

  “What else?”

  “I will come back,” he said. “I can’t leave it like this.”

  She said nothing but gestured to the front door and he could do nothing but bow to her, his face flushed and angry. He had to open the front door himself, and step out onto the wharf, ignoring the stevedores loading another cargo into a ship bobbing at midtide, and walk beside the river to Horsleydown Stairs to hail a wherry to take him back to the north side, to his beautiful London house on the Strand.

  He thought for a wild moment that he should plunge into the muddy tide and drown before her house, that nothing
else would wash his honor clean, that nothing else would free him from this pain. He heard the clink of chains from the bones hanging at the gibbet at the edge of the River Neckinger and thought how hateful this place was. He hated Alys with a hot murderous fury, and for a moment, he even hated Alinor too. She had been his inferior in every way, his for the taking, but somehow she had slipped away from him, like a mermaid in dark tides, and his son had gone too, like a changeling stolen by faeries. He wheeled and looked back at the house. The shabby little door was tight closed.

  He looked up at her window and thought he could see the pale outline of her gown as she looked down at him. At once, his hand went to his hat; he swept it from his head and stood looking up, at her, bareheaded. “Alinor!” he whispered, as if she would throw open the window and call down to him.

  He bowed with what dignity he could find, put his hat on his head, and turned to walk to the water stairs to hail a waterman, but there were no craft plying the incoming tide and he stood for a lifetime, looking at the dazzle of the sunlight on the dancing ripples, wondering if he could have said anything that would have persuaded her. The day was hot and exhausting, and he felt old and defeated, marooned among the poor on the wrong side of the river.

  “Sir James?”

  It was the widow, with a black lace shawl over her head, as if she had run down the stairs to bring him a message. At once he turned from the edge of the quay and went towards her.

  “Tomorrow is Saturday,” she said briefly. “The children come home after they have finished their work in the afternoon. If you were to come to take me for a walk at, say, four o’clock, we could come back at five. You would see the grandchildren. And perhaps they will invite you for dinner.”

  “She refuses to see me ever again.”

  “But you will see your boy, despite them both, if you meet me at four.”

  “He’s my boy?” he said with a surge of longing. “He is?”

  She spread her hands. “Only she can say. But you can at least see him.”

  “You are kind to me…” he said awkwardly.

  “I have no friend in England but these…” She gestured at the mean little warehouse. “And perhaps you?”

  JUNE 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

  Ned walked up the broad grazing lane that ran through the center of Hadley village with a big basket loaded with the fat red strawberries grown in his garden on one arm, and on the other a basket of wild leeks and mushrooms that he had gathered from the forest. Horses, cows, sheep, and even pigs cropped the wide track that ran through the center of town. Later in summer the cows would be released to graze with a cowherd to watch over them, the pigs would run freely in the forest to root for nuts and mushrooms, tearing up the earth with their sharp little hooves and their rooting tusks, and the horses would be released to run free and only brought in to work.

  The weave of the basket on Ned’s arm was the signature of the maker, a woman from the Pocumtuc who lived a few miles upriver of Ned’s ferry and had given him a basket in return for free crossings. He had taught her some English words earlier in spring, when he was digging his plot, and the women used to call his ferry over to the north bank to bring them into the little town. She had come into his garden one evening at dusk and shown him the Seven Sister stars, just visible in the evening sky, and told him that their coming was a sign that it was time to plant beneath them.

  “My name,” she told him. “Plant-time Star.”

  “My name Ned,” he replied.

  Plant-time Star showed him how to heap the earth into hillocks, how to plant the seeds with a fish to feed them, how the three seeds—squash, beans, and maize—should grow together to feed the earth and should be eaten together to feed the body. “The three sisters,” she said, as if there was something holy about planting. “Given to us: the People.”

  He had thought she would come back to see how the crops had grown but he had not seen her after an argument about fish traps set in the river. Someone going downriver to the sawmill at Northampton, steering a raft of felled logs, had grounded the boat on half a dozen of the exquisitely made basket traps. The women had complained to the elders at Hadley who had said, reasonably enough, that it was no one from the town, and that they must go for compensation to the sawmill, or to the logger himself—whoever he was. Now the women crossed the river in their own dugouts, as if they did not trust the raft ferry nor the broad green common that ran through the center of the town, where every house stared at them as they went by.

  Ned missed their cheerful chatter, and the little goods they paid him as fees. He even spoke up for them at the town meeting, but no one could agree how long a native fish trap took to make, and what one of the fish traps would be worth. No Englishman had the knack of making them so no one could say, and many declared that native time was worthless anyway, and the traps were made from twigs that were worthless too.

