Tidelands

by Philippa Gregory

  But there had never been a choice for her: she was a woman and had to marry, as all women do, and she was a poor woman who would never go anywhere, however bright her face and breathless she might be. Their mother, knowing that her own death was coming near and nearer, had insisted that Alinor marry, hoping to leave her safe, not knowing that Zachary himself was a wandering haven, no more trustworthy than the shore, vagrant as the tidelands.

  “You’ll never get Alys married if she’s inherited your wildness,” he said sternly.

  “Ah, she’s a good girl,” Alinor said, immediately defensive of her daughter, sleeping inside the cottage. “She works so hard, Ned. She wants a better life, but you can’t blame her for that! And—see—I only dream.”

  “Dreams are worthless,” he ruled. “And anyway, how are you finding the boat?”

  The smile she turned on him was so dazzling, it could be nothing to do with the boat. “Rob came over from the Priory two weeks ago with Master Walter and his tutor, and we all went fishing.”

  He could see nothing in this to make a woman look as if the world was opening up before her. “Catch much?”

  “Yes.” She gestured to the bank. “We made a fire. We ate together. We were just there.” She laughed.

  Her joy was a mystery to him. He finished his cup of ale and got to his feet with a grunt at the twinge of pain from the rheumatism that twisted his joints from a childhood of hauling on the damp rope of the ferry and working in all weathers at every high tide.

  “Don’t be foolish,” he warned her, uneasy at the thought of her dreams and the light in her eyes. “Don’t forget where you are, who you are. Nothing changes here but the waters. The rest of the country can run mad, turn upside down, but here only the sea changes daily and only the mire goes where it will.” The rumble of the mill, as ominous as thunder rolling over the flat drowned land, emphasized his warning.

  “I know,” she reassured him. “I know. There is no hope; nothing can happen.” But the light in her face denied her words.

  “If your lad would only work the ferry for me till the end of the summer, I’d go and volunteer for Oliver Cromwell in the North,” Ned said. “They say he’s marching men to meet the Scots. A hard march, from Wales, a long march. He’ll need men who know how to do it. General Lambert is holding the Scots at bay, but he can’t do it alone.”

  “Rob can’t take the ferry,” she said quickly. “He’s bