Tidelands

by Philippa Gregory

  “Is Da home?”

  “No,” she said flatly. The perennial question no longer gave her a pang of grief for her son. “Not today. Get dressed.”

  Obediently Rob sat on the edge of the mattress and pulled his jacket on over the linen nightshirt. He pulled up his breeches and tied them with laces to the jacket. He would go bare-legged and barefoot to his work today. He was crow-scaring at Mill Farm after morning school. He sat up at the table and she poured gruel into his bowl.

  “No bacon?” he asked.

  “Not today.”

  He took up his spoon and started to eat, blowing on each mouthful and sucking it loudly. She gave him a cup of small ale; no one at Foulmire ever drank the water. She turned back to the bed, sat on the edge, and touched her daughter’s shoulder.

  Alys rolled over and opened her dark blue eyes to look at her mother as if she were part of a haunting dream. “Did you go out?” she asked.

  Alinor was surprised. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I heard you come in.” The girl sighed as if she were about to sleep again. “In my dream.”

  “What did you dream?”

  “I dreamed you met a cat in the churchyard.”

  The two of them were intent. “What color?”

  “Black,” the girl said.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. That was all. You stood before him and he saw you.”

  Alinor thought of this, held it in her seer’s vision. “He saw me?”

  “He saw you, he saw everything.”

  Alinor nodded. “Don’t speak of this,” she said.

  The girl smiled. “Course not.” She pushed back the covers of the bed and rose up, standing tall at her mother’s shoulder, her fair hair in a plait down her back, her skin Saxon-pale. She turned to her pile of clothes at the foot of the bed and pulled on her skirt of felted wool, dried mud crusted on the hem, and a patched shirt. She sat on her stool at the table to wash her face and hands and then took the bowl to the door and threw it over the herbs outside.

  Alinor took her stool beside her children and clasped her hands. “Father, we thank thee for our daily bread,” she said quietly. “Keep us from sin forever and ever. Amen.”

  “Amen,” they said in a chorus, and Alinor served her daughter and herself, leaving a portion in the pot.

  “Can I have that?” Rob asked.

  “No,” Alinor said.

  He pushed back his stool and knelt on the floor for her blessing. She put her hand on his matted curls and said: “God bless you, my son.”

  Without another word, he took his cap from a hook behind the door, pulled it on his head, and opened the door. The sound of seagulls crying and the salty morning air poured into the darkened room. He went out, banging the door behind him.

  “He’ll be early for school,” Alys remarked. “He’ll be playing football against the church door again.”

  “I know,” Alinor replied.

  “You look strange,” the girl told her mother. “Different.”

  Alinor turned her face to her daughter and smiled. “In what way?” she said. “I’m the same as yesterday.”

  Alys saw the deceit in the way her mother’s eyelashes veiled her gaze. “You look as you did in my dream. Where did you go?”

  Alinor gathered up the empty bowls and stacked them on the table. “I went to the church to pray for your father.”

  The girl nodded. She knew very well it was Midsummer Day. “And did you see him?” she asked, very low.

  Alinor shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “So perhaps, he’s still alive? If you didn’t see him, then he’s not dead. He could still come home.”

  “Or perhaps I have no sight.”

  “Perhaps that. Perhaps you met a black cat and he truly saw you.”

  Alinor smiled. “Don’t speak of it,” she reminded her daughter. She thought of the priest, waiting for his gruel in the net shed. She wondered if he had truly seen her, like the black cat of her daughter’s dream.

  The girl ran her fingers through her thick fair hair and pushed it back from her face, then pulled her cap over the golden plait. She sat down to put on her boots. “I wish to God we knew,” she said irritably. “I don’t miss him, but I’d like to know I can stop looking for him. And it’s not fair on Rob.”

  “I know,” Alinor said. “Every time a ship comes to the tide mill quay I ask for news of him, but they say nothing.”

  The girl lifted up a boot and poked her finger through the hole in the sole. “I’m sorry, Ma, but I need new boots. These are through at the toes and the sole.”

