Dark Tides

by Philippa Gregory

  “I understand,” Ned said. “You do get used to it, you know. I’ve never had neighbors. If you’re a ferryman you’re always on the water’s edge. Your house is on the land but your living’s on the water. It was like that for me in England too. And of course, back then, during the war, I was for the people, the common people, when everyone around me on the island or in the town of Chichester was for the king. I feel like I’ve always been out of step.”

  “You can’t be for the People now!” she said jokingly, using the name that some of the tribes used for themselves.

  Ned did not answer to the joke. “I don’t know who I’m for anymore.”

  “For us,” she told him, as if it were obvious. She looked up from her work, earnestly. “For the elect who make a new world here, for those who oppose the tyranny of the king, for this village, where we all have to do our work to keep the settlement safe, and strong, for Mr. Russell’s congregation. For your wife if you get one, for your family if you have one, for yourself.”

  “Yes,” Ned agreed. “Yes. Of course. Yes.”

  “You can’t have doubts, Mr. Ferryman,” she said flatly. “We can’t build a new country without being sure that we are God’s chosen people. I wouldn’t marry a man who had doubts.”

  “Yes,” Ned repeated. “Of course. Yes.”

  OCTOBER 1670, LONDON

  Livia met Sir James in the black-and-white marble hall of Avery House.

  “I was just going out,” he said, hat in hand.

  “I was just coming in to see if there were any letters for me,” she said, turning to the gilt-framed ornate mirror and taking off her hat.

  He could not help but think that hers must be the most beautiful face that the mirror had ever reflected. He paused for a moment to watch her as she regarded her own heart-shaped face with the dark wide eyes, removed the hatpin, stabbed it into the bonnet, and then her gaze turned to him and he looked away.

  “Are there any letters?” he asked awkwardly.

  “I don’t know,” she said with a smile. “I’ve only just arrived. I haven’t looked for them yet.”

  “They leave them on that table for you,” he said. “They don’t bring them to me.”

  “I know.” She was as self-possessed as if he were a visitor to her house and not the other way around. She moved with easy grace to the half table that he indicated, took the letters, and sat on the chair beside the table.

  “If you need to write, you may use my study,” he said. “There are pens, and paper.”

  At once she rose up and followed him into his study. He gestured that she might take the seat behind the great desk. It was tidy, but there was a closed ledger marked Avery House, and another marked Northside Manor, and a third marked Douai. Her quick glance flickered over all three but when she sat on the great chair and looked up at him, she was blandly uninterested.

  “Pen,” he offered. “Paper. If you leave anything that you want posted I can frank it for you.”

  “Frank it?”

  “I’ll sign the envelope and your letters go for free, under my frank, as I am a member of the House of Commons,” he explained.

  She inclined her head to hide her triumphant smile. “Thank you. If someone wants to see the antiquities again, may I invite them?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I can be here.”

  “I wouldn’t take up your time,” she said politely.

  “It would be no trouble, and… if they were acquaintances of mine it would be wrong of me, it would be impolite—not to be at home.”

  “How right you are!” she exclaimed. “People would wonder what I was doing here without you. I should be taken up for a burglar!”

  He did not laugh with her.

  “And so, shall we say a week on Tuesday?” she went on smoothly.

  He did not think she would suggest a day so near, but he bowed. “Certainly,” he said. “Of course.”

  Her smile was very charming. “And may we give them—I don’t know—tea? Or something?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll tell the cook to be ready.”

  “Oh, please let me,” she said. “You should not be worried about things like tea for the ladies.”

  “I do entertain.” He was nettled. “This is not a complete bachelor den. I am not a barbarian.”

  She made a little apologetic gesture with her black-mittened hands and placed them on either side of her face so that he looked, despite himself, at her warm rosy mouth. “I never thought such a thing,” she protested. “I wanted to spare you more trouble.”

  He nodded. “It is my wish to help you. Ordering tea is nothing.”

  She smiled and took up the three letters. “I am so pleased that we can do this together,” she said. “The warehouse family would never accept help from you, but this way, they don’t even know what you are doing for them. I am your gateway to helping them. We do it together. I have very high hopes that we might buy them a better warehouse upriver, in a cleaner part of town, and they might be happy.”

  “You’re generous,” he conceded, though there was something about her tone that grated on him. “And knowing that the money is going to them makes all the difference for me.” He looked out of the window at the garden that ran down to the river and then turned back to her. “I would like to buy the statue of the fawn. It looks so well out there.”

  She nodded, not at all eager. “Ah, you are the second person to admire it. Well, the third in truth. But I will sell it to you. At the discount we agreed.”

  “I don’t want the discount,” he said, a little irritated. “If you are going to buy a house for Mrs. Reekie, I want to contribute to that. Indeed, I should like you to let me know if I can help with the cost of the house, or the hire of the servants, or the cost of moving, or anything that she needs.”

  “You would have to give the money to me,” she specified. “They would never accept it from you.”

  “I understand.”

  “So, you would have to trust me with a large sum of money,” she pursued.

