Tidelands Read online

  “Is Da home?”

  “No,” she said flatly. The perennial question no longer gave her a pang of grief for her son. “Not today. Get dressed.”

  Obediently Rob sat on the edge of the mattress and pulled his jacket on over the linen nightshirt. He pulled up his breeches and tied them with laces to the jacket. He would go bare-legged and barefoot to his work today. He was crow-scaring at Mill Farm after morning school. He sat up at the table and she poured gruel into his bowl.

  “No bacon?” he asked.

  “Not today.”

  He took up his spoon and started to eat, blowing on each mouthful and sucking it loudly. She gave him a cup of small ale; no one at Foulmire ever drank the water. She turned back to the bed, sat on the edge, and touched her daughter’s shoulder.

  Alys rolled over and opened her dark blue eyes to look at her mother as if she were part of a haunting dream. “Did you go out?” she asked.

  Alinor was surprised. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I heard you come in.” The girl sighed as if she were about to sleep again. “In my dream.”

  “What did you dream?”

  “I dreamed you met a cat in the churchyard.”

  The two of them were intent. “What color?”

  “Black,” the girl said.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. That was all. You stood before him and he saw you.”

  Alinor thought of this, held it in her seer’s vision. “He saw me?”

  “He saw you, he saw everything.”

  Alinor nodded. “Don’t speak of this,” she said.

  The girl smiled. “Course not.” She pushed back the covers of the bed and rose up, standing tall at her mother’s shoulder, her fair hair in a plait down her back, her skin Saxon-pale. She turned to her pile of clothes at the foot of the bed and pulled on her skirt of felted wool, dried mud crusted on the hem, and a patched shirt. She sat on her stool at the table to wash her face and hands and then took the bowl to the door and threw it over the herbs outside.

  Alinor took her stool beside her children and clasped her hands. “Father, we thank thee for our daily bread,” she said quietly. “Keep us from sin forever and ever. Amen.”

  “Amen,” they said in a chorus, and Alinor served her daughter and herself, leaving a portion in the pot.

  “Can I have that?” Rob asked.

  “No,” Alinor said.

  He pushed back his stool and knelt on the floor for her blessing. She put her hand on his matted curls and said: “God bless you, my son.”

  Without another word, he took his cap from a hook behind the door, pulled it on his head, and opened the door. The sound of seagulls crying and the salty morning air poured into the darkened room. He went out, banging the door behind him.

  “He’ll be early for school,” Alys remarked. “He’ll be playing football against the church door again.”

  “I know,” Alinor replied.

  “You look strange,” the girl told her mother. “Different.”

  Alinor turned her face to her daughter and smiled. “In what way?” she said. “I’m the same as yesterday.”

  Alys saw the deceit in the way her mother’s eyelashes veiled her gaze. “You look as you did in my dream. Where did you go?”

  Alinor gathered up the empty bowls and stacked them on the table. “I went to the church to pray for your father.”

  The girl nodded. She knew very well it was Midsummer Day. “And did you see him?” she asked, very low.

  Alinor shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “So perhaps, he’s still alive? If you didn’t see him, then he’s not dead. He could still come home.”

  “Or perhaps I have no sight.”

  “Perhaps that. Perhaps you met a black cat and he truly saw you.”

  Alinor smiled. “Don’t speak of it,” she reminded her daughter. She thought of the priest, waiting for his gruel in the net shed. She wondered if he had truly seen her, like the black cat of her daughter’s dream.

  The girl ran her fingers through her thick fair hair and pushed it back from her face, then pulled her cap over the golden plait. She sat down to put on her boots. “I wish to God we knew,” she said irritably. “I don’t miss him, but I’d like to know I can stop looking for him. And it’s not fair on Rob.”

  “I know,” Alinor said. “Every time a ship comes to the tide mill quay I ask for news of him, but they say nothing.”

  The girl lifted up a boot and poked her finger through the hole in the sole. “I’m sorry, Ma, but I need new boots. These are through at the toes and the sole.”

  Alinor looked at the patched uppers and the mended soles. “Next time I have money, next time I go to market,” she promised.

  “Before winter, anyway.” The girl pulled on her worn boots. “I might bring a rabbit home tonight. I set a snare yesterday.”

  “Not on Sir William’s fields?”

  “Not where the keeper ever goes,” she said mischievously.

  “Bring it home and I’ll stew it,” Alinor promised, thinking of the extra mouth to feed if the priest did not leave till the evening ebb tide.

  The girl knelt before her mother and Alinor rested her hand on the tender nape of the girl’s neck. “God bless you and keep you safe,” she said, thinking of her daughter’s young prettiness, and the miller and his men who watched her as she crossed the yard and joked of the husband she would have in a few years’ time.

  The girl smiled up at her mother as if she knew her fears. “I can fend for myself,” she said gently, and went out, shooing the hens out of the door and out of the gate so that they could pick their way down to the shoreline.

  Alinor waited till she heard the crunching sound of footsteps on shingle recede, as her daughter walked along the shore to the ferry crossing at the rife. Only when she could hear nothing outside but the calling of the seabirds did Alinor spoon the warm gruel into the spare bowl, her missing husband’s bowl, and take his carved wooden spoon and his own wooden cup filled with small ale, and carry them back along the bank to the net shed.

  She tapped at the door and went in, ducking her head below the crooked lintel. He was asleep, sprawled over the nets, his good woolen cape spread under him, his beautiful curling hair tumbled around his face. She observed his pallor, and the dark long sweep of his eyelashes, the sleeping strength of his body, his chest and arms and the length of his legs in the expensive riding boots. Nobody would take him for anything but a stranger, foreign to this impoverished island off the south coast of England. One glance would tell anyone that he was a nobleman. He was as out of place, sprawled on the stinking nets in the ramshackle shed, as she would have been among the silks and perfumes of the king’s court, in the old days, when the king had a court in London.

  She thought it was disrespectful to wake him, but then the cooling bowl in her hand reminded her that if she left the gruel beside him and he woke to found it cold and congealed he would be nauseated. So she bent down, put the cup of ale on the floor, and gently shook the toe of his boot.

  His eyelashes flickered at once and he opened his eyes and sprang to his feet in one movement. “Ah! Goodwife,” he said.

  She held out the bowl and the mug of small ale. “Gruel,” she said. “I know it’s not good enough for you.”

  “It comes from you, and it comes from God, and I am grateful,” he replied. He put the bowl and spoon and mug on the floor and he knelt down and spoke a long whispered grace in Latin. Alinor, not knowing what to do, bowed her head and whispered “Amen” as he finished, though she had been told by the minister—they had all been told—that God did not speak in Latin, that God spoke in English and should be addressed in English and that everything else was a sham and a heresy and a papist mockery of the truth of the Word.

  He sat cross-legged on the nets as if they were not crawling with vermin, and he ate the gruel like a hungry man. He scraped the wooden bowl with the wooden spoon and drained the cup of small ale.

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