Tidelands Read online

  He had surprised her with his vehemence. “You’ve never spoken of this before.”

  “My nephew was never apprenticed to the service of a royalist lord before!” he exclaimed angrily. “With the king held, but plotting as if he’d never lost a battle, and cavaliers up in arms all around the country, the Scots coming down on us, the Irish raising troops! Have you heard the news from Essex?”

  She shook her head. “Only what the minister said.”

  “They’ve declared for the king, the fools. The army’s had to march on Colchester and set a siege against royalists.”

  She looked aghast. “They’ve never started fighting again?”

  “And the ships of the parliamentary navy have gone over to the king. We’ve lost the admiral’s own flagship and half a dozen others.”

  “What will they do? Will they sail into London?”

  “Who knows what they’ll do, the traitors? Ship in the Irish? Rescue the king from the Isle of Wight?”

  “Oh, Brother, don’t say it’s war? Not again.”

  “It’ll be war forever until the king agrees to make peace, and keeps to his word,” Ned predicted. “He says one thing to parliament and then sends for the Scots and the Irish. Even the Welsh. The army should take him themselves, force him to swear peace, and then make him keep his word.”

  “I thought he was in prison at Carisbrooke Castle?”

  Ned shook his head in disgust. “He’s holding court as if he were at Whitehall. He drives in his carriage all around the island, visiting the lords and ladies as if he were newcome to his throne. They say that he’s welcome everywhere he goes. He never stops writing his letters and planning his escape. I thank the Lord that the commander of the castle is Robert Hammond. He’s a good man. I know him myself; he had his own troop in our army. At least he can be trusted to keep the king safe, and in the end, I swear we’ll put him on trial for making war against his own people.”

  “On what charge? Wasn’t it parliament that rebelled against the king?”

  “He raised his standard first. He turned his guns on apprentice lads and clerks. He armed his lords and set them up on great horses to ride us down. He turned against us. You’re signing your boy up to the wrong side, Sister. Nobody is going to love a cavalier at the end of this summer, when they’re all defeated.”

  “I don’t want him on any side,” she said fretfully. “I just want him in a good place, and my daughter with a dowry, and a fishing boat to earn my own living.”

  He subsided and took a deep draft of ale. Red put his soft chin on his master’s knee. “Ah, I can talk. Talk is all I do now. For all that I marched and prayed and fought, as soon as Da died I came home to the ferryboat. I was on the winning side with my heart set on it, and now I ship a cavalier lord to and fro whenever he hails the ferry. And he never pays me a penny because the ferry is his, and I am his tenant, and he probably thinks the water of the mire is his too, the mud beneath it, and the sea beyond it.”

  “You had to come home.” She wanted to comfort him, her only brother and only neighbor. “And we’d have lost the ferry if you hadn’t, and the house and our livelihood with it. There were plenty who would have been glad to take Father’s place. In Sealsea alone were dozens. They would have been queuing at the Priory gates begging for the right to it. You kept it for us, and you kept our house too. And—as it’s turned out with Zachary gone—I’d be a beggar without it. We eat out of your kitchen, and we drink out of your brewhouse.”

  “Ah, it’s your home, not just mine. I don’t even want it. My troop is marching north against the Scots and I’m not there. I feel like a coward.”

  “You’re no coward,” she said fiercely. “It takes courage to do the right thing. And it was the right thing to come home and keep Ferry-house and the ferry in the family. Where would we be now, if we had lost it?”

  “We’d all be relying on you,” he said with a wry smile. “You and your new boat. But I did come home, and we’ve kept the ferry, and you don’t have to take a boat out if you can’t bear it. I know it’s the last thing you want to do, a woman like you.”

  She heard the echo of the words: “a woman like you in a place like this” and he was surprised to see her face light up, as he had never seen her look before, not since their childhood.

  “You say everything in the world has changed,” she said, and she did not sound fearful. “Perhaps I will change too.”

  TIDELANDS, JULY 1648

  Alinor walked with her boy on the seashore path to the Priory through a haze of midges and mosquitoes that rose as their steps crushed driftwood and dried reeds at the high-water mark. The tide was coming in; they could hear the bubble of the hushing well as they turned inland, away from the rising waters, across the Priory meadow, the haystacks as pale as straw in the late summer sunshine.

  She said: “You’ll come home on Michaelmas Day and I’ll see you every Sunday in church.”

  He was pale with fear. “I know,” he said shortly. “You’ve said it a dozen times.”

  “I’ll come to the kitchen and ask after you on Friday. You can tell the cook if you want to see me before then, and she’ll tell me.”

  “You said.”

  She nodded. “If you really don’t want to go, you don’t have to. We can manage.”

  “I’ve said I’ll go.”

  She turned the handle on the wooden door set in the flint wall and suddenly remembered leaving the priest, Father James, to hide behind the haystack while she spoke to Mr. Tudeley. The metal handle was warm from the sunshine, the timbers of the door dry to her touch, just as they had been on that day last month. She felt that she was wrong to think of that moment, of that man, when she was sending her own son into service.

  “Come on then,” she said, giving him a smile for courage, dismissing the day that a priest had looked at her with desire and said: “a woman like you.”

  They went through the garden, to the kitchen door. The cook looked up from the table where she was kneading an enormous ball of dough, floury to the elbows. “You’re expected,” she said. She looked Rob up and down. “Good lad,” she said. “You mind your manners here and this will be a great chance for you.”

  He pulled his hat off his head. “Aye, mistress.”

  “You say ‘Yes, Mistress Wheatley,’ ” the cook corrected him.

  “Yes, Mistress Wheatley,” he repeated.

  “Stuart will take you up,” she said, turning her head and shouting towards the hall. “Where is that man?”

  Stuart appeared in the doorway, a thin man dressed in the Peachey livery with down-at-heel shoes.

  “Look at the state of you!” she scolded, without any hope of improvement. “Take Goodwife Reekie’s boy in to Mr. Tudeley. He’s expecting him. In his room. And then come straight back here. You’re wanted to get the platters down.”

  He nodded to Rob and turned towards the door that led to the steward’s room.

  “Wait! Say good-bye.” Alinor caught her son as he was following obediently, without another word to her.

  He turned back to her, his face pale and closed, and dropped to his knee before her. She put her hand on his curly head in her blessing and then she bent down and kissed him. “Be good,” she said inadequately. She had no words for how much she loved him, how much she hated leaving him here. “God bless you, son. I will see you at church on Sunday.”

  He rose up, his cheeks red with embarrassment at the emotion in her voice, yet anxious not to reveal his own feelings, and picked up the little sack of his belongings. He had almost nothing: a change of linen, his spoon and his knife. He followed Stuart out of the door.

  Mrs. Wheatley laughed at Alinor fighting her tears as she watched her son leave. “Ah, give over,” she said kindly. “He’s not going to sea to fight against the prince. He’s not pressed for the army and marching into the wild North to fight Scotsmen.”

  “I thank God for it.”

  Mrs. Wheatley thumped the dough into a bowl and set it under a cl