Tidelands Page 8

  “And now, shall I cook your fish for you?” she asked the boys.

  “Can we cook it? On a fire with sticks?” Rob begged.

  “Oh, all right.” She smiled, and James could see the love she had for her son. She turned to him. “Will you eat with the boys?”

  “If I may,” he said. “Shall we all dine together?”

  “You may not want to. Rob hopes to eat like savages around a fire.”

  He had to stop himself tucking the tumbling lock of hair behind her ear. “Let’s be savages.” He smiled.

  Rob and Walter gathered driftwood and Alinor brought the embers from the damped-down fire in the cottage. James, going to help her, looked around the single room, the bed that she shared with her daughter, the stools where they sat, the table where they ate. It was a typical cottage for a poor working family, and he was struck how the bleak poverty strangely contrasted with the sharp and sweet smell of the place. It smelled of lavender and basil, like the Priory stillroom. Usually a hut like this would stink of old food and excrement, the heavy scent of unwashed people sleeping in their working shifts, but here the salt air blew in through the open door and the room was filled with a grassy smell of drying herbs. In one corner of the room there were cords strung from beam to beam, festooned with posies of herbs. Beneath them, a corner cupboard held a collection of glass jars, and on either side were shelves holding metal trays filled with wax for extracting perfume.

  “Your stillroom?” he asked her.

  She shrugged. “My corner. I have more room in the ferry-house. I use my mother’s stillroom there, as I used to do with her. This is just for the things from my garden here, while they’re fresh.”

  Under her direction James sliced bread from the big loaf under the upturned pot on the table, and carried out four slices to serve as trenchers for the fish. The little fire was burning brightly.

  “Will your daughter come home in time to eat with us?” he asked.

  “No, she works late in summertime,” Alinor replied. “She won’t be back till sunset. I’ll cook her a mackerel and save it for her.”

  Alinor cut and cleaned each fish, throwing the entrails into a pot for later use as bait, but leaving the heads and tails on. She gave the gutted fish to Rob, who skewered each one on a stick and handed them round. Alinor went to the house to wash the scales and blood from her hands and came out with four cups of small ale. Rob watched her give his missing father’s cup to James, but he made no comment.

  When the skin on the fish was burned to a blackened crisp and the flesh inside was moist and hot, Alinor told the boys: “That’s done. You can eat them.” Walter nibbled his from the charred stick, but Rob put his between two hunks of bread and took mighty bites. When they had all finished eating they sat in silence, looking at the fire as the sun lay on the horizon, and the tide seemed to stand still, lapping at the pier but rising no higher. The hens came running up from the shoreline and rushed towards Alinor, confident of their welcome and hoping for crumbs. She greeted each one by name and gave each a little piece of her bread, and they pecked around her feet and clucked softly.

  “We have to go,” said Rob. He looked to his mother and was surprised to see her gaze turn from him to his tutor.

  “Oh, do you?”

  James rose to his feet as if he did not know what he was doing. The hens scattered from the stranger; but he did not see them. “Yes, yes, I suppose we do. That’s sunset now. We should go.”

  “I’ll lead the way back to the Priory,” she offered.

  James wanted to agree, but there was no reason that she should guide them when her son was there.

  “I can show the way,” Rob said, puzzled.

  Slowly she rose from her fireside seat, and her boy came into her arms. She hugged him, and when he knelt for her blessing she put her hand on his head, whispered a prayer, and bent and kissed him. She dipped a little curtsey to Walter. “I’m glad you came,” she said to him. “You can come anytime, for your mother’s sake as well as your own, you know.”

  He flushed. “Thank you,” he said awkwardly, for she was a Peachey tenant and they were, in any case, his fish. “Rob and I will come again.”

  The two of them started down the path to the Priory, side by side, companionably silent. Alinor was left alone with James.

  “Shall you come again?” she asked him, her tone carefully neutral.

  “Yes,” he said, rushing into speech. “Yes. I want . . . I really want . . . May I come again? May I come back now, as soon as I have taken them home?”

  She had a dizzy sense of the world turning too fast around her. She looked up and felt a jolt of desire as his brown eyes met her dark gray gaze.

  “You can’t come through the mire on your own.”

  “I’ll come the long way round. I’ll follow the road,” he said.

  “Yes, you can come back tonight,” she agreed, and as if to deny her words she turned from him and kicked the embers of the fire so they were darkened and cool, and then she went along the bank towards her cottage without looking back at him.

  The waxing yellow moon had turned the water of the mire to a yellowy shine, and the land to tarnished black as James turned off the main road at the ferry-house, walked quietly past Ned’s back garden, and then loped along the sea bank to Alinor’s cottage. He had left the boys in the schoolroom, evening prayers done, tasked with reading and completing some mathematical exercises, and putting themselves to bed. James did not know what was ahead of him. He did not know if he would find Alinor alone, or if her daughter would be there. He did not know, if he found her alone, what he should say, or what he should do, nor what she might allow. He could not imagine how he had dared to ask to return, nor why she should have consented. He knew that he must not break his oath of celibacy. He was sworn to the Church; he could not consider a woman as a lover, he should not even be alone with a woman outside of the confessional. But, at the same time, he knew he could not stay away.

  As he walked along the path from her brother’s house, ducking below the blackthorn boughs, the high tide licking the raised bank, he did not think what he was doing, only that he could do nothing else. He thought he was a fool to run through the dusk to see a woman who was little more than a cottager, a poor woman, a woman far beneath him in the eyes of the world. But he knew that he could not help himself, and he was reveling in the sense of his own helplessness. Promised to God, engaged in a conspiracy for the King of England, he should have no time to fall in love. But as he ran, he knew very well that was what he was doing: he was falling in love. He could not stop himself feeling a leap of joy as he recognized that he was falling, unstoppably, in love with a woman as if he were an imaginary knight in a poem and she the greatest of ladies in a castle.

  She was waiting for him. As he saw her slim silhouette at the outermost end of the rickety wooden pier, her dress gray against the gray waters, her white cap pale against the night sky, he knew that she had gone out to the end of the pier so that she could watch the bank path and see him walking towards her. Instead, she had seen him running like a lover to his love. He skidded to a walk at the sight of her as she came down the pier, stepping carefully over the rotting planks, so that as he arrived where the steps met the bank and held out his hand to help her, they were handclasped before they had even said one word.

  At the touch of her hand, her scratched rough palm, he could not help himself: he drew her closer towards him and put a hand around her waist, feeling the warmth of her body through the homespun cloth. She did not resist him but stepped into the circle of his arm and raised her face to look at him. They gazed at each other silently and then, as if the exchange of looks had been an exchange of vows, he dropped his head to hers and their mouths met.

  She was willing. Years later he would remember that, as if it absolved him from guilt. She was longing to be loved, she was longing to be loved by him.

  Her kiss was sweet. It was the first time in his life that he had kissed a woman and he felt desir
e rush through him as if his knees would go weak beneath him. He felt her relax against him as if she too were feeling a wave pass through her, as irresistible as the flow of the tide.

  “I should not,” she said when she took a breath. “I don’t even know if my husband is alive or dead.”

  “I should not,” he said, finding the words awkward in his mouth as if he had no speech but only the power of touch. “I am an ordained priest.”

  She did not move from him, she did not take her eyes from his face, his mouth, his dark gaze.

  “Kiss me again,” she said quietly, and he did.

  They stood enwrapped in each other’s arms, his body pressing against her, his mouth on hers, his arms tightening around her, and then she moved a little away from him and at once he let her go. In silence, just a halfpace apart, they waited to see if they would move together again, if he was going to take her hand and lead her into the little cottage to make love in her missing husband’s bed. She shook her head, as if he had said words of desire out loud, but she did not speak.

  “I will come to you again next month, in the evening at this time,” he said as if a month apart would teach him what to do and what to say to her, while today each was dazed by the other’s closeness.

  “Next month?” she queried, as if it were a year away. “Not till next month?”

  “I have to go away tomorrow,” he said.

