Tidelands Read online

  “And yet . . . well, it’s a very good match for your girl. Stoney Farm! Richard Stoney! You’ll be lucky if people don’t say that she trapped him into it.”

  “Nobody would be so unkind,” Alinor ruled. “It’s obvious that Richard loves her so much, and she him.”

  “Just that it’s such a good match for her,” Mrs. Miller grumbled. “Strolling out of a fisherman’s cottage and getting to Stoney Farm in one jump.”

  “There’s no denying that it’s a good match for her,” Alinor conceded. “But she’ll make a good wife to him. She has learned so much good housekeeping from you.”

  “She’s learned nothing today, but walking around the market and spending other people’s money.”

  “She’ll make it up to you,” Alinor promised, taking Alys’s cold hand. “And now we must be going.”

  “I wish you well,” Mrs. Miller said begrudgingly. “I wish you very happy.”

  “I know you do,” Alinor replied, and picked up her sacks of salt as Alys hefted the sack of wool and walked beside her mother out of the yard. She left the yard gate open for the carter to leave, and they went towards the ferry together.

  “I put the purse back,” Alys said nonchalantly.

  Alinor’s heart skipped a beat. “I thought you said you would do it in the evening. I thought you would come back, when she closes up her hens?”

  “Yes, but when I saw her come out to you to look at the lace, I knew I had a moment. I ran into the kitchen, pulled out the brick, popped in the purse, and put the brick back in a second. She’ll never know it was gone.”

  Alinor almost staggered with the relief. “So, it’s done, and you got away with it.”

  Alys beamed at her. “It’s done, and I got away with it.”

  “And you’ll never do it again,” Alinor commanded. “Promise me, Alys. It’s too great a risk. Never take anything from her again. Not even borrowing. You shouldn’t have done it this time. Promise me, you’ll never do it again. Think of the danger!”

  The girl laughed as though no danger could threaten her. “I’ll promise you that I’ll never be caught,” she said gleefully. “I’ll promise not to end up on the gallows. A fool like Mrs. Miller will never catch me, and soon I’ll have far more money than Jane Miller’s dowry. You wait till I’m Mrs. Stoney, of Stoney Farm, Birdham! I won’t keep my money in a chimney. I shall have my own box at the Chichester goldsmith’s! I shall be a woman of means!”

  TIDELANDS, SEPTEMBER 1648

  Alinor heard nothing from James all through the month of September, but she did not expect to hear from him, and she went through the dusty days at the end of summer with a languid sense of peace. She found that she trusted him, she believed that he would go to that place—that unimaginable and mysterious place—that he called his home, and the men he called his brothers would release him from his vows. Alinor, raised in a country where Roman Catholics had been banned for nearly a century, could not imagine what rituals and oaths James might endure to be free of his blasphemous past. She thought they might frighten him with threats of endless purgatory and drench him in wine like blood and force him to eat raw flesh. Tears came to her eyes when she thought of him facing the terrible mastery of Rome. But she trusted him to be brave and confident in that world that was such a mystery to her. He had said that he would do it, and she knew that he loved her and she believed that he would convince them that he must be freed.

  She was more afraid of the influence of his family, especially his mother, as she could imagine only too easily what a noble lady might say to her adored only son when he told her that he was leaving the priesthood with no greater ambition than to marry a deserted wife, a herbalist, a fisherman’s widow who made a living clinging to a muddy harbor in the tidelands of England. If the Stoneys—yeoman farmers—looked down on Alys, what would the aristocratic Summers say to her drab of a mother?

  James’s parents were sure to forbid him to return to her. They would disinherit him rather than let him throw himself away on a woman that they would accuse of being little more than a hedge witch: little better than a pauper. But then she remembered that they too were landless, they too were clinging to all they had left after six years of civil war, far from their beautiful home, in exile with a defeated queen. They were papists and cavaliers and utterly damned. They could not return to England: both their religious faith and their political loyalty were criminal. They had been far above her when their king was on the throne and their faith accepted, but now they were not. The unimaginable gulf between her and their son had been destroyed forever with the smashing of the altars, with the breaking of the contract between king and people, with the end of deference. While the king could be captured by a mere cornet of the army and end up in an ordinary house in Newport on the Isle of Wight, then Alinor and James were no longer at opposite ends of society with a gulf between them unbridgeable as the mire. His parents must know, as everyone now knew, that the world was changed, that the humble people of England had risen up and that the rulers were no longer in their palaces. If a working farmer like Oliver Cromwell could rule England, why should a fisherman’s widow not rise in the world and hope for better?

  “The prince has been defeated at sea and driven back to Holland. Have you heard?” Ned asked her one evening, as he sat before the cottage door and smoked his pipe to keep the biting flies from his face. His dog lay down in the shade of the bench and panted in the heat.

  Alinor brought him a cup of small ale and sat beside him to sip her own. She had the pole of her distaff pushed into her belt so that the hank of wool was as high as her head and, as she sat beside him, she plucked and twisted the thread with her free hand, keeping the spindle on the end of the thread in constant motion with little taps from her foot. The hank of wool was hot in her hand and greasy with lanolin.

  “I hadn’t heard. But I’ve seen no one since Chichester market. I’ve not been out of the brewhouse, or the stillroom or the kitchen. What’s happened?”

  “You and Alys are working all hours. Did you get a good price for that barrel of salted fish?”

  “Twenty shillings! From the grain trader ship. But what about the prince?”

  “I only just heard it myself. We never hear anything here. It’s as if we were under the waters of the harbor, not just beside it. But Farmer Gaston’s wife has a cousin come to visit from London, and he told me as I ferried him across the rife. You knew that the Prince of Wales had command of a fleet?”

  “Yes, I’d heard that,” Alinor confirmed, thinking of the man who had told her of the waiting fleet, of the chance for the prince.

  “Our navy, the parliament fleet, has chased him out of the Thames and all the way back to Holland. He won’t wait off our shores again.” Ned chuckled. “Must’ve been hoping his father would escape from Newport and that he’d pick him up at sea, take him to France. They must’ve thought that the king would break his parole and escape again. So that’s overset, too. The king’s ships’ve gone, and he’s trapped in Newport, the parliament men telling him how it’s to be, and nothing for him to do but agree.”

  “The king’s ships have failed him?” she asked.

  “Driven back to Holland. He’s got nowhere to go now,” Ned said with satisfaction. “He’ll have to agree with parliament and return with them to London. And I tell you, he’ll find a dusty welcome there.”

  “But what’ll become of him? And what about all the people who followed him? Those in France and Holland, those who went into exile with the queen?”

  “Who cares for them?”

  “It’s just . . . what will happen to them, I wonder.”

  “You know, I think they’ll reprimand the king,” Ned said thoughtfully. “I think they’ll take him to London and make him into a king like no one has ever seen before, a king who has to work with the parliament and the church, not one who’s set over it. I think they’ll give him back his house but not his throne. Maybe they’ll make him Mr. King!” He laughed at his own joke. “I