Dark Tides Read online

  “I’d be glad of it,” she said. “If you’re not too tired. You do look pale, my boy.”

  “Ah, don’t fuss,” he said, grinning at her. “I was out drinking with the other lads last night and I have a headache from bad wine.”

  “So, does he not get scolded for spending his wages on drink?” Sarah demanded. “Ribbons are forbidden, but drink is all right?”

  “He’s a boy,” her grandmother teased her. “He can do as he wishes.”

  “You’ll never get a husband if you’re such a shrew.” Johnnie winked at her.

  Sarah kicked his chair with her foot under the table. “Don’t want one!”

  “Now stop, you two,” Alys said quietly. “What will your aunt be thinking?”

  “I think they are adorable!” Livia said warmly. “But tell me—am I trespassing in someone’s bedroom? I am in the attic room next to Tabs?”

  “That’s my room,” Johnnie said.

  “I thought it must be, with the books and the charts. My nursemaid and baby have taken the bedroom downstairs.”

  “That was mine,” Sarah said.

  “Could you sleep with your baby and the nursemaid for tonight?” Alys asked Livia.

  The young woman spread her hands in apology. “Alas, I cannot! If I sleep near Matteo he cries for me, and it wakes me and I can never sleep again. He seems to know that I am in the room, and he calls for me! It is so sweet! But if Miss Sarah would condescend to sleep with my nursemaid, Carlotta, and the baby, I know the baby would be quiet as a little mouse? Would you agree? You don’t object?”

  “All right,” Sarah said. “Since it’s my bed anyway. But where is Johnnie to sleep?”

  “I can bed down here,” he offered.

  “I would never dream of it. He must have his room and I will share with your mamma if she permits.”

  “Me?” Alys demanded.

  Livia smiled. “Of course,” she said blandly. “There is nowhere else. You don’t object to sharing with me? I don’t snore at all.”

  “No,” said Alys. “Of course.”

  * * *

  Alinor went up to her room early; but the rest of the little family sat at the table playing Game of Goose and talking about their week. Livia’s bright assessing gaze went from one young face to another looking for the resemblance to Sir James, wondering if it was possible that the handsome youth and the pretty girl were not twin brother and sister. Raised together and always in each other’s company, they knew what the other was thinking and often finished each other’s sentences, their expressions mirrored each other. Livia thought they could well be twins—only a mother could have known the truth. Only a father seeking an heir could have dreamed of separating them, could have wanted one, without the other.

  At midnight Alys said, “Come, you two. You’ve got to be up in the morning for church. It’s time for bed now.”

  In the hall their nighttime candles were each in a candlestick. Alys went to the kitchen to check that the back door was locked, and the fire banked down for the night.

  “All safe?” Johnnie asked, his foot on the bottom stair, his candle lit.

  “All safe,” she confirmed.

  “D’you still draw the runes against house fire in the ashes?” Sarah asked.

  Alys smiled. “Of course! Think what your grandma would say if she found me letting the house burn down for want of a mark to keep the fire in the grate.”

  “Good night.” Sarah kissed her mother and then, when Livia opened her arms, she kissed her aunt too.

  “Good night,” Johnnie said from the cramped landing.

  “You don’t kiss me good night?” Livia teased, and laughed to see him blush, and hurriedly go up to his attic room.

  Alys turned into her mother’s room to say good night, as Livia went into Alys’s bedroom. She set down the candle on a washstand and looked around the room. It was sparsely furnished with a large wooden chest at the foot of the bed. She lifted the lid and found thick jackets and winter cloaks, and—she rummaged into each corner—a metal box which might hold money or perhaps jewelry. She flicked open the catch and lifted the lid. On the top was writing paper and a stick of old sealing wax, and underneath it were white ribbons, now brown with age, and a posy of dried herbs tied in with some dry and wrinkled berries. Livia glanced at them: a bridal buttonhole—a winter bridal buttonhole—but who had worn it? And where was he now?

