Tidelands Read online

  “You can go along the bank and see your mother if you like,” James said quietly to Rob as Ned hauled the ferry, hand over hand on the rope. “Walter and I will go on to the Priory. I can lead your horse.”

  Rob nodded.

  “Why, what’s the matter with you?” Ned demanded, hearing the dullness in James’s voice and seeing Rob’s drooping head. “Are you sick, Rob? Is there something wrong, Mr. Summer?”

  “Just weary,” James said. He had not known that the despair he felt in his belly was showing in his face. “I think we’re all weary.”

  “So the sight of the king did not cheer you?” the ferry-man remarked. “His touch did not cure you of all ills?”

  James reminded himself that nobody here knew that he had failed in his mission and the purpose of his life was wasted. “No. The boys liked to see him.”

  “You a royalist now, Rob?” his uncle demanded, as the ferry grounded on the bank.

  “No, Uncle,” Rob replied quietly. “But I was glad to see the king in person.”

  “And his coat!” Walter interpolated. “You should have seen his hat!”

  The boys led their horses off the ferry onto dry land.

  “Looks like he’s going to haggle on and on with the parliament men,” Ned said to James. “But I reckon the army will have something to say about any deal. He won’t wrap the army round his little finger, whatever tricks he plays on parliament. The soldiers won’t forgive him for starting the wars again, after we all thought we were at peace. The country’s turned against him like never before, for that. No one will forgive him that.”

  “I don’t know,” James said wearily, stepping ashore and pulling at his horse’s bridle. “God knows what they will come to, and what it will cost us all.”

  “You don’t take in vain the name of our Lord on my ferry,” Ned reproved him.

  “I apologize,” James said, through cold lips, leading his horse up to the mounting block, climbing into the saddle, and taking Rob’s reins. “My good wishes to your mother, Rob.”

  Alinor was striding along the bank path to Ferry-house garden to pick blackberries when she saw the silhouette of her beloved son against the afternoon sky, as he walked from the rife. He did not bound like a colt in the field, but walked as if his feet were heavy, his head down as if he were hurt.

  “Holloah!” she shouted, and ran towards him. As soon as she took him in her arms, she knew that there was something wrong. She sniffed at him like an animal scenting ill health: the different houses where he had lodged, smoke from different kitchens in his hair, a different starch in his collar, the smell of the sea and the salt of the harbor on his coat. Then she stepped back and looked into his face and saw how his shoulders were hunched, and his face turned down. “What is it, son?” she asked him gently. “What ails you?”

  “Oh, nothing, nothing,” he said dully.

  “Come home, come inside.” She led the way back to the cottage without another word, dimly understanding that he would not speak under the arching sky with the gulls crying and the sea lapping at the bank as if it were flowing inshore and would make all the world into tidelands.

  “Were you going somewhere?” he asked her.

  “Just to pick blackberries. I can go later.”

  She did not close the front door on the little room, but kept it open so that she could see his face in the bright afternoon light. He dropped onto his stool. He had sat there when he was a boy and cried for some small hurt. She wanted to hold him now, as she had done then.

  “Where’s Alys?” he asked.

  “She’s having her dinner at Stoney Farm with the Stoney family, and staying the night there. She’s fine. But what is it with you?”

  “I . . . It is . . . We met . . .”

  Inwardly, she cursed the priest who had taken her boy from his home, over the seas, and brought him back speechless with distress. “Are you hungry?” she asked him, to give them both time.

  “No!” he exclaimed, thinking that she could not waste her bread on him, that it would be hard for her to earn it when everyone knew that she was an abandoned wife.

  “Have a cup of ale, then,” she said gently, and went to the jug and poured them each a cup. Then she sat beside him, and clasped her hands in her lap to keep herself still. “Tell me, Rob. It’s probably not that bad. It’s never as bad—”

  “It is bad,” he insisted. “You don’t know.”

  “Tell me then,” she said steadily. “So that I do know.”

  “I saw my da,” he said quietly, his face downcast. “At Newport, on the island. He had a ship, he’s master of a coastal trader. It’s called the Jessie.” He snatched a quick look at her face. “Did you know?”

  “No, of course not, I’d have told you.”

  “He could’ve come home to us months ago,” he said. “But he didn’t.”

  She gave a little sigh. “This doesn’t shock me,” she promised him. “Nor hurt me, neither.”

  “I saw him, and I called his name, and he saw me and he ran,” Rob said, his voice quavering a little. “I didn’t think it at the time, but now I think that he knew me at once, and ran from me. But I went after him like a fool, and Walter and Mr. Summer after me.”

  Now she flushed, a deep humiliated blush that rose from her neck to her forehead. “Master Walter and Mr. Summer were there, too?”

  “Course they were! They met him.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “Awful. We all went with him into an inn, a small dirty place where he had a slate. I think Mr. Summer paid foreverything. And he said he’d been pressed by the navy, the parliament navy, and escaped from them when they went over to the prince, and then he got a passage on a coastal trader. He said he’d come to breakfast with us the next morning, but he didn’t. He went on an errand for Mr. Summer and never came back. We thought we might see him in Cowes, but though I went down to the quayside he wasn’t there, and they hadn’t seen his boat. Mr. Summer says that he won’t come back here.”

  With one hand shading his eyes so he did not see her face, he stretched out his other hand and she gripped it tightly.

  “I don’t even know there was an errand,” he said, his palm clamped over his eyes. “It may be that they lied to me, thinking I was a child, thinking I am a fool. Maybe he just ran away, and Mr. Summer lied for him.”

  “This isn’t your fault.” She felt that she could wail with pain that anyone should turn from Rob, that his own father should run from him. “This is the fault of the man that Zachary is, not the boy that you are. He can’t live with me: p’raps that’s my fault. But it’s nothing that can be blamed on you. You’ve been a son that anyone would be proud of, and Alys a daughter that anyone would love. Zachary cannot live with me, nor I with him. But that’s our fault. It doesn’t fall on the two of you.”

  “Did you ever think he’d come back?”

  “I didn’t know,” she confessed. “As the months went on, I thought it less and less likely, but I didn’t know. Just this Midsummer Eve I went to the graveyard in case his ghost was walking, so that I’d know for sure that he was dead. God forgive me, Rob, I was hoping he was dead so that we wouldn’t have to think of him anymore. When I didn’t see his ghost, I knew he must be alive, and was choosing not to come home to us. But it’s still not your fault, Rob.”

  She felt a pulse of shame that she had met the priest in the graveyard when she should have been undertaking a vigil for the ghost of her husband, and now he had met Zachary, and they had spoken together of her. She could not imagine what Zachary might have said. If he had repeated the wild accusations he used to make—of her taking faerie gold for whoring in the other world, of her witchcraft and unmanning him—she would be shamed before James Summer forever. If he had convinced James that Ned’s wife had died because Alinor was negligent or worse: murderous; then she might face questioning. She closed her eyes at the shame and the danger that Zachary could still bring her. They sat side by side, both blinded with distre