  Without the native women traders to walk with him, Ned went alone, calling at one house and then another down the street, exchanging his goods for a small tub of butter at one house, a whip of an apple tree at another, and setting some new-laid eggs against his slate at the third. He sold to households whose gardens were not as productive as his, and to those who would not spend time in the woods looking for food. The debts he paid with his produce were part of the constant exchange of the town. When Ned had first arrived he had hired other settlers to help him build his house, roof it, and set up his stock-proof fence.

  “I don’t dare go into the forest,” one woman said, standing on her doorstep and looking at his basket of mushrooms. “I’d be afraid of getting lost.”

  “No fish today, Mr. Ferryman?” a woman called over the stock fence, irritated at the shortage.

  “Not today,” he said. “Probably next week.” He did not tell her that he had set his fish traps as usual but someone had pulled up the stakes that held them to the riverbed and released all the fish but two or three, as if to leave enough for Ned to eat, but not enough for him to sell.

  “You won’t get my business if you can’t be relied on,” she said sharply.

  “Why? Who else are you going to buy from?”

  She looked around at the empty lane. The women who usually brought fish and food to trade walked past in silence, their creels dangling empty from their hands, their faces closed and unfriendly.

  “I don’t want to buy from them,” she said, walking away, her expression sour.

  “By the looks of it, they don’t want to sell to you,” Ned said under his voice.

  Ned went on to the blacksmiths’, where Samuel and Philip Smith worked at the forge in the double lot behind their clapboard houses. Ned swapped some leeks for a bag of new nails to fix the shingles on his house walls against the coming winter.

  “Heard you refused to come into town,” Samuel Smith said with a slow smile at Ned. “Thought it was odd.”

  “I didn’t refuse!” Ned exclaimed. “I’ll come when I’m needed. But I can’t leave the ferry without warning. I’ve got to get someone to man it. Like now, Joel’s lad is minding it for me. I’ll come when I’ve something to sell or to buy, or when I can serve my neighbors or the Lord. Not because some selectman, in his place five minutes, comes and tells me I’m to take orders from him.”

  “All you old roundheads will only take orders from your own,” Philip joked, and saw Ned’s slow smile.

  “Thing is,” Sam interjected, “you don’t know, living that far out and ferrying the savages as you do, friendly like, that there’s rumors that the French are sending messages to them, stirring up trouble against us. Telling them we can’t be trusted.”

  Ned gave him a rueful look. “Oh, can we be trusted?” he asked. “For I heard that the Massasoit—their chief—swore that he would sell no more of his people’s land, and we swore he should keep his own; and yet we go on buying. I heard it was the Plymouth governor’s own son: Josiah Winslow himself! Taking up mortgages on Indian lands and making them sell when they’re caught in debt.�
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  “But why not? Mr. Pynchon is buying land at Woronoco and Norwottuck. These lands are empty!” Philip protested. “The plague killed them before we arrived. It’s God’s own will that we take the land.”

  “Was London empty, after the great plague killed a family in every street?” Ned demanded.

  The man hesitated, leaning on the bellows so the forge glowed red with the hiss of air: “What d’you mean?”

  “Would it have been right for French families to move into the London houses that had a big red cross on the door, and the owners dead inside?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then why call the lands empty, when you can see they were farmed, and worked for years? When you use their well-worn paths and trails through the forest and can see their fields well worked and the forest they’ve cleared of undergrowth for hunting? Just because they were sick, don’t mean they don’t own their fields as much as ever.”

  The two men looked at Ned, as if they were disappointed in him. The town of Hadley clung together with a common purpose, survived by a common will. Dissent in anything—from religious tradition to politics—was not welcome. “Nay, Ned, don’t talk so daft,” the older man counseled him. “You’ll make no friends here talking like that. We’ve all got to stick together. Don’t you want more land to master?”

  “No,” Ned said bluntly. “I had enough of masters in the old country, I don’t want to breed more here. And I don’t want to be one myself. I came because I thought we would all be equal, simple men together starting a new life among other simple men without masters. All I want is enough of a garden to farm and feed myself.”

  Philip Smith laughed and clapped Ned on the shoulder. “You’re a rarity, Ned Ferryman!” he told him, despising his simplicity. “The last of the Levelers.”

  JUNE 1670, LONDON

  James was waiting at the far end of the quay beside a stack of barrels, hidden from the blank windows of the house where every blind was drawn down, except the ones in the turret—Alinor’s eyrie. The front door opened and the Italian widow stepped out, opened a black silk parasol against the glare, and tripped lightly in her little silk shoes over the cobbles towards him.