  She took off her black trimmed cap and put it beside the small silvered mirror on the little table. She unbelted her overdress and laid it carefully in the top of the chest. Underneath she had her silk underdress which she hung to air on the back of the door. By the time Alys came in, Livia was in her beautiful linen nightshift, trimmed with the finest lace, her hairbrush in her hand.

  “Would you?” she asked familiarly, and sat on the end of the bed and tossed her mane of dark glossy hair over her shoulders.

  “D’you like it plaited for the night?” Alys stumbled.

  “Please. I usually ask Carlotta to do it, but I don’t want to disturb them.”

  “Of course.”

  Gently, and then with more confidence, Alys swept the brush through the thick mass of black hair. “It is beautiful,” she said.

  “Roberto used to brush it for me. He said that your mother had hair like a wheat field, yours was the color of barley, and I had hair the color of night.”

  Alys finished the plait with a neat bow of white ribbon, and turned to undress herself, as Livia went to the bed. “Which side do you like?”

  Alys kept her face turned away. “I never slept in the same bed as my husband. I don’t have a side. I don’t know which.”

  “Ah,” Livia said quietly. “I will go this side, then, near the door in case I have to go to little Matteo in the night, and you shall sleep by the window, unless the sunlight is too bright for you when it rises?”

  “No, no,” Alys said. “The shutters are closed, and anyway, I’m an early riser.” She coiled her hair into a loose knot, pulled on a cap, dragged a nightgown over her clothes, and then blew out their candle. In the dark she shuffled out of her gown and petticoats under her nightgown before shaking them out and laying them on the chest and getting into bed. It occurred to her, for the first time, that though she had lain with a man she had passionately loved, they had never had even one night together, parting on their wedding day.

  She lay rigid, stiff as a bolster, her head on the pillow pointing south, her feet due north, like a locked compass. She did not dare to stretch or slump.

  “Are you cold?” came a whisper out of the darkness.

  “A little.” She did not know what she felt.

  A warm hand reached under her shoulders and drew her close. “Rest your head here,” Livia invited. “We are both lonely, we are both alone. Rest your head here, and we can sleep together.”

  Through the thin nightgown Alys could feel the warmth of the young woman, she could smell her perfume of roses. Slowly she relaxed, and they fell asleep lulled by the quiet lapping of the low tide.

  JUNE 1670, LONDON

  In the morning Livia was still sleeping, dark eyelashes swept down over the soft curve of her cheek, as Alys got up, dressed in silence, and tiptoed from the room for fear of waking the young woman who slept through the noise of the stirring house as if she were the princess in the story, and would wake only to the kiss of a prince.

  Alys plaited her hair and put on her cap in the counting house before going into the kitchen where Tabs was blowing the embers into life. “Give me a small ale, please,” she said.

  “Thirsty?” Tabs demanded cheerfully. “I’m thirsty. It’s that hot in my attic you’d never think it.”

  “Yes,” Alys said repressively. “Can you lay the table for breakfast, Tabs? We’ll just be us four. Mrs. Alinor won’t be down. I’ll take up her tray.”

  “Getting it done now,” the young woman confirmed. “Will you take her a small ale now?”

  Alys took a cup and went up the stairs, although she
did not turn to the right to her mother’s door but went to her own bedroom.

  Livia was sitting up, leaning against the plain pillows, her embroidered cap framing her dark beautiful face, her nightgown pulled low to show her olive-skinned shoulders. She smiled as Alys came in.

  “Ah, there you are!” she said. “I was lonely the moment that I woke, and found you gone.”

  “Here I am,” Alys agreed uncertainly, proffering the drink. “I brought you this.”

  * * *

  The family attended St. Olave’s Church and there were special prayers for Rob. They all walked back with the minister who came to pray with Alinor. He wore a smart dark suit, but no vestments and no outward sign of his calling. Alinor had raised Alys during the puritan years of the Commonwealth and they still preferred their religion plain, with nothing of church ritual, even though times had changed. The new king was restoring the surplices and ceremonies at every altar, decking them with gold and silver. His papist wife had her own chapel and half of London genuflected behind her and dizzily inhaled incense at Mass. Alys, and all the old reformers, now had to accept the new rules which had once been called heresy. Anyone who could not stomach it had no choice but to leave the country, as Alinor’s brother Ned had done.