  She made a little gesture as if she would take his hand and delay him. “Not back to France?”

  “No, no. But I have to serve . . . I have made a promise . . . I will go and I will return.”

  She guessed at once it was the secret business of his Church, and the king imprisoned on the Isle of Wight. “Into danger? Are you going into danger?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “But I hope to be back with you within the month.”

  She heard, as a woman in love will always hear, the promise of love more than the meaning of the sentence. “Here, with me,” she repeated.

  “Without fail.”

  “Can’t you refuse to go?” she demanded. “Can’t you say you’ve changed your mind?”

  He smiled. “But I have not changed my mind,” he said. “I think as I did about everything, and I cannot break my word. There are men depending on me; there is a great man depending on me. Nothing has changed . . . except . . .”

  She was silent, while she waited for him to say what had changed.

  “My heart,” he told her.

  TIDELANDS, AUGUST 1648

  Alinor worked as usual, through the next weeks of summer storms and sudden days of heat, which made a haze on the mire that looked like palaces and streets and warehouses. The visions made her wonder what James was seeing, if he was admitted into great buildings or was walking down beautiful streets, far bigger and cleaner than Chichester, far grander than anything she had ever seen, if the gates of palaces opened for him, if there were garden doors into beautiful houses.

  She walked to Chichester market and at the secondhand clothes stall she bought Alys a pair of boots, hardly worn and with a good sole that would keep her feet warm and dry through the coming autumn and winter. She bought linen shifts and caps for both of them, and a new petticoat for Alys. She bought a ribbon to trim it, since Alys had so few pretty things. It was too hot to imagine that winter would ever come, but the secondhand clothes were cheapest in August, so Alinor bought her daughter a winter shawl and a cape of waxed cloth that would keep her dry when she had to go out across the ferry to the tide mill or work outside.

  Alinor attended church and saw Rob, she picked fruit in the ferry-house garden, she worked in the Mill Farm dairy. She delivered hanks of spun wool to the wool merchant and received, in return, her pay and a bale of fleeces for spinning. She went through every day, her eyes down, her behavior demure, as if she were not burning up inside, white cap on her feverish forehead, gray dress wrapped as tight as an embrace around her waist. She took the boat out on a turning tide at slack water and laid four lobster pots, holding her nerve, though the boat rocked as she leaned over the side. She drew them in again next day, heaving against the weight of the pot and the rope, with two snapping monsterlike lobsters inside. She baited the pots again with stinking fish, threw them out, then rowed to the mill quay with her catch, and sold it to a couple of farmers’ wives for fourpence each.

  “You look well,” Mrs. Miller said, staring at Alinor’s flushed smiling face as she pocketed the pennies.

  “I’m just the same,” Alinor said, though her heart pounded too fast.

  “I don’t know how you can bear the work.” Mrs. Miller looked disdainfully from Alinor’s soaked hem to the stinking bait jar. “Especially this work. In this heat.”

  “Oh,” said Alinor, as if she had not noticed.

  She went to her beehive and watched the bees coming and going with their determined purpose from the little doorway at the foot of the skep. “Something has happened to me,” she told them. “Something very important.” She listened to the warm comforting rumble of the hive as if the swarm was agreeing that it was important to them too; but she did not tell them what it was. She weeded her vegetable bed on her knees with her little hoeing stick, the sun hot on her back. She stood up, suddenly dizzy, her hands empty, as if she were walking in her sleep, and remembered the morning when she had looked through the cottage door at the unearthly whiteness of the sky and thought herself enchanted.

  The wheat in the harborside fields was a rippling sea of gold, ready for harvest, the miller more and more fearful of a summer storm in this year of terrible rain. Finally, Mrs. Miller declared that they would start the harvest, and all the poor cottagers nearby were summoned to Mill Farm for the work.

