Tidelands Read online

  Alys was in the line of binders, working alongside the other women laborers, following the reaping gang of men. Most of the men were stripped to the waist, their backs blistered from the sun, but the others, godly men, some of them puritans, wore their shirts modestly tucked into their breeches and tied at their sweating throats. The men were working in a line across the field in a punishingly hard rhythm: grasping a handful of wheat stalks, bending and slashing at the stalks with the sickle, straightening up and throwing the bunch behind them. Alys and other women followed them, gathering the cut stalks into armfuls, tying them with a twisted stalk, piling them in a heap for the wagon. Every so often Mrs. Miller or her daughter, Jane, came out of the house, crossed the yard, and stood at the gate to the field, her hand shielding her eyes, glaring across the field to make sure that the reapers were doing their job, and not leaving uncut wheat for the gleaners.

  Alys was pale with exhaustion, her hands and arms scratched from hugging the stooks, her apron filthy, her hair falling loose under her working cap, walking in the line with the other women, bending and gathering the cut wheat, straightening up, tying it, stacking it, bending again. She was working alongside women from Sealsea Island that she had known from childhood; but there were also day laborers come from inland, and half a dozen women were travelers, a harvesting gang that went from one farm to another through the summer. They were paid by the job, not by the day, and they set an exhausting pace that Alys had to match: she was struggling to keep up.

  Alinor waited at the gate and was joined by half a dozen other women who had the gleaning rights to the mill fields. They stood together, commenting on the richness of the crop and the heat of the day until Jane rang the bell in the mill courtyard and everyone in the field turned from their work to the shade of the hedgerow and the dinner break. The gleaners went into the field, some to meet husbands or children with their dinner. Alinor walked across the spiky stubble and wordlessly held out the pitcher of small ale to her daughter. Alys drank deeply.

  “Thirsty work,” Alinor said, looking at her beautiful daughter with concern.

  “Filthy work,” the girl said wearily.

  “Nearly done,” her mother promised her. “Come and sit.”

  The men gathered into one group, passing around flasks of ale, eating the food they had brought from their homes. The women gathered at a little distance. One woman untied a swaddled baby from her back and put him to the breast. Alinor smiled at her. It was one of the babies that she had delivered in the spring.

  “Is he feeding well?” she asked.

  “God be praised, he is,” the woman replied. “And I still name you in my prayers for coming to me in my time. D’you want to see him?”

  Alinor took the baby into her arms and gently pressed her lips to his warm head, marveling at the warmth of his skull, and the tiny plump hands.

  No one else spoke as they drank and ate their first food since breakfast. When Alys had finished the thick slices of bread and the last of the smoked fish, Alinor returned the baby to the young mother, and she and Alys shared the plums from Ned’s plum tree.

  “I’m surprised at you eating fruit in the sunshine, Mistress Reekie,” one of the women remarked. “Aren’t you afraid of the gripe?”

  “These are from my brother’s garden. We’ve eaten them every summer and never taken ill,” Alinor explained.

  “I’d never eat fruit with the sap in it,” one of the older women declared.

  “I stew most of them,” Alinor agreed. “And I pickle some, and make jam, and I dry a lot of them.”

  “I’ll buy two jars of your stewed plums,” one of the women offered. “And a jar of dried plums. We had your dried gooseberries at Christmas and everyone wanted more. How much’ll they be this year?”

  Alinor smiled. “Tuppence a jar, for them both. I’ll bring them to you with pleasure,” she said. “It’s been a good year for gooseberries too.”

  “I’ll take a pound of them,” another woman offered.

  The women stretched out their weary legs. Some of them lay back on the prickly stubble.

  “Tired?” Alinor asked her daughter quietly.

  “Sick of it,” the girl said irritably.

  The bell, warning them that rest time was over, clanged in the mill courtyard. Mrs. Miller was a strict timekeeper. The men got to their feet, cleaned their sickles, and started to walk to the mill yard. They would bring the wagon, fork up the stooks, and take them to the barn for threshing.

  Alinor handed a bag with a shoulder strap to Alys. The women who held gleaning rights on the mill fields formed themselves into a line at the foot of the field. They were careful to spread out fairly so that no one woman was given a broader sweep than another and they looked jealously down the line to see that no one was taking an advantage. Mothers and daughters, like Alinor and Alys, took care to stand wide apart to give themselves the maximum area. The line moved forward.

  Wearily, the women who had worked all day for cash, now labored for themselves, bending to the ground to pick up every fallen ear of wheat, even individual grains. In some strips an inexperienced reaper had missed a stand of wheat, or crushed it down as he stood, and there the gleaners could snatch handfuls of grains. Slowly, they moved like an advancing line of infantry across a battlefield, never getting ahead of each other, holding their advance, holding the spacing between them. Alinor, her eyes fixed on the ground, bending and picking, bending and picking, was almost surprised to come to the blackthorn hedge at the end of the field, and realize that they had finished. Her bag was filled with ripe pale heads of wheat.

  “Both ways,” one of the older women declared.

  Alys muttered resentfully, but Alinor nodded. Nothing should be wasted, nothing should be missed. “Both ways,” she agreed.

  The women changed the line, as well as turning the direction, so those who had been on the hedge at the left and those who had been on the extreme right were now at the center, so that no one would walk the same part of the field twice. Once again, they edged forward, their eyes on the ground, their hands snatching at heads of wheat, even scraping individual grains, pressing everything into their gleaners’ bags, some of them filling their upheld aprons. Only when they came to the hedge at the end of the field again did they straighten their backs and look around them.

  The sun was low in the sky, sinking into drifts of gold and rose clouds. Alinor looked at Alys’s heavy bag and her own. “Good,” was all she said.

  They walked together to the mill yard. Mrs. Miller had the scales out in the yard and was weighing the gleaners’ wheat, and marking the weight on a tally stick, as a record. Alinor and Alys tipped the contents of their bags into her scale and snapped off the few stalks. Mrs. Miller added weights on the scale until she said begrudgingly: “Three pounds two ounces.” Her daughter, Jane, marked the hazel stick with three thick gouges around one end and two small cuts at the foot and then sliced it in half with a little hatchet. Alinor took their half with a word of thanks, and put it in her bag. Jane Miller tossed the other into the tally stick box as a record of what the Reekie women were owed in flour, when the wheat was milled.

  “Bring some of your cordial when you come tomorrow for harvest home,” Mrs. Miller told Alinor, as she turned to weigh another gleaner’s load. “My back feels like it’s on fire, bending over this all day.”

  Alinor nodded. “I’m coming to glean in the afternoon. I’ll bring it then,” she said.

  The water in the harbor was low, the millpond brimming, gates gently bumping together, pushed shut by the dark weight of the water in the deep pond. As the weary women walked to the white-painted gate of the yard, one of the miller’s young men walked around the millpond wall, balanced like an acrobat on the top of the gates, the dark waters lapping below him. He shouted boldly: “Good night! See you tomorrow!” to Alys.

  All signs of her fatigue fell away in a moment. She could have been a princess hearing a tribute. She did not answer him, but she inclined her head, smil