Tidelands Read online

  There was little chance, James thought, that his mother, Lady Avery, would join such a court, to serve an uncrowned king. His father would never compete for office or duties with corrupt adventurers, and if they were not appointed by the king in exile, why would they stay in exile? They would come home, James thought. They must come home to Northallerton in Yorkshire and James would be able to return with them to his own fields, to his childhood home, and feel the cold winds blow off the moors again, and hear the cry of the peewit as it tumbled, spade-winged, in the clear sky.

  He would present Alinor to his parents as the woman that he loved and intended to marry, and surely they would allow him to live with her, in a new house that he would build, perhaps in the fields below the great house: perhaps a small house, a manor house, set in a walled garden for her herbs, with a fruit orchard. He would present her to the village and the parish as his wife, acknowledging that they could not yet be legally married, but calling her his betrothed, and demanding for her the respect that an Avery commanded in the manor of Northside. And he was certain that, though people would gossip behind their hands, though his mother would disapprove, in a world of such momentous change in which everything was turned upside down, and a middling farmer from Cambridgeshire was running the country, the fact that the future Lady Avery was not yet married to the son and heir would quickly become old news.

  All he had to do, James thought as the road wound over the height of the South Downs, so pale and gray and misty in the bitterly cold morning, was convince Alinor to leave her little fisherman’s cottage, her beloved daughter and her adored son, and come north with him. Confidently, James thought he could do that. She could bring her daughter and son, if she wanted, if that was the price of her coming. Or they could visit. Or anything, James thought passionately, any condition she wanted to make. If she would only come to him.

  TIDELANDS, FEBRUARY 1649

  Ned, Rob, Alinor, and Alys walked along the bank at the side of the harbor, past Alinor’s old cottage and net shed, through the quickthorn tunnel, dropping down to the shingle beach, bending their heads beneath the low boughs of the overhanging oak tree, then climbing up the rough steps cut out of the sea wall to the footpath to the church. The rumbling of the millstones across the mire and the rush of the millrace water sounded loud on the cold air, and Alinor glanced back as if she feared that the waters were rising up after them. Ned helped the two women over the stile into the churchyard and they went silently in single file along the path that wound through the gravestones. Ned and Alinor paused before the plain stone that marked their parents’ burial site.

  “I wish he could have lived to see this day,” Ned said of his father. “He would never have believed it possible.”

  Alinor bowed her head in silence. “I miss her,” was all she said.

  The four of them turned and went into church, Alys and Alinor going up the stairs to the wooden gallery where the workingwomen of the parish stood in silence, Ned and Rob stood at the left of the nave where the men of the parish waited bare-headed for the Peachey household to enter and Sir William to take his seat. Only when the nobility arrived would the service to God take place. Ned muttered to Rob that nothing would ever change in the tidelands, no matter what took place elsewhere.

  There was only one chair: his lordship’s, placed before the chancel steps like a throne. Walter was in Cambridge, and there were no guests at the Priory to sit in the Priory pews. The household stood behind the empty seats. Alinor, looking down from the gallery on his lordship’s beautiful dark felted hat trimmed with a dark feather and a silver pin, as he processed slowly into church, wondered if he missed his son, or if he had heard anything from his son’s former tutor. She knew that she could never ask him, nor anyone of his household. She tightened her thick winter shawl over her round belly, and watched the minister step towards the lectern, bow low to his lordship, and begin.

  The service—the new service, as designed by the parliament and delivered by the Church that obeyed them—went through the usual prayers and readings. But when it came to the sermon the minister looked at the men at the back of the church and said, “Edward Ferryman, are you there?”

  “Present!” Ned replied with the promptness of an old soldier at roll call.

  “Would you tell us what you have witnessed in London, so that we may all know what has befallen the king who betrayed his people?”

  The men either side of Ned parted to make him a path to the chancel steps. He came cautiously forward.

  “I was not party to any councils or explanations,” he said. “I can only tell you what I saw.”

  “The view of an honest man. The report of an honest man is all we want from you,” the minister assured him, and some of the more godly parishioners said: “Amen.”

  Alinor found she was holding her hands tightly under the shelter of her shawl. She did not know what Sir William would make of Ned’s report; she did not know if Ned might, with this encouragement, overstep the line of deference. Rob glanced upwards over his shoulder, to the gallery where his mother stood, and she knew he would be thinking the same thing. His apprenticeship in Chichester did not start till the next day. His chance could be blighted before it had even begun.

  Ned walked to the minister and then turned to the people in the church. He bowed slightly to Sir William, who gestured that he should speak.

  “King Charles was put on trial for eight days,” he said. “I was present from first till last. I was there on the first day in Westminster Hall, when they brought him in.”

  Alinor saw Sir William shift slightly in his seat.

  “There were more than sixty judges sitting to hear how the king answered the accusation of tyranny and betrayal of the people,” Ned went on.

  The door at the back of the church opened for a latecomer, but no one turned at the gust of cold air. The congregation was completely attentive to Ned’s story.

  “The king did not speak as they read the charges, and when he did speak he refused to plead guilty or not guilty.”

  “Why?” someone called out. “Why would he not speak up?”

  “He spoke,” Ned specified. “He spoke. But he would not plead.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know for certain,” Ned admitted. “It was a lawyer’s argument.”

  There was a quiet rumble of disapproval. “But why didn’t they let the king answer?”

  “It was he that would not speak to them. They called witnesses against him, in a smaller room, but he did not even attend. Men who had seen him on the battlefield taking arms against his own people. They had many witnesses for that. I saw it myself.”

  “May I speak?”

  Everyone in the body of the church turned to the doorway to see the latecomer, but he was standing beneath the public gallery and neither Alinor nor Alys could see who it was.

  “I, too, was at the trial. I, too, have come directly from London.”

  Alinor recognized his voice at once, cramming her fist against her mouth so she did not cry out, biting her fingers against the sudden wave of faintness.

  “Who is it?” Alys nudged her mother.

  “I don’t know,” Alinor whispered.

  He walked up the central nave of the church, the collar of his dark traveling cape set square on his shoulders, the hem of it brushing the tops of his polished riding boots. Alinor, looking down from the gallery, could see only his hat, and when he doffed it, his dark curly head. She could see nothing but his assured stride to the chancel steps and the swirl of his expensive cape.

  “Is that you? Mr. Summer?” the minister asked.

  James bowed to Sir William and then stood before the minister. “It is I, James Summer, tutor to Sir William’s son, Walter. I was in London for business, and I attended the trial of the king. Now I am here for a brief visit to Sir William. I should be happy to tell you what I understood and add my witness to that of Edward Ferryman’s.”

  The preacher made a gesture, inviting James