Tidelands Read online

  “Not yet,” he said, moving slowly above her. “That’s moonlight.”

  “No. It’s dawn. And I have to go back to my home today, and we have to tell Sir William that you are well.”

  He rested his head on her shoulder as he moved within her. “I can’t bear it.”

  “Can’t bear the pleasure or can’t bear the parting?”

  “Both. Can’t we say that I am still ill? Can’t we take another day? Alinor, my love, can’t we steal another day together?”

  “No. You know we can’t. Neither of us can come under suspicion.”

  “I won’t let you go.”

  She raised herself up to his kiss and her rich hair tumbled back from her face. “Let me kiss you once,” she said, “and then I’ll get up and get dressed.”

  He wanted to hold her, but she shook her head and he rolled away and lay back, gripping his hands behind his head so that he should not snatch at her, as she leaned over him and kissed him passionately on the mouth and then rested her forehead on his chest, inhaling the scent of him as if he were a rose beneath her lips. Then she peeled herself off him, as if she were shedding her own skin, and turned away, to pull her linen shift over her head so that the stiff fabric fell, concealing her.

  “I can’t do this,” he said quietly. “I really can’t be parted from you.”

  She said nothing, but stepped into her skirt and tied the laces at her waist with meticulous care, and then sat on a bench at the side of the room to pull on her woolen hose.

  “Alinor,” he breathed.

  “Let me dress!” Her voice was choked. “I can’t dress and speak. I can’t hear your voice and think. Let me dress.”

  He sat up in the bed in silence while she twisted her hair into a knot at the back of her head and pulled on her white cap, crumpled as it was. When she turned to him she was, once again, the respectable midwife of Sealsea Island; and the tranced lover of the night was hidden under the shapeless bulky clothes.

  “Now you,” she said.

  He started towards her and she put out her hand to fend him off. “Don’t touch me,” she begged him. “Just get dressed.”

  He pulled on his linen shirt. For the first time in his life he noticed what fine linen he wore, and he thought that the first thing he would do, as soon as he was well, would be to go to Chichester and buy her some beautiful shifts, as smooth as her flawless skin. He pulled on his hose, heaved up his breeches, stamped his feet into his riding boots, and turned to her.

  “I’m dressed,” he said. “Are you satisfied?”

  Her dark eyes in her pale face were huge. “No,” she said quietly. “I am longing for you again, already. But we have to be ready to face the world and the day.”

  He heard the echo of Zachary in the back of his mind: that she was a woman that no man could ever satisfy. He shook his head. “Where will you go?” he asked, as if she had anywhere to go but the poor fisherman’s cottage.

  “Home.”

  “I shall stay here for a few days and then I will have to go to London and then to my seminary,” he told her, trusting her with his secrets as he had trusted her with his sin. “But, Alinor, my love, it is all changed for me. I have lost my faith and failed in my mission. I have to go and tell them that, and I will have to confess, and then, I suppose, I shall have to leave. I will have to beg them to release me.”

  She looked alarmed. “You have to confess? You have to speak of this?”

  He grimaced. “These are mortal sins. I have broken so many of my vows. I have to confess. My loss of faith is worse than this, but I have to confess this too and face my punishment.”

  “Will they punish me too?” she asked.

  He could have laughed at her ignorance. “I won’t say your name,” he assured her. “They won’t even know where you live. They cannot report you.”

  “D’you have to speak of us?”

  “I have to make a full confession, great sins and lesser.”

  She wondered which was the greater sin and which the lesser. But she did not ask. She would not have claimed her own importance. “If you confess to them, mightn’t they keep you there?”

  “I don’t think they will want me,” he said desolately. “I have failed in everything they sent me to do. And I have lost my faith as well.”

  “But even so, mightn’t they keep you? Can they keep you? Can they make you stay there? Can they lock you up?”

  “They would not keep me against my will, I know that. But they will make it very difficult to leave. They will have to be convinced that I am sure. I can never go back, you see. If I leave, I can never return. They will see this as a betrayal of my duty and of my faith. And they have been father and mother and schoolmaster to me as well as my way to God. They will be sorry, as I am sorry.”

  She looked very grave. “You are sorry?”

  “But I will come back to you.”

  The flush on her face told him what that meant to her, but she shook her head. “Don’t come back for me,” she said quietly. “This has been everything to me, but you can’t come back here for me. I’m not fit for you. I couldn’t live in your world, and you’d never live in mine.”

  “But we have been lovers as if the world was ending!”

  “But it’s not ending,” she said reasonably. She found a little smile. “Outside, everything goes on. I’ve got to go back to my life, you’ve got to return to yours, whatever it turns out to be. Faith or no faith. King or no king. And even if everything’s changed for you, nothing changes for me. Nothing ever changes for me.”

  “Have I not made a change for you?” he demanded. “Are you not a woman of desire, as you said? Will you go back to stone?”

  She turned her head from him. “I won’t be dead to myself again,” she promised. “I won’t turn back to stone. But I wouldn’t survive long in my world as a woman of desire. I have to harden, or someone will destroy me.”

  “My family are in exile,” he told her, his voice very low. “My mother and father are in exile, our lands and houses sequestered—do you know what that means?”

  She shook her head.

  “My father was appointed by the king to advise the Prince of Wales,” he said. “When the prince went into exile, my father and mother went with him. Our lands were sequestered—that means taken by parliament, to punish us. My father and mother are now at the queen’s court in Paris. But if we left the royal courts, made an agreement with parliament, surrendered to them and paid a fine, just as Sir William has done, we could get our lands back, just as he has done. I could live in my family house. It’s in Yorkshire, a long way from here—a beautiful house and good farmlands. I could get it back; my mother and father could return to England.”

  “Would they want to?” she asked. “Would they want to live with a new minister in their church, and new men in power? Under a parliament, not a king?”

  He waved away her objection. “What I’m saying is that I could get our house back, I could return home. I’d be in England again, not an exile, not a spy, not in hiding.”

  She tried to find a smile. “I’d like to think of you living in your house with your lands around you. I’d look at the moon and know it was shining on you, as it was shining on me. I’d like to think of you at the water’s edge as the tide ebbed, while I stood on the tidemark in Foulmire.”

  “It’s a different tide, and anyway we’re inland,” he said, distracted by her ignorance. “But that’s not what I mean. I mean to say: I won’t leave you here. I would not return to my house without you. I will take you there, to my home.”

  She looked at him as if he were speaking Latin, as if he were quite incomprehensible. “What?”

  “Would you come with me to Yorkshire? Will you marry me?”

  “Marry?” she asked wonderingly. “Marry?”

  “Yes,” he said steadily. “Why not? If there is no king on the throne and no bishops in their palaces, if there is no royalty nor church, if all degree is leveled and there is neither master nor