  “Will you stay for your dinner, Mr. Forth?” Alys asked politely, as he came down the narrow stairs after his visit to Alinor’s room.

  “I have to make other visits,” he replied. “I cannot be seen to fail in my duties for a moment. The previous minister wants his parish back, his rectory, and especially his tithes. The communion expelled him for being a monarchist and half-papist and now the fashion is for monarchy and papistry again. He will return and all my work here will be overset.”

  “What will you do?” Sarah asked him.

  “If I am forced out, I will sail to the Americas,” he told her. “If I cannot serve the Lord here, I will go where the Saved want to hear my word.”

  “My uncle Ned is in the town of Hadley in New England,” Alys remarked. “It’s a new settlement, led into the wilderness by the minister, so they are a godly town with much preaching. He thinks as you do.”

  “Does he trade in furs?” he asked. “He could make a fortune.”

  “He wants to make a sufficiency, not to be the bane of any other.”

  “I pray that a godly man can do that,” he agreed. “But I fear that one man’s wealth is always another man’s loss.”

  “Here, yes, but perhaps not in a new world?” Alys challenged. “Where land is free? It was his hope that he could live of his own, without hurting another.”

  “I pray that it does not come to it for me; but if I am forced to leave, I will come to you and ask for his direction.”

  “He’d be glad to see you.” Alys bowed and Johnnie opened the front door and let the preacher out into the glaring light of the quay. Sarah was alone with her mother in the parlor.

  “Did Uncle Ned know that man—Sir James?”

  “No!” Alys lied at once. “Why d’you ask?”

  “So how did Sir James know you and Grandma at Foulmire? How did he not meet Uncle Ned?”

  “I meant that they were not friends,” Alys corrected herself. “Your uncle Ned was the ferryman, of course he knew everyone.”

  “Before we were born.”

  “Yes, as you know.”

  “So did we all leave at once? Great-Uncle Ned, and Sir James and Grandma and you? Were we all in the wagon altogether?”

  “No, it was just your grandma and me,” Alys said unwillingly. “I must have told you a dozen times. Just you babies and Grandma and me—after a quarrel with the Millers at the tide mill over my wages. Ned didn’t come till long after that. And then when the king was restored, he left for the Americas. Surely you remember! Now, I have to see what Tab is doing. I can smell burning.”

  “So why did they leave? Uncle Ned and Sir James?” Johnnie echoed his sister, coming in at the end of this conversation. “Together? But not with us? It can’t have been about your wages, surely?”

  “Oh really!” Alys hurried away. “What does it matter? It’s so long ago! We left because we wanted a better life for you than we could have had on the mire, Uncle Ned left for conscience, when the king came in; and Sir James was only ever passing through. We weren’t friends, we hardly knew him.”

  “Then why does he come here every day and see Grandma?” Johnnie joined with his sister.

  “He doesn’t come every day. He’s only seen her twice,” Alys said irritably.

  “But why?” Johnnie asked.

  “What?”

  “Why does he come?”

  “I don’t know!” Alys blustered, breaking away from the two of them and opening the kitchen door. A haze of fatty smoke rolled into the hall. “Tabs! What are you doing in there?”

  “Surely you must know,” Johnnie said reasonably.

  “I know that it’s none of my business nor yours. And I don’t want either of you talking to him. D’you hear?”

  Alys closed the kitchen door on them. Sarah and Johnnie exchanged brief glances of complete understanding. “Something’s not right,” Sarah said.

  “I know. I feel it.”

  “We’ll find out,” she decided.

  * * *

  After dinner Sarah sat with her grandmother upstairs in her room, sewing black ribbons for Alinor and Alys’s mourning caps.