  Alinor looked at the patched uppers and the mended soles. “Next time I have money, next time I go to market,” she promised.

  “Before winter, anyway.” The girl pulled on her worn boots. “I might bring a rabbit home tonight. I set a snare yesterday.”

  “Not on Sir William’s fields?”

  “Not where the keeper ever goes,” she said mischievously.

  “Bring it home and I’ll stew it,” Alinor promised, thinking of the extra mouth to feed if the priest did not leave till the evening ebb tide.

  The girl knelt before her mother and Alinor rested her hand on the tender nape of the girl’s neck. “God bless you and keep you safe,” she said, thinking of her daughter’s young prettiness, and the miller and his men who watched her as she crossed the yard and joked of the husband she would have in a few years’ time.

  The girl smiled up at her mother as if she knew her fears. “I can fend for myself,” she said gently, and went out, shooing the hens out of the door and out of the gate so that they could pick their way down to the shoreline.

  Alinor waited till she heard the crunching sound of footsteps on shingle recede, as her daughter walked along the shore to the ferry crossing at the rife. Only when she could hear nothing outside but the calling of the seabirds did Alinor spoon the warm gruel into the spare bowl, her missing husband’s bowl, and take his carved wooden spoon and his own wooden cup filled with small ale, and carry them back along the bank to the net shed.

  She tapped at the door and went in, ducking her head below the crooked lintel. He was asleep, sprawled over the nets, his good woolen cape spread under him, his beautiful curling hair tumbled around his face. She observed his pallor, and the dark long sweep of his eyelashes, the sleeping strength of his body, his chest and arms and the length of his legs in the expensive riding boots. Nobody would take him for anything but a stranger, foreign to this impoverished island off the south coast of England. One glance would tell anyone that he was a nobleman. He was as out of place, sprawled on the stinking nets in the ramshackle shed, as she would have been among the silks and perfumes of the king’s court, in the old days, when the king had a court in London.

  She thought it was disrespectful to wake him, but then the cooling bowl in her hand reminded her that if she left the gruel beside him and he woke to found it cold and congealed he would be nauseated. So she bent down, put the cup of ale on the floor, and gently shook the toe of his boot.

  His eyelashes flickered at once and he opened his eyes and sprang to his feet in one movement. “Ah! Goodwife,” he said.

  She held out the bowl and the mug of small ale. “Gruel,” she said. “I know it’s not good enough for you.”

  “It comes from you, and it comes from God, and I am grateful,” he replied. He put the bowl and spoon and mug on the floor and he knelt down and spoke a long whispered grace in Latin. Alinor, not knowing what to do, bowed her head and whispered “Amen” as he finished, though she had been told by the minister—they had all been told—that God did not speak in Latin, that God spoke in English and should be addressed in English and that everything else was a sham and a heresy and a papist mockery of the truth of the Word.

  He sat cross-legged on the nets as if they were not crawling with vermin, and he ate the gruel like a hungry man. He scraped the wooden bowl with the wooden spoon and drained the cup of small ale.

&
nbsp; “I’m sorry, there’s no more,” she said awkwardly. “But I’ll bring you some fish soup if you’re here at dinnertime.”

  “It was very good. I was hungry,” he said. “I am grateful to you for sharing your food. I hope that you did not go without to feed me?”

  She thought with a brief pang of guilt of her boy, who would have eaten more at breakfast. “No,” she said. “And my daughter might bring home some meat for dinner.”

  He narrowed his eyes as if he was trying to conjure a calendar and see if there was a holy day or a fast day that he should observe. He smiled. “It’s St. John’s Day. I shall be glad to dine well, but if there is only a little I beg that you take it for yourself and your children. You do a great service to me and for God by hiding me here. I don’t want you to go hungry. I am accustomed to it.”

  Her face lit up as she laughed, and he was struck again by her sudden transformation. “I wager I’m more accustomed than you!”

