Tidelands Read online

  Alinor, knowing that Mrs. Stoney would have seen her at Chichester market with a blackened eye, with a bruised cheek, shook her head. “I’ve no complaint against him and I know that he is coming home,” she said steadily. “We disagreed sometimes, like many a husband and wife—nothing out of the ordinary. Zachary signed up for a voyage with a coastal trader, and then we heard that he had been pressed into the navy. Then the navy went over to the prince. But I don’t doubt that when the peace comes, the sailors and the soldiers will be released, with their back pay and prize money. I don’t doubt that he will come home then.”

  She kept her face very still, expressionless, and thought that she had promised James that she would tell everyone that Zachary was not coming home, and that she was a widow, and now here, the very next day she was declaring the contrary. But there was nothing she could do about it now, while Alys was holding the floor of the room and lying like a mountebank.

  “And his pay,” Alys added. “Who knows what pay he’ll bring home? If he’s captured a ship he’ll be rich!”

  “So he’s serving with the prince now?” Mr. Stoney seized on another problem. “We’re a parliament household, here.”

  Alys shook her head. “We don’t know what ship he’s on. He might be on the ships that stayed loyal to parliament. My father’s a parliament man, like my uncle Ned. You know my uncle Ned!”

  “We’re a parliament household too.” Alinor struggled to join the conversation, tried to drag her eyes away from the old red leather purse.

  “Then shouldn’t they delay marrying till he returns?” Mr. Stoney turned to Alinor. “If he’ll come home when there’s peace, and the parliament are talking to the king right now?”

  “Perhaps—”

  “No!” Alys said quickly. “That wouldn’t be right at all. My da gave me his savings to use for my dowry so that we didn’t have to wait for him! He told me not to delay my wedding. And there’s no way of knowing when the king will agree to peace.”

  Alinor nodded, but found she could not speak.

  “So is it enough?” Richard pressed his father. “If we both work without pay on the farm, and give you our wages from everything else? It is enough with the dowry? Zachary Reekie’s dowry?”

  The farmer looked at his son, and decided in his favor. “It’s enough,” he ruled. He picked up the purse, hefted it in his hand, judging the value from long experience. He pulled open the drawstring and peered inside at the coins of gold and silver. “Sixty pounds—I didn’t expect it; but yes, it’s enough.”

  “We could have got more,” Mrs. Stoney reminded him stiffly.

  “We could.” He smiled at his son. “But I’d rather see you happy.” He handed the purse to Alys with a warm smile. “I’ll give you this back now,” he said, “as I should. And you give it to Mrs. Stoney at the church door on your wedding day, with your mother’s savings, and with your wages between then and now, and Richard will give you a ring and his word. It’s agreed. You’ll have your share of the farm on his death, and your seat at this fireside for all your life. And your son will have the farm after Richard, and his son after him.”

  Alys burst into tears as Richard pulled her into his arms and kissed her. Mr. Stoney rose to his feet and kissed first Alinor and then the weeping girl. Mrs. Stoney put her hand on her son’s head in blessing and then kissed Alys.

  “So that’s that,” she said to Alinor begrudgingly. “He’d set his heart on her, and she pulled a dowry out of her pocket that no one would ever have dreamed. You’d think he was enchanted.”

  “Yes, yes . . .” Alinor was lost for words, still stunned at the sight of Jane Miller’s dowry purse in Alys’s hands. Alys palmed it back into her pocket without looking at her mother.

  “And your son doing so well!” Mrs. Stoney said, allowing herself some warmth. “Apprentice to an apothecary in Chichester! What a start for a young man!”

  “Yes,” Alinor said. She realized she was nodding, still speechless. “Yes.”

  “How ever did he get a place like that?” Mrs. Stoney invited her to explain.

  “They like him at the Priory.” Alinor found her lips were so stiff that she could hardly form the words. “He’s been companion to Master Walter and they paid for his apprenticeship. He’ll start when Walter begins at the university. They call it the Lent term.”

  “Shall we have a glass of wine? And will you take your breakfast with us?” Mr. Stoney urged hospitably. “Now we’re to be family? And I’ll show you round the barns and the orchards, Mrs. Reekie, and I daresay you’ll want to see the herb garden.”

  “Yes, please,” Alinor said faintly. “I would like that. I would like that. Thank you.”

  The two women waved good-bye to the Stoney family, and walked together in silence up the road to Chichester. Alinor felt a gripping pain in her belly, which she thought was fear, and had the taste of sickness in her mouth, which she knew was dread.

  The farm was half a mile behind them and out of sight before Alys spoke. “Say something. Please say something.”

  “Are you mad, Alys?”

  “I know! I know! I must be!”

  They walked a few more steps in silence, then Alinor felt Alys’s cold hand creep into her own.

  “Help me, Ma.”

  “How can I? This is a hanging offense. This is theft.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “It’s Jane Miller’s dowry, isn’t it? In her mother’s red leather purse?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Put the purse back. I just had to show it. I’m not going to steal it. I’ll earn what I need for my wedding day. I’d never steal for it.”

  “It’s only six months away! We’ll never earn enough. We wouldn’t earn enough in six years. And if Mrs. Miller goes to her hiding place and finds Jane’s dowry missing, she’ll turn the mill upside down and accuse everyone. You and me first. Alys, how could you!”

  “I’ll get it back in hiding before she misses it. But I have to marry him.”

  “Because you’re lovers already?”

  The girl gave a little gasp, which was a confession in itself. “Because I love him so much. I’d rather be hanged as a thief at Easter than lose him now.”

  “I would not!” Alinor cried out. “I’ve spent my life trying to keep you safe and now you’ve lain with a man before marriage, and stolen—” She cut off her cry and dropped into a whisper though they were alone under the wide sky, and the empty track stretched north ahead of them.

  “I haven’t stolen. I’ve borrowed. He loves me. And she won’t catch me. It is worth the risk.”

  “You think that now . . . you’ll think differently later.”

  “I do think this now. So I acted now.”

  “You’ll change. You’ll look back and this’ll seem like madness to you. And you’ll think I was mad not to stop you. I was wrong not to stop you. I should’ve taken the purse off you, the moment you brought it out.” Alinor choked on the rising bile in her mouth. “I thought it was my purse! My red leather purse filled with nothing but my little coins! I thought I was going mad.”

  “Then I would have lost him. You heard them.”

  “Even so. Better to lose him than—”

  “I knew you wouldn’t go against me, Ma. I knew you’d never let me down.”

  “I shouldn’t have gone along with you. This is a hanging matter, Alys. If you’re caught with that purse on you, they’ll hang you for a thief.”

  “They won’t catch me. I’ll put it back. But I swear to you, that if I can’t marry him, I will die. If you forbid me, I’ll run away. If he were to leave me, I’d drown myself in the millpond.”

  Alinor thought that she was the last woman in Sussex to argue against a desire that was more than life itself. How could she blame her daughter for doing nothing worse than she had done? Alinor had risked her life, going into the locked room above the stables with James, and since then she had lied to everyone.