  Alys was one of the binding gang that followed the reapers, picking up the cut wheat, binding it into a stook, and loading it into the wagon. It was painfully hard work and when Alys came home, her arms were scratched by the stalks and her back was aching from bending and lifting and throwing stooks into the wagon. She worked from dawn—harvest days were long days—and her face was white with exhaustion. She was paid for extra hours with a small loaf of wheat bread baked in the mill’s big bread oven, in the harvest bake—one for each reaper and binder on top of their daily pay. It was a luxury that the Reekies only tasted at harvesttime. The rest of the year they baked their own coarse bread of mixed grains.

  Alinor bathed Alys’s arms and face with elderflower water. She fed her nettle soup to ease the stiffness in her back and arms. Alys drank her soup and ate her bread in silence.

  “I’m fine,” she said, as soon as she had finished, pushing back her stool and heading for bed, pulling off her skirt and filthy shirt. “It’s only as bad as always. I forget how vile the work is. The fields go on forever.”

  “Soon be finished,” Alinor reminded her, picking up the bowls. “I’ll wash your gown and linen overnight. You can wear your new shift tomorrow.”

  “I swear next year I won’t do it,” Alys said as she rolled into bed, almost asleep. “I swear next year I’ll have work somewhere else: clean work, easy work. Indoor work. You know, I’d sell my soul for indoor work.”

  “I hope that you get it,” Alinor said gently; but she could not imagine what work Alys would find that could pay her a wage to live on.

  “And that Jane Miller—” Alys broke off, almost too sleepy to speak.

  “Jane?”

  “Eyeing up the miller’s lads, just because her father owns the mill. Giggling with Richard Stoney. She’s such a stupid whey-faced thing . . . I’d like to push her in the millpond.”

  Alinor smiled. “You go to sleep on a pleasant thought,” she counseled. “And have kindly dreams.”

  “I am,” Alys whispered. “That is a pleasant thought.”

  Alinor took the washing bowl outside the cottage, and as she was wringing out the skirt and rough linen shirt, and spreading them on the rosemary bush to dry, she saw her brother, Ned, picking his way on the bed of the mire from shingle bank to dry sand on the h
idden shortcut from Ferry-house to her cottage. He brought a half round of cheese—a fee for ferrying a wagon going and returning from Chichester market. They sat together, outside the cottage on the bench facing the mire as the low tide ebbed farther and farther away until all around them was dry land, and the water was a silvery line on the horizon at the bar of the harbor. He watched her as she ate a tiny slice.

  “Are you sick?” he asked. “Is it quatrain fever?”

  All the people who lived on the side of the mire had marsh fever three or four times a year. They were accustomed to the onset of cold shivers and the sweats that would last perhaps a week, and then pass off. Alinor gave her patients willow and mint tisanes for their fever, and grew marigolds and lavender at the door and windows of the cottage to discourage the insects that brought the illness in their bite.

  “No, I’m well,” she said, though the high color in her cheek and the brightness of her eyes contradicted her.

  Across the mile of mud, they heard the squeal of the sluice gate key opening the millpond, and then the roar of water in the millrace. They heard the wheel creak and turn and the sound of the grinding stones. Then the water poured out into the dry channel in the mire in a sudden deep flood.

  “You’ve not heard from Zachary?” Ned asked, thinking that she might have had news of her missing husband. “You look feverish.”

  “No,” she said, finding a smile and meeting his eyes. “No. Nothing. It’s just me! I am filled with impatience: I have spring fever in the wrong season. Canterbury tales after Midsummer Day! I think it must be Rob leaving home, and knowing that I can start to save a dowry for Alys, and I have a boat of my own. I feel as if I am young again and free, and could go anywhere or do anything.”

  He nodded, putting her rapid speech and the brightness of her eyes down to the wildness that was always a danger, even in the best of women. They could not help themselves. They were like the swallows that were swooping round and round, rejoicing in skimming and dipping in the mill rife, flirting with the warm air, building tiny perfect homes in houses and barns: wild and tame at once, here for summer, gone in winter, perfectly inconstant. He thought his beautiful sister was like a swallow, and that she should never have been tied down to one place. Certainly, she should never have been given in marriage to a man who was so much of the earth that he had probably sunk himself in deep waters and was even now rotting under barnacles on a seabed.