Tidelands Read online

  She flushed a little under his attention. “It’s not easy for me,” she reminded him. “Everything that I have, whether it is respect, or hams in the chimney, I have worked for. Every penny of my little savings I’ve worked for. Years of money I have saved up. Jane’s dowry is ready, for the first good husband to offer for her. You don’t find me without a penny to my name! But where does Goodwife Reekie get her money from? Her own husband swore she had faerie luck; perhaps he spoke true for once. How can she buy a boat if not by some double dealing? I tell you one thing: whenever she has something to sell, my husband buys a dozen of them—as if he needs lavender bags!”

  James managed a false laugh, as if he thought the Millers’ grudging generosity to Alinor was funny; and unwillingly, Mrs. Miller smiled too. “Ah, well,” she said, recovering her temper. “No one is more charitable than me to our poor neighbors. I pride myself on my Christian spirit.”

  James nodded his head approvingly. “It does you credit,” he praised her. “A woman so great as you in the neighborhood must show compassion to those who have less.”

  “Was it Mr. Tudeley who chose her boy to be server to Master Walter?” she lowered her voice. “I thought it must be him.”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “But why would a man like him, his lordship’s steward, give a boy like Rob such a chance?” She slid a sideways glance at him. “I trust and pray that she has not played tricks on Mr. Tudeley. They say she can . . .”

  James maintained a discouraging silence.

  “. . . summon,” she said: an odd ambiguous word.

  “Rob was chosen for his skills in the stillroom,” James repeated. “And because he’s a very clever boy.”

  She hesitated. “I know she’s a good woman. I had her myself to the birth of my boy. But times are changing and if she can’t get a license for midwifery what is she to do? She might be an honest woman now, but what of the future?”

  James glanced up and found Alinor’s dark gaze was steadily fixed on the two of them, watching them as if she could hear every spiteful word. He could not smile reassuringly while Mrs. Miller was pouring poison into his ear.

  “Surely the only reason she cannot get a license from the bishop is because there are no bishops in the new parliament?”

  “Aye, that’s what she says,” Mrs. Miller said grudgingly. “But everyone knows she’s lost more than one poor woman, dead in childbed. Her own sister-in-law . . .”

  “She would get her license if they were being issued?”

  “But they’re not! And so she has no license! And anyone can say anything against her.”

  “Does anyone actually speak against her?” James asked. He longed to have the courage to add: “other than jealous wives and women with half her looks?”

  “It’s only natural that they should. With men being such fools, and her in and out of the house when a wife is laid up. And her looking—” she broke off. She could not bring herself to acknowledge Alinor’s luminous beauty. “Like she does,” she said lamely.

  “I hadn’t noticed,” James said firmly.

  “You had not? I thought you went fishing with her?”

  James was horrified that he was part of the gossip whirling around Alinor. “No, I took Master Walter in the boat with Robert,” he corrected. “She rowed.”

  “And the rest of it,” she said coarsely.

  He looked at her, his eyes cold, thinking that he must silence this woman at once. She must be stopped from gossiping, or sooner or later the parliament spies would hear of his stay at the Priory, and they would suspect him, Sir William, and the whole ring of conspirators. “There is no rest of it.”

  “I know full well that she cooked your catch on the beach.”

  So he had been spied on; but he could not know how much this woman knew about him and his cause. “She did,” he said levelly. “Just as Mrs. Wheatley would cook our dinner at the Priory. I don’t think Master Walter and I could undertake to be our own cooks.”

  She recoiled from the familiar scorn of a gentleman silencing a vulgar woman. “Yes, of course, excuse me, of course, I understand.”

  “Sir William would not like any sort of gossip about Master Walter’s companion,” he said.

  She nodded, but she could not resist going on: “But you understand that she’s a poor woman; she’s not fit company for the lord’s son, nor for you. How did you even meet her?”

  “We hired her when Master Walter wanted to go fishing,” he said, denying her to protect his own secrets.

  “Because her own husband said she had faerie luck, and that her children were born beautiful and without pain.”

  “He said that?”

  “Born, like faeries, in silence and laughed with their first breaths. I wish the best for her, poor thing,” she said. “I don’t begrudge the lavender bags. It’s a pity that she has fallen so very low. But you have to remember that she is a cottager, little better than a pauper, and from a long line of wisewomen.”

  “Midwives and herbalists,” James corrected her.

  “Who knows what they do? And I can’t stand the daughter.”

  James took a slice of ham as the platter was returned to him, keeping his eyes down so that he did not look at Alinor. He felt nothing but nausea at the feast, and revulsion for the Millers.

  “No, I imagine you can’t.”

  As soon as dinner was done, all the women helped carry the dishes to the farm kitchen and scrub them clean, while the men lifted the heavy table from the trestles and cleared the yard for dancing. A couple of barrels and a door made a raised dais for the fiddler and the tabor player, and they played for the old circle dances, men on the outside, girls inside, dancing slowly one way and then another, a little pulling this way and that, as boys and girls positioned themselves so that they were opposite their desired partner. Alys took hands with Richard Stoney and they processed through the archway of upraised arms as if they were dancing on their wedding day. He was a lanky brown-haired boy with a merry smile, and he never took his eyes from the tall blond girl at his side.

  Alinor watched him and glanced over to see the proud beam of his mother, and thought that next week, or the week after, she should walk over to the Stoneys’ farm and see what dowry they were wanting from a daughter-in-law. Richard was their only son—they had no other children—the farm would be inherited by him. They could look for a far wealthier bride than Alys, but they would not find a prettier girl in all of Sussex. They were indulgent parents, and if she was Richard’s choice, then they might agree to a down payment now on betrothal, and more over the next few years as Alinor earned it.

  James was trapped with the Millers, watching Master Walter and Rob as they joined in the circle. The dancers laughed and twisted and turned as the fiddle ripped out an irresistible tune. Alinor knew that it was impossible for James to break free from his hosts and dance like his pupils. All the godly men and their wives had gone home as soon as dinner was over—a minister of the reformed Church should do nothing more than watch the first dance and then leave—but she could not stop herself thinking that perhaps he would come to her. For a moment, she fell into a dizzy imagining of him taking her hand and leading her into the circle. She thought of the swell of envy that would follow them, of the familiar flush of jealous rage on Mrs. Miller’s cheek, of how the young women of the parish would whisper behind their hands that of all the girls he could have chosen, of all the young wives he could have honored, of all the plump matrons who would have swooned as they took his hand for a country dance—of everyone—he led out Alinor Reekie, the tall, willowy, excessively beautiful Alinor Reekie, who cast down her eyes like a modest woman and then looked up and smiled at him like a woman in love.

  Alinor was so absorbed by this reverie of social triumph that she had a little jolt of surprise when she saw James standing before her. The coincidence of daydream and reality overwhelmed her. She was certain that he had come to ask her to dance, that despite everything he would take her han