  “I do trust you, of course. I know your plans for the ladies are nothing but generous and good. I know that you love them.”

  “Just as much as you do,” she said quietly. “We can join together in our kindness to them. We will be partners.”

  He shifted his feet a little, as if he wanted to walk away from her talk of a partnership of charity.

  She saw it at once. “I’ll tell my buyers that it will be a week on Tuesday at three,” she said, and he bowed and left the room.

  When she heard Glib close the front door behind him, and the footman’s lazy stroll back to the servants’ stairs, she pulled the ledger marked Douai towards her and turned the pages. It seemed to be a list of donations credited to a religious house in France, a seminary for Roman Catholic priests. Livia guessed he was acting as a treasurer for his old school and she had no more interest in it. She put it precisely in its original position and opened the ledger marked Avery House. She widened her eyes at the cost of running a great house in London and pursed her lips in irritation that James should spend so much on candles while she had to scrape together shillings from the bottom of her traveling trunk and wheedle them from Alys.

  The Northside Manor book was longer and more complicated, showing rent from the farms, profits from sales of animals and goods, rent from the mill, from the bakery, from the brewhouse, and wages, gifts, and purchases. She did not understand at first that one page was costs and one page was profits, and that there was a balancing figure at the bottom of each page. She had never seen an accounting book like this before, and she looked bewildered, able only to see that there were large sums involved, and that James was, genuinely, very wealthy.

  A noise from the hall made her slam the book and push it away and bend over her own letters as Glib knocked on the door and asked if she wanted her messages delivered by hand.

  “I’ll leave them for Sir James to frank for me,” she said.

  Glib nodded. “That’s what h
er ladyship used to do.”

  “I know,” Livia said, waving him away. “That’s why I do it.”

  * * *

  On her return to the warehouse, walking through the hot dirty streets, Livia found Alys setting out to the coffeehouse for her regular noon meeting with captains and merchants who might use the wharf, as the wait for the legal quays was lengthening in these shorter days of autumn.

  “Shall I come with you?” Livia asked, taking her arm.

  Alys nearly laughed. “You’re dressed far too fine,” she said. “Nobody would talk with me if I walked in with you. They would think that I had risen in the world and was no longer interested in unloading apples for penny profits.”

  “I am too fine?” Livia asked, as surprised as if she had never considered her appearance before.

  “Far too beautiful,” Alys said, giving her a little push towards the front door. “Go and sit with Ma. She’s planning a great feast for Sunday to celebrate Sarah’s day of freedom. She will be a time-served milliner, and in December, Johnnie will be out of his apprenticeship too.”

  “Of course it is a pleasure to sit with your mother, but when will you be home?”

  “When I have secured next month’s business,” Alys said. “However long it takes.”

  “Spending hours on apples?” Livia teased. “But shall you see the Captain again? The one who went to Venice?”

  “Yes, he’ll be there. He’ll be going to Venice again.”

  “He is faithful?” Livia asked.

  “He’s always reliable.”

  “Ask him if he has room for some more antiquities,” Livia said. “The same sort of load? Say twenty crates? At the same price and terms? I’ll write out the directions again, he can go to my old steward and collect them.”

  Silently, Alys followed her into the warehouse as Livia helped herself to a pen and tore a page of paper from the back of the ledger to write her steward’s address.

  Alys did not take it, her face was flushed with embarrassment. She put her hands behind her back though Livia offered her the address. “I’m sorry, my dear, I am so sorry… but I can’t commission him. I don’t know how to say this…”

  “Whatever is the matter?” Livia asked, smiling.

  “I don’t have the money to pay him. I can’t commission him, until we earn.”

  Livia widened her eyes. “But surely, you don’t have to pay him until he returns? You only pay a little now?”

  “I have to pay half now, and we really don’t…”

  “Pay him his price now and when he returns I will have the money from the sale to pay him the second half. I will pay it myself. Don’t worry.”

  Alys hesitated. “We’ve never run the warehouse like that,” she said. “We’ve always had enough in the chest to pay for the whole bill, before commissioning anything.”

  “Allora!” Livia remarked gleefully. “And now you are living beyond your means, as you should, as we should, as I have always done. For we know that we are going to earn more than you have ever earned before! But we have to get the goods here before we can sell them! We cannot make money without spending money. We have to have more antiquities to sell and you have to pay the Captain to fetch them. What is the difficulty? Is there nothing in the cashbox at all?”

  “It’s pounds he wants, not shillings! I’ve got about fourteen pounds. I can just stretch to pay the first half, but I don’t have the rest.”

  “But this doesn’t matter!” Livia smiled and took Alys’s anxious face in both hands and kissed her on the mouth. “Send him out with your little savings, and when he returns I will have sold the antiquities and I will pay him. Be happy!” she told her.

  “It’s just that we never…”

  “You’ve never had such profitable trade before.”

  “It’s such a risk!”

  “No it is not,” Livia ruled. “You are trusting me, as we agreed. You have to trust me.”

  * * *

  Alinor, in her bright high room, was drawing up a list of Sarah’s favorite dishes for the feast on Sunday. She had prepared her a gift, a soft shapeless pillow stuffed with lavender and rosemary for repelling moths, catnip and chamomile for repelling fleas. “You press it in a bonnet to help it keep shape.” She showed Livia. “And it keeps out the moths. Her mother is getting her a hatbox, and we are going to hire a signwriter to paint her name on the outside in curly letters, like a proper milliner.”

  “But she can’t open her own business, can she?” Livia confirmed. “She’ll never have her own hatboxes?”

  “Ah no, we couldn’t afford to set her up in a millinery business. Rents are impossible, a millinery shop needs to be in the City. She will have to sign on as a senior milliner where she is now. She’ll stay for a year, and only then perhaps look for another position.”

  “It’s like slavery,” Livia exclaimed, who had been married younger than Sarah was now. “All she can hope for is a kind master. And what about Johnnie? Is he to be cast into slavery too, poor handsome boy?”

  “He completes his apprenticeship at Christmas, and then he’ll be a senior clerk. His great ambition is to be a writer for the East India Company—but we can’t introduce him.”

  “His merits are not enough? When he has served his time?”

  “No. It’s not merit—you have to know the right people and they propose you. Even the lowliest clerk has a patron. Johnnie will never get into the Company without a patron.”

  “What you need is a wealthy and well-positioned friend,” Livia observed.

  Alinor gave her a grave level look. “We don’t have one,” was all she said. “Johnnie and Sarah will have to make their own way in the world. Like their uncle Rob did.”

  “Ah yes,” Livia said, her hand on her heart at once. “My Roberto earned his success because he studied so hard and learned so much.”

  “He would not have given one word to that man that you call a friend.” Alinor was steely. “They parted in a silence that Rob would never have broken.”

  “He’s no friend of mine,” Livia said earnestly. She took Alinor’s hand and held it in her own. “I use his house, I use his name only to make our fortune,” she promised. “As soon as I can, I shall buy a house to show my goods and I will never see him again. You will never think of him again.”

  Alinor withdrew her hand. “I would not think of him now if you were not at his house every day,” she said quietly.

  Livia picked up the menu for Sunday. “But this is a feast!” she said.

  Alinor let her turn the conversation. “We celebrate so seldom these days. When I was a girl there were feast days all the time. Harvest home and Christmas and Midsummer Day and Easter, and the quarter days as well, and the saints’ days, Plough Monday and Beating the Bounds…”

  “Are they not all restored now?” Livia asked. “Now that the king has come back to London and everyone is happy again?”

  “They were country festivals. They can’t happen in the town.” Alinor looked out over the river as if she could see the long horizon of the mire and the procession of people going to the little church with flowers in their hats.

  “Would you like to live in the country again?” Livia inquired. “Roberto was always speaking of his home, and the tide coming in over the land. It’s what he loved about Venice—the marshes outside the city and the sandbanks and the reeds. He said it was like the country of his childhood, half sea and half water and never certain.”

  “He knew the lagoon?” Alinor asked. “He knew it well?”

  “Oh yes. He could have found his way blindfolded. He was always out on it.”

  OCTOBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

  It was a bitterly cold morning and Ned thought it unlikely that anyone from Hatfield, on the opposite bank of the river, would risk the ferry journey on the icy water even to attend the Sunday church service at Hadley meetinghouse. He heaped the embers of the fire under an earthenware cover and, smiling at himself for folly, he drew the little signs in the ashes th
at his mother had always made, to keep the house safe from an accidental fire in her absence. She had taught them to him and Alinor, and Alinor had taught them to Alys and Rob. He had no doubt that Sarah and Johnnie knew them too, and he wondered how far back in time the tradition stretched among the Ferryman family, and how many children, yet unborn, would be told that they—like the Pokanoket—could teach fire when to blaze, and when to lie quiet.

  He glanced round the sparse cottage, pulled on his thick winter coat, and gave his well-worn shoes a quick rub with his sleeve. He left his dog on the chain in the kennel. “No, you can’t come,” he told Red. “It’s too cold for you to wait outside, and happen I’ll visit Mrs. Rose after the service.”

  Red’s ears drooped and he went back into his kennel.

  “Back soon,” Ned told him as he turned up his collar and pulled his hat down over his ears and strode through the north gate and down the common lane to the meetinghouse. From every front gate and front door men and women and their children were walking towards the church, greeting each other, and calling children to order, quieter and more thoughtful on the Sabbath.

  Ned found himself alongside one of Hadley’s other single men, Tom Carpenter.

  “Good day to you,” Ned said. “Cold.”

  “Aye,” he returned.

  They walked in silence for a moment. “Will you not take the ferry out till spring?” Tom Carpenter suggested. “You won’t take a penny in fees.”

  “No,” Ned agreed. “It’s a fair-weather trade.”

  “Never going to make a fortune on that,” the man observed.

  “I know,” Ned said. “But I don’t need a fortune, I just want a living.”

  They were outside the meetinghouse; mothers were gathering their children. John Russell the minister came from his gate followed by his wife and children, Mrs. Rose, his housekeeper, behind them, and the three slaves behind her.