  He had to stop himself from touching her smiling cheek. “You’re right,” he conceded. “Fasting is my choice, part of my faith.”

  “I thought I’d guide you to the Priory this morning,” she offered. “If you want to try the steward there, and see if he’ll take you in.”

  “I should be glad of your help. I should be glad to meet with him. Do we go back the way we came?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then I can find my own way. I’ll go alone. I won’t put you in danger.”

  “It’s the mire,” she reminded him. “I have to guide you. I can walk ahead of you, so that we’re not seen walking together.”

  He nodded. “You must keep your distance.”

  “Very well.”

  They were silent for a moment. “Will you sit?” he invited her. “Sit and talk with me?”

  She hesitated. “I have to go to my work.”

  “Just stay a moment?” He wondered at himself, seeking her company when he should have been using the solitude for prayer.

  She sank to the floor, tucking her feet under her rough woolen skirt. The room was shadowy, smelling of salt and seaweed and the foul undertone of marsh mud. The floor was tamped-down earth, the nets flung carelessly one on top of another, the lobster pots rotting with their load of old seaweed and shells.

  “What should you be doing, if I were not delaying you?” he asked her.

  “This morning I’d be weeding in the garden, and cleaning the house, picking the herbs, for drying or distilling, probably spinning. This afternoon I’ll go up to my brother’s house at the ferry, to start barley in the brewhouse for our ale. I’ll make bread from the yeast. Sometimes I work at Mill Farm—in the dairy or bakery—or I weed or dig or harvest, depending on the season.” She shrugged. Clearly there were too many tasks for her to list. “As it’s Midsummer Day I’ll pick herbs again this evening, those in my own garden and those that I grow at the ferry-house, and I’ll distill in the ferry-house stillroom. Sometimes, someone sends for me, for childbirth or sickness. I go to church some evenings. It’s good to sit, just for a moment.”

  “You must be lonely?”

  “No—though I miss my mother,” she conceded.

  “Do you not miss your husband?”

  “I’m glad to be rid of him,” she said simply. “Except for the loss of the boat.”

  “He was unkind to you?” He gripped his hands in his lap to stop himself covering her clasped hand with his own. He thought the man must be a monster to hurt such a woman as this—and what was the minister of the church doing, what was her brother doing that he did not protect her?

  But she shook her head. “No worse than many. I never complained of it. But he took a lot of feeding, and a lot of working for. It was tiring to be his wife, wearisome. But without him we’ve got very little money and few ways to earn it, and no way of saving. I fear for my girl—working at Mill Farm every day—as pretty as she is. She’s got to marry in two or three years and where I’m going to find her dowry, I don’t know. And I fear for my boy, growing up and not even his father’s fishing boat to inherit. He’ll get the ferry after my brother, I suppose, but not for years, and then it’s a hard life. I don’t know what’ll become of either of them.” She shook her head as if she had puzzled over this often. “Nor of me, either. God keep us all from begging.”

  “You can’t beg,” he said, shocked. “You can’t be reduced to begging.”

  “Well, we borrow,” she admitted, and he saw from the ghost of her smile that she meant that they poached game from Sir William’s lands.

  “God does not forbid borrowing if it’s only rabbits,” he told her, and was rewarded by a mischievous gleam. “But you must be careful . . .”

  “We are,” she said. “And Sir William only cares about his deer and the pheasants. Perhaps we’ll buy a boat somehow. Perhaps times’ll get better.”

  “Don’t you have a man who would take your husband’s place?” he asked, thinking of her waiting for someone at the church on Midsummer Eve.

  He was shocked by her disdain, as she turned her head away. He had met duchesses with less hauteur.

  “I shan’t marry again.”

  “Not even for a boat?” He smiled.

  “Nobody with a boat would have me with two children,” she observed. “Three mouths to feed.”

  “Is your daughter like you?” he asked, thinking that she must be as pretty as a princess in a story, like a princess in disguise.

