Tidelands Read online

  “No. My father is a baronet. Not that it matters.”

  “But I’ve thought of you all this time as James Summer. Is your given name not James? How shall I call you anything else?”

  She was so ridiculous, so frivolous, that he grabbed her by the shoulders and at once, she jerked back to avoid a blow, following an old lesson that a shaking was followed by a blow, and if she let herself be knocked to the ground she would get a kick to the belly or in the face. At once he released her, horrified, dropping his hands from her shoulders and spreading them wide as if to show that he had no weapon.

  “Don’t!” he said. “For Christ’s sake, don’t! I’m not that brute. I wouldn’t hurt you. Forgive me, forgive me! But I can’t make you hear me! Alinor, you must listen to me.”

  “I’m listening,” she said, recovering herself faster than he could do. “I’m listening. But I can’t do what you ask.”

  “Forgive me . . .” He was trying to calm the furious thudding of his heart. “It has been a terrible month, a terrible year. The very moment that I met with my parents—and they were so angry—we learned of the arrest of the king. So I couldn’t leave my seminary, as I was preparing to do, but had to go back into royal service. Since then I’ve been in London and The Hague, and then to London again, trying desperately—you have no idea—meeting with men who had no hope, asking for money from paupers, asking for them to act when they dared not, sending messages and getting no reply and now—God forgive us—now he is dead, and it is all over, and we have lost worse than we ever lost before, and I have to listen to your brother taunting—”

  “Ned didn’t taunt you.”

  “He did. You don’t understand. It was between men. It was about our country, our war.”

  “My war, too,” she observed. “My country, too.”

  He took a swift step away from her to the gate as if he would fling himself out of the gate and down the road, in a rage. “This is not the point! You aren’t listening to me!”

  She stood as still and silent as a deer when it scents danger but does not know what is coming. She stood as innocent as a deer, as intent as a deer scenting the wind. He stepped back towards her, his fists clenched at his sides, and fought to find the words to explain. “You have given me a terrible shock. I don’t know what to say.”

  A barn owl with a great spread of white wings flew along the hedgerow of the lane towards them, lifted clear of the bushes, and disappeared into the field on the other side of the garden. James saw how she watched it, as if it was warning her of something, and he thought that it was impossible for a man like him—an educated man, a spiritual man—to understand a woman like her, in a place like this.

  “What?” he demanded, and she turned her gaze back to him.

  “I was just watching the owl,” she said quietly, knowing that he was irritated but not knowing why. “I was attending to you. I was just watching her.”

  “You’re cold,” he said, but it was he who shivered. “And Ned will be wondering where you are.”

  “He knows where I am. I told him I was shutting up the hens.”

  He had to bite his tongue on his irritation. “What I mean is, we can’t talk now. We can’t talk here. We must talk tomorrow. We must meet tomorrow somewhere and talk. Where will you meet me?”

  “I have to take Rob to Chichester tomorrow.”

  Again, he bit the inside of his mouth and tasted blood. “Can’t Edward take him?”

  “Oh, no!” She was shocked that he would suggest it. “I want to see Rob’s master and his home, and where he will work. Mr. Tudeley will pay over the money. I have to sign Rob’s indentures. They will accept a woman’s signature. I have a good name in Chichester.”

  He tried to be calm. “Yes, indeed. Then I will come to Chichester and meet you there.”

  She nodded without speaking, and opened the garden gate for him to leave. He was astounded by her calmness.

  “Alinor, we must be together, we must be lovers again. I will make you my wife. I will give you my name—my real name. You will become accustomed! I love you, I want you. More than anything in the world. You are all that I have left! I have lost everything else. You are all that is left for me.”

  She nodded, saying nothing.

  He thought her unnaturally serene while he was sweating with a mixture of anger and frustrated desire. “Where shall we meet?”

  “The Market Cross?” she asked. “Before noon?”

  “I’ll be there. Nobody knows of this, do they?” He jabbed towards her belly with his hand. “You’ve not told anyone?”

  She lied to him, for the first time, before she had even thought of it. “Nobody,” she said.

  “Then it will be all right,” he tried to reassure her, though it was he who looked panicked. She was as cool as the sickle moon.

  “It will be all right,” she agreed through pale lips, and she closed the gate on him and turned back to the frozen garden. As he walked away he heard her speak softly to her hens, in the same gentle tones as she had used to soothe him.

  Alys wanted to walk to Chichester with her mother and Rob, see Rob’s new employer, collect some more wool for spinning, and perhaps even buy a ribbon to trim her wedding dress.

  “It’s only the Monday market,” Alinor said discouragingly. “The ribbon stall is far better on Saturday. And the wool merchant is bringing wool and leaving it here, when he comes next week.”

  Alys made a face. “Anyway, I suppose I should go to work at the mill,” she said.

  “You should,” Alinor agreed.

  “I’d almost rather work the ferry than spend the day with Mrs. Miller.”

  “You could ask your uncle Ned to take his turn in the dairy?”

  Unwillingly, Alys laughed.

  “Ah, she’s not so bad,” Alinor told her daughter. “And it’s baking day today. The other women will be there for the firing of the oven and you can bake us a loaf.”

  Alys wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and tightened her apron at her broad waist. “I’ll go to Stoney Farm when I’ve finished work. I’ll have my dinner there, and walk back here later,” she said.

  “Yes, yes,” Alinor said absently. She went to the foot of the stairs and called Rob and heard his answering shout.

  “Help me with the copper into the scullery for Rob.”

  The two women slid the pole through the carry rings and lifted the copper filled with hot water to the center of the room, then Alinor kissed her daughter and saw her out of the front door, turned to the foot of the stairs, and shouted for Rob again.

  He came downstairs in his shirt and stripped naked, and washed himself, using the gray soap as Alinor poured jugs of hot water over his shoulders and over his head.

  He stepped, long-legged as a calf, out of the water onto a little mat that Alinor put before him, and rubbed himself down with a linen sheet. He sat, wrapped in the sheet on a stool before the fire, as Alinor trimmed his thick brown hair and rubbed it dry with her own mixture of olive oil and apple vinegar and then combed it through with a lice comb. Rob dressed himself in the clean linen that they had given him at the Priory, and a pair of breeches belonging to Walter Peachey.

  “Eat some breakfast,” Alinor urged him, and put some bread and small ale before him on the kitchen table.

  When he had finished, he lifted the copper with her and carried it back to the scullery. “Shall I pour it away?” he asked her. “It’s heavy for you.”

  “I’ll wash down the floors with it later,” she said. “Leave it there.”

  Alinor had bought him good secondhand hose in Chichester market and he could still get into the shoes they had given him for Christmas at the Priory, though they were tight across the toes. He had a secondhand jacket which once belonged to Walter.

  Alinor stroked the thick wool of the sleeve. “It’s very fine,” she said.

  “It’s nothing. It’s his old one, his second-best. He wore velvet to go to university.”

  “I am sorry . . .” sh