Tidelands Read online

  “Don’t delay!” Alys warned him. “Don’t get your shoes muddy—go round by the bank!”

  “I shan’t be stolen by mermaids,” Rob teased her. “We’ll get there before you do!”

  Mr. Stoney clicked to his pair of horses and they headed south as Ned put the cover over the fire, shut the back door, and walked with Rob on the little paths across the flooded harbor to church.

  The whole parish turned out to witness the wedding of the pretty Reekie girl to the wealthy farmer’s son, many of them glad to see Alinor’s daughter doing so well, a few murmuring that it was a shame she was going off the island. Ned was known to everyone in Sealsea Island because of his long service on the ferry, and his father before him, and most of the women had consulted Alinor for their health or for the delivery of a baby. The marriage was an extraordinary upward leap for the family who had worked the ferry on the island for as long as anyone could remember, but everyone conceded that if any girl was likely to marry well for her looks, that would be Alys.

  There were a lot of comments about Rob as he took his place in the men’s pews at the back. Some people who had seen him in the summer processing to the front of the church with the Peacheys were glad to see him returned to a lowly place. But the young people, especially the young women, remarked on the difference between Rob their former playmate, son of the missing fisherman Zachary Reekie, and this new Rob, with his command of Latin, his apprenticeship in Chichester, and his well-cut jacket.

  Nobody remarked aloud that the two Reekie children had been blessed with extraordinary opportunities, given that they had been born in a fisherman’s cottage to a ferryman’s daughter and a wastrel father who was now missing. Nobody said that their good luck could only be something other than chance, charm, or ability. Nobody repeated the old story that they were faerie born, that their own father had sworn it, and that their good looks and good fortune were the gifts of their mother—a faerie concubine, beloved of the unseen world, and guided by it. But almost everyone thought: how else could the Reekie children be so undeservingly blessed? How else could their mother walk out of a violent marriage with her head high and not a mark on her? How else should Zachary so conveniently disappear? Nobody would say such a thing on Alys’s wedding day, but a number of people thought it, and glanced to each other, and saw that others were thinking it too.

  Alys was about to go into church and Alinor about to follow her when Mrs. Stoney delayed them at the church porch. “D’you have the dowry?” she asked. “You’re supposed to give it to me here.”

  Alinor halted, and turned to her daughter. Alys flushed a little, and reached into the pocket of her gown under her apron.

  “If it’s short you’d better tell me now,” Mrs. Stoney said harshly. “Before you go a step farther.”

  “It’s not short,” Alys said.

  Alinor tried to nod as if she were confident that Alys had all the money. They had worked all the hours at the mill, and spun, but even with the ferry money and Rob’s wages, she thought that Richard must have donated all his inheritance.

  Triumphantly, Alys handed over the purse, and Mrs. Stoney weighed it in her hand and then opened it and peeped inside. Alys’s face was like a sculpture in stone as she looked at her mother-in-law. The woman tipped the coins into her hand: gold crowns, silver shillings, no small coins, no coppers at all: a fortune.

  “You got it,” she said, as if she still could not believe it.

  “Of course,” Alys said.

  “Of course,” Alinor repeated.

  Mrs. Stoney tucked the purse into the pocket of her cape. “Then we can go in,” she said. “I’ll put this in our treasure chest at Stoney Farm tonight.”

  She turned and went into church, past the standing room for the workingmen at the rear of the church, and took a seat in a pew near the front, while the usual pew owner shifted up sulkily. Alys took her mother’s hand and went to stand at the back, waiting to be called up to the altar. Richard was waiting at the front of the church.

  “Next Sunday, that’s where I’ll be,” Alys whispered to her mother, nodding at Mrs. Stoney’s determined occupation of the prestigious front pew. “And you shall sit beside me. That’s worth scraping up for pennies, isn’t it? We’ll have our own pew.”

  “That wasn’t pennies,” Alinor said, still stunned that Alys had a dowry purse with the full amount.

  Her daughter smiled up at her. “Richard,” she whispered. “I told you he would not risk losing me.”

  The door of the church behind them opened, and Sir William strolled up the aisle of the church, nodding to his tenants left and right, showing no signs of mourning for the king he had lost and the defeat of his cause. His face was set in its usual lines of calm indifference. His eyes flickered over the men at the back of the church and he ignored Ned and other known roundheads. Behind him, as always, in order of precedence came his household; before them came his guest: James Summer.

  Alinor, standing with Alys, unnoticed at the rear of the church, closed her eyes. She felt herself go rigid as an iron bar on an anvil. She had not thought that James would still be at the Priory. It had not occurred to her that he would come to church for Alys’s wedding day. Alinor gripped the back of the pew against the falling sense of faintness. She bit her lip. She held herself as if she were a fragile thing that might crack and dissolve, as if she might be exhaled if she did not hold her breath.

  The minister announced the first hymn, the parish stumbled through an unfamiliar song with the musicians sawing away on tabor and fiddle. Alinor opened her eyes, came to her senses, and opened and closed her mouth as if she were singing too.

  Her heart was thudding with relief that she had not confided in Alys, who glanced without interest at the Priory household. Alinor thought that if her daughter had known that James was the father of the baby that she was carrying, and seen him walk past her without exchanging a glance, her shame and humiliation would have been unbearable. Alinor turned her head a little so her gaze was directed away from the Priory pew. Perhaps this was her punishment for foolishly trusting a young man who spoke of priceless love but lived inside an expensive world, who called himself mad for her but was all too thoughtful when it came to his future. Alinor realized that the hymn had finished and sank obediently to her knees for the prayers. There was nothing she could do to stop the man who had betrayed her from witnessing her daughter’s wedding. The best thing she could do was to try to share Alys’s joy in this day, and not let her own unhappiness distract her. Alinor closed her eyes and bent her head. She could not find words for a prayer; but she could only wish herself through her daughter’s wedding, and for the day to be over without betraying herself.

  James, at the front of the church, sensed Alinor’s presence behind him, and had to fight the temptation to glance back to see if she was looking for him. He had not thought that he could bear to walk past her; he did not think he could get through the long church service. He had forgotten that it was Alys’s wedding day, and it was of no importance to Sir William. The cook, Mrs. Wheatley, could have told him, and that she had baked a great cake to take to Stoney Farm for the wedding feast, but she did not know that he had any interest in Alinor. She would not have dreamed that he was shaking with desire as he knelt and laid his head on his hands, and prayed to God to keep him from sin and from folly.

  When the service was finally over, the minister did not walk to the back of the church to greet and reprimand his parishioners as usual. James waited impatiently for the Priory household to lead the way out of church and release him from this vigil—and then he realized that they were not leaving.

  “Today we celebrate a wedding,” the minister said. “Those of you not wishing to attend may leave. Please do not linger in the churchyard and don’t allow children to play around the tombstones.”

  There was a little murmur from the church wardens, who agreed with the minister, that the parish’s traditional use of the church as a gathering point was ungodly. “And those of