  “Not for me, I won’t wear it,” Alinor said.

  The girl hesitated. “Grandma, why not?”

  “Sarah, I don’t believe it, I can’t feel that he’s dead. I won’t wear black for him.”

  The girl laid down her work. “Grandma, you wouldn’t want to be disrespectful?”

  “I won’t lie.”

  “What does Ma say?”

  “Nothing. I’ve not said anything to her.”

  Sarah scrutinized her grandmother. “You cannot doubt the word of his widow. It’s not just a letter now, she has come all that long way, with her son, and now you know what happened?”

  Alinor looked out of the window where a mist was uncoiling along the incoming tide. Sarah felt a chill in the room as if the hairs on the nape of her neck were standing up, one by one. She shivered.

  Alinor glanced at her. “Yes,” she said, as if it were a commonplace. “Something’s not right. You feel it too.”

  Sarah got up to close the half door to the balcony outside.

  “It’s not the mist,” Alinor told her granddaughter. “You know as well as I do that it’s the sight.”

  “I don’t see anything,” the girl complained. “I just feel a chill.”

  “That’s how it feels,” Alinor confirmed. “I know something, but I don’t know what. I felt it when she said that poor little baby would be a comfort to me. That he would replace Rob!”

  “Nobody could replace Rob.”

  “It’s not that… It’s because…”

  “What?” the girl prompted.

  “I don’t know.” Alinor shook her head. “I can’t see anything clear. But I just know that something’s out of true.”

  “D’you know what is true, Grandma?”

  “Yes,” she said swiftly. “Always. As if the truth had a scent. I recognize it. And if you and me both feel the mist on the back of our necks—then there’s a warning.”

  “A warning for who?”

  “I don’t know for sure.” Alinor smiled at the girl and let the spell slip away. “But here’s a lesson down the years, from my grandmother to my mother, from her to me and from me to you: mind that chill when you feel it… something’s wrong.”

  “Can we put it right?” the girl whispered.

  Alinor looked at her granddaughter, at the bright courage in her dark eyes, at the strength in her face. “Maybe you can,” she said.

  “How? How could I put it right? I don’t even know what’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know either. But I believe it will be you who finds the truth in this. And in the meantime, I won’t wear black.”
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  Sarah said nothing more but picked up her grandmother’s cap and started to unpick the black ribbon. “What will you say?” she asked.

  Alinor smiled ruefully. “I won’t have to say anything,” she said. “Everyone will just assume that I am a stupid old woman and I can’t accept the truth.”

  “You don’t care if people say that?”

  She smiled. “I’ve been called worse.”

  Downstairs, Johnnie joined his mother in the counting house and they went through the transactions for the previous week, balancing the cash taken and spent against the stock held. They had to file the licenses to show that ships with foreign goods for the legal quays had been permitted to unload at the little wharf. They had to file the double-stamped dockets that showed that duty had been paid. Johnnie was meticulous with the documents: the smallest question against any one of the sufferance wharves would lose them the permission to bring cargoes onshore and pay the dues.

  Livia put her head around the door and, seeing them both hard at work, laughed at their industry, and said that if she was to be neglected, she would take the baby and the nursemaid on her afternoon walk. They left the house together, and at the corner of Shad Thames the maid was surprised to see Sir James was waiting.

  “I brought Matteo with me for some good country air,” Livia explained to him as she strolled up. “It is not good for him to be indoors all the time. A baby should be in the fresh air, in the country. If only we could visit a house in the country!” She beckoned Carlotta to her side and lifted the white lace shawl from the baby’s face. “See him smile? He knows you!”

  “He’s very small,” Sir James said, looking at the tiny body in the trailing white gown.

  “Oh yes, for he’s so young! But you will see. He will grow. He will grow to be a little English boy, a strong, brave little English boy.”

  She turned away from her son and took Sir James’s arm. “Shall we walk together into the fields? I so love the country.”

  “Of course, if you wish.”