  “Not really,” she answered with a smile. “She has high hopes, she listens to her uncle, thinks that anyone can be anything, that the world is laid out before her, that everything has changed. She’s all for parliament and the people. I don’t blame her. I can’t help but hope for better for her, and for Rob.”

  “Your son?”

  Her face warmed at his name. “He’s born to be a healer. He’s got my mother’s gift. From a baby he was out in the herb garden with me, learning the names and their potency. And I’ve taught him how they’re used, and sometimes he comes with me, for a sickness, or a death. If I could only keep him at school so he could have book learning! A cunning man with learning can make a good living among people with money, in a town perhaps.” She shrugged. “Not here. I get paid in food and pennies for the herbs, and my patients are all poor people. The only gentry are at the Priory. I nursed her ladyship before she died, and I physicked her son a few months ago. Twice a year I go to the stillroom and restock it and make it tidy, but when his lordship is ill, he sends for the Chichester physician.”

  “You are a cunning woman?” he asked. “What things can you do?”

  “Herbs and healing only,” she answered carefully. She guessed that he would know nothing of the many careful gradations between healers who used natural cures and those who drew on dark arts and could sicken a whole village. “I’m a midwife. I used to have my license, when the bishop was in his palace and could grant a license—before he was thrown out and ran away. I can draw a tooth and set a bone, cut out a sore and heal an ulcer, but I do nothing else. I am a healer and a finder of lost things.”

  “You found me,” he said.

  “Were you lost?”

  “I think that it is England that is lost,” he said seriously. “We cannot put our king from his throne, we cannot choose how we worship God. We cannot put parliament over everything. We cannot make war against the king appointed by God to rule us.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  He hesitated. “You said last night that your brother is for parliament?”

  “He ran away to fight and he would have stayed with the New Model Army; but when my father died he had to come home again to keep his right to the ferry. Our family had the rights to the ferry for generations, and we are tenants of Ferry-house.”

  “It’s the only way to cross to the mainland? Your brother’s wherry?”

  “It’s not a wherry,” she corrected him. “It’s more like a raft on a rope across Broad Rife,” she said. “Broad Rife flows between Sealsea Island and the mainl
and. It’s not deep—you can wade across at low tide. The wadeway is cobbled, so you can’t get stuck in the mud. My brother keeps the wadeway, and ferries people who don’t want to get their feet wet, and women going to market carrying their spun yarn or their goods, and at high tide the wagoners, or Sir William, who loads his horses and carriage on the ferry when the water is too high.”

  “He rows people across?”

  She shook her head. “He pulls on a rope. It’s like a big raft, a floating bridge, big enough to take a wagon. At mid-tide the current’s very strong. The ferry is hooked fore and aft to an overhead rope so that he doesn’t get swept away by the tide and out into the mire, and then out to sea.”

  He saw that she went pale at the thought of it. “Have you always been afraid of water?” he asked curiously. “Living here, on the shore?”

  “The daughter of the ferryman and the wife of a fisherman.” She smiled. “I know full well that it’s foolish, but I have always had a terror of it.”

  “Then how will you fish when you get your boat?” he asked.

  She smiled and gave a little shrug, rising to her feet and picking up his bowl and his cup. “I’ll have to find the courage,” she said. “I can row and I can throw a net, and the children can help me. I won’t ever go out to sea on the deep waters. I’ll stay inside the harbor bar. And then, if your side gets your way, and the king comes to his own again and the church goes papist, I can sell fish in the market and at the doors on all the fast days.”

  “I will send you money for a boat when I get home,” he promised her.

  She smiled as if it was a pleasantry. “Where’s your home?”

  He hesitated, but he wanted to trust her with the truth. “I live at my college in France,” he said. “My family sent me to the English college at Douai when I was a boy of twelve, and I stayed on and took my vows as a priest. When the war started, they were glad that I was safely out of the way. My father fought against parliament and was defeated, wounded at Naseby. Now, he and my mother are in exile, with the queen in Paris, and I am a seminary priest, sworn to come to England to bring people back to the true faith.”