Tidelands Read online

  “Red’s missing,” Alys said as Alinor climbed cautiously aboard, the ferry rocking on the ebbing tide. “He didn’t come out to the pier this morning and he wasn’t in his corner at noon.”

  “Yes, I know,” Alinor spoke unguardedly. “Poor Red. I said good-bye to him this morning.”

  “You knew the dog would go missing?” the farmer’s wife demanded. “How did you know?”

  “She didn’t know,” Alys interrupted rudely. “It’s just an old dog and he was lazy getting up this morning. She didn’t know.”

  Alinor looked up, surprised at Alys’s harsh tone.

  “Nobody could know such a thing,” Alys ruled.

  The farmer’s wife remarked that sometimes she had premonitions herself, and her mother had been a terrible one for dreaming. “And of course your grandma had the sight,” she reminded Alys.

  “Not us,” Alys declared roundly, bringing the ferry to the pier as Alinor got off, and turned to help the woman off the ferry. “We don’t believe in stuff like that. Good night!” she called. “See you tomorrow.”

  “I did know about Red,” Alinor remarked mildly as Alys tied the ferry up and came up the steps.

  “I know you did; but we can’t say things like that,” Alys said abruptly. “Not even to Mrs. Bellman. Anyway, I suppose he’s under a hedge somewhere,” she said.

  “We’ll look,” Alinor promised her. “And I have an egg for your tea. A dove egg.”

  “Lord, she exceeded herself!” Alys exclaimed. “How lucky are we? Two tiny eggs! She’s spoiling us. You go that way, I’ll go this. We’ll find him.”

  The dog was not far from the house. He had gone quietly, as wise old dogs do, to die alone. It was Alinor who found him, as she knew she would, curled as if he was asleep; but his coat was cool and his nose was cold and his eyes were shut.

  “The ground’s too hard for us to bury him,” Alys said. “What’ll we do? It doesn’t seem right to burn him, or put him on the midden.”

  “I’ll dig a hole in the soft mud of the mire,” Alinor said. “You go and start dinner. I won’t be long.”

  She took a shovel from the lean-to in the fruit garden and went out on one of the little shingle paths that led out into the deep mire. It would be flooded at high tide, but now, as the moon came up and the cold wind blew across the water, it was dry enough for her to walk along and to dig a deep hole in the soft mud at the side of the track.

  When the pit was broad enough and deep enough she took the stiffening body, which now seemed so small and light, and laid it in the bottom of the hole. She knew that Ned would ask her if his dog had been properly buried, and that he would trust her. She filled the grave with shingle from the path to keep the body deep under the moving silt of the harbor floor. “Good-bye, Red,” she said gently. “You’re a very good dog.”

  She shoveled a pile of silt and went to tamp it down when a glint of silver caught her eye, bright as a star in the dark night sky. She knelt down and found a tiny coin, shaved and thin but twinkling brightly in the mud. It was faerie gold, a coin from the old people, from the old days, with a crest on one side and a crown on the other, too rubbed and worn to be deciphered, too old to be recognized, too light to be valuable.

  “Thank you,” Alinor said to Red. She accepted without a second thought that this was his burial fee, which he had sent to her from the other side, a country as far away and as misty as the distant side of the mire. “God bless, good dog. Godspeed.”

  She put the coin in her pocket and the shovel over her shoulder, and she went heavily up the freezing shingle path to where the lights of the ferry-house gleamed over the cold waters.

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, JANUARY 1649

  The two men went through the crowded streets, stepping over the dirty gutters in the cobbled ways, picking their way down muddy lanes till the great walls of the palace were before them and they could see the soldiers of the New Model Army on guard before the gates. There was a small crowd outside the gates, looking towards the gray carved stone walls and the snow on the slate roof.

  “Where is the king housed now?” James asked, keeping his voice down.

  “In St. James’s Palace. They’ve called a hundred and thirty-five judges to London to sit in a high court to try him. But I swear half of them won’t dare to come. And even if they do, he won’t answer to them. How are they even going to get him into court?”

  “But if they come, and if he answers—”

  The nameless man interrupted him. “He won’t,” he insisted. “By what rights can they summon him? You can’t summon a king. Nobody’s ever summoned a king. Would his father, King James, have come to the parliament whistle? Would Queen Elizabeth have trotted obediently along? No country in the world has ever called their king into a court. No English monarch has ever obeyed parliament.”

  James nodded; it was incredible that the conflict between king and parliament, which should have been resolved on the first battlefield, or at least at Newport, had come so quickly to this unimaginable state. “But suppose they do,” he said. “Have they named a day and a time?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I get the names of the judges?”

  “You can get the names of those who were called. But nobody knows who will come. They won’t know themselves. More than one will be sleepless tonight, trying to decide what he should do.”

  “Is it possible that none of them will come, and the trial collapse?”

  James’s guide spat into the frozen gutter. “The devil knows. It’s his idea, surely. But I would think Noll Cromwell will be there, wouldn’t you? And men who are faithful to him, and those that go beyond him?”

  “The trial is open to the public?”

  “Yes, but don’t think you can burst out of the crowd and save him. He’ll be so closely guarded, no one will get near him. They’ll be expecting a rescue attempt. They’ll take no risks.”

  “The best time to get him away would be when he comes from his rooms at St. James’s to here at Westminster.” James was thinking aloud. “Probably by barge . . .”

  The man ducked his head. “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. And I have no opinion.”

  “I have none either,” James said. “I’m whistling in the dark. Let’s get the names of the judges.”

  TIDELANDS, JANUARY 1649

  At dawn, the late cold dawn of January, Alinor woke to hear the cracking of ice and the sound of horses splashing through the cold waters as a carriage skidded down the wadeway and forded the ebbing tide. She rubbed the frost flowers off the inside of her bedroom window and squinted to her left. In the half-light she could see the lumbering bulk of the Peachey carriage.

  “Alys! The Peachey carriage is going over the wadeway,” she said to the girl still sleeping in the bed behind her.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Alys replied, unmoving. “He doesn’t pay.”

  “I wonder if Rob is with them. And where they’re going.”

  “To London, I expect, chasing after the king, like everyone else.”

  “They’ll have left Rob at the Priory then,” Alinor said. “Surely, they wouldn’t take him?”

  The rattle of the front door answered her. “That’ll be him now!” Alinor said gladly. She called down the ladder stairs: “Is that you, Rob?”

  “Aye, Mother,” he shouted cheerfully. “I’m to stay with you till Candlemas and then Mr. Tudeley is to take me to Chichester. I’m to go to Mr. Sharpe, the Chichester apothecary. My term starts with him then.”

  Alinor tied her shawl around her thickening waist, and climbed down the stair. She hugged Rob and stepped back to admire him. “I swear you’ve grown again.”

  “In the three weeks since Christmas Day?” he teased her.

  “You’re becoming a man,” she said. “Think of you going as an apprentice!”

  He dropped to his knee for her blessing and when he rose up he asked, “Have you breakfasted?”