Tidelands Read online

  James’s mother rose from the table and looked out of the window again as if the little market square in the small provincial town had anything to interest her. “Don’t speak like that,” she said quietly. “Not while James is risking his life.”

  “Has he escaped?” James asked his father very quietly. “I heard he was to ride away, that there was a ship waiting for him. Is he safe?”

  His father shook his head. “It didn’t happen. The plot was discovered.”

  “Hardly surprising,” James said sourly.

  His mother turned back from the window. “Don’t be bitter,” she said quietly. “Don’t let these times spoil you.”

  “They have spoiled me,” James confessed. “I have lost my faith. Lost my faith in the cause, and lost my faith in God, too. But I suppose you know that? I suppose Dr. Sean sent for you? That is why you are here?”

  His father was too honest a man to lie to his only son. “They sent for us the moment you came in,” he said. “They said you had been brought very low. Is it your faith in the king and God that is troubling you? Or is there a woman in it too?”

  James hesitated, as his mother came to the table and rested her white hand on it, the beautiful lace from her cuff reflected in the polished wood. “You can speak in front of me,” she said. “I’m very sure I have heard worse over the last few years. We have been in a ragtag court in exile, with the morals of stable cats for long enough for me to hear everything.”

  “Are you spoiled?” James asked her with a crooked smile.

  “I’m hardened,” she admitted. “You can’t tell me anything new.”

  “There is a woman,” he confessed. “A workingwoman, not a lady, but she is very beautiful and very brave and very . . .” He tried to think of a description that would do justice to Alinor. “Interesting,” he said. “She’s interesting. She is a herbalist, but quite uneducated. She is a simple woman but she has her own mind, her own thoughts. She lives—” He broke off, thinking that he could not describe the hovel at the side of Foulmire, and the ferry-house and the army brother. “She lives very simply,” he said, avoiding a description of her poverty. “But she saved my life the night that she first met me, and took me into hiding.”

  “Her family?” his mother prompted.

  “She has two children: a boy and a girl.”

  Her aghast face told him of his mistake.

  “I didn’t mean that! I meant to ask: is she of a good family?”

  “She has children? She’s a widow?” his father asked.

  James answered his mother first. “She has a little standing in her village, with her neighbors. There’s gossip—but there’s always gossip in these poor little places, you know that! Her husband has gone. He’s probably dead. They are poor people.” He hesitated, looking from one to another. “I’m not explaining this well. They don’t have land, or a family, or a name.”

  He looked at his mother, as if willing her to see the mire as he saw it, a place of eerie beauty, and Alinor as a woman of the place, strange and beautiful too. “They are not people like us,” he tried to explain.

  “But she did at least have a husband? She was married once? She’s not a—”

  “No! Her parents are dead but she has a brother. He’s a good man.”

  “Did her husband die in the war?” his mother asked. “On our side?”

  “Er, no . . .” James said awkwardly. “He’s just missing.”

  “She’s a deserted wife?” his mother asked. “Abandoned?”

  “Yeoman stock?” his father asked hopefully. “This brother? Has he got his own land? Or is he a tenant farmer?”

  James shook his head, forcing himself to be honest. “He keeps the ferry. They have the tenancy to the ferry and the ferry-house, and they grow vegetables and trees and keep hens in an acre behind the house. They sell ale out of the window. They’re poor people, sir, on poor land, on the very edge of England as it turns into sea. It’s marshland, tidelands, neither one thing nor another. And it’s true to say, she owns almost nothing. She was given a few shillings for bringing me to safety and she used it to buy a boat.”

  He did not know that he was smiling at the thought of the boat and the courage of the woman he loved. “It meant everything to her. She fishes from the boat, and sells her catch. She said—” He broke off as he realized that he could not tell them of her joke that saving him was of the same value as catching a fat salmon. “She grows herbs and makes physic. She’s a healer and a midwife in the little village. It’s a little fishing village, very poor.”

  His mother was blanched with horror. “A fisherwoman?” she repeated. “A midwife? Like a cunning woman?”

  “Yes,” he said steadily. “She’s no grander than that.” He turned to his father. “But she saved me when I had nowhere to go. And then, later, she nursed me when I was near to death, when anyone else would have locked the doors and abandoned me, for fear of plague. But she chose to stay with me, and be locked up with me. And I have asked her to marry me.”

  His mother gave a suppressed moan and put her hand over her mouth, closing her eyes.

  His father’s face was dark. “This is not what we planned for you,” he said shortly.

  “Sir, I know it. But we did not plan a world like this.”

  “We are exiles and all but penniless. We’re defeated in this world, but we have not sunk so low that you can break your vows to the Church to marry a village midwife with a brace of lowborn children.”

  “I am sorry, sir. I am sorry, Lady Mother.”

  She shook her head, her hand shading her eyes, as if she could not bear to look at him.

  “We allowed you to go to the Church,” his father said begrudgingly. “That was not easy for us. We gave up all hopes of grandchildren and a daughter-in-law then. That was your choice. You said you had a calling and we believed you. That was the hardest thing I ever did—to give up my only son to the Church. And now you tell us that was for nothing? And we are to give you up again? But this time, for something of no value at all? For a woman who—by your own description—is valueless?”

  James heard the rising volume of his father’s anger. “I know. I know. You were good to let me go to the Church. I longed to be in the Church then. I was certain. But . . . going back to England, and seeing the defeat of everything that we believe and the king so—”

  “The king so what?” His mother rounded on him in a cold fury. “Is all this—all this!—because you have discovered that the king is a fool? I could have told you that ten years ago!”

  Her husband moved his hand to silence her but she went on. “No! I will speak. The boy should know. He knows already! Yes! The king is a fool and a cat’s-paw, and his son is two parts a villain. But still he is the king. That never changes! And you are a priest, and that never changes. Whether he is a good king or a bad one, that never changes. Whether you are a good priest or a bad one, that never changes! Just as your father is and always will be Sir Roger Avery of Northside Manor, Northallerton. It never changes. Whether we live there, in our house, or not, whether it is overrun with rabble or not, whether you live there or not. It is still our name, it is still our house. England never changes and neither will you.”

  There was silence in the little room. Sir Roger looked from his son to his wife.

  “Did the woman accept you?” he asked as if it were a matter of secondary interest.

  “Whyever would she not?” Lady Avery demanded angrily. “D’you think she would prefer to stay where she is? In nowhere? Half drowned in the tidelands?”

  James raised his head. “No, she did not. She said it was not fitting.”

  “She’s right!”

  “Did she really say that?” his father asked, interested.

  James nodded. “Yes, I told you she was unusual. But I said that I would be released from my order, that I would ask you if we might pay the fine to parliament and return to Northside, and that I would ask your permission to marry her, and bring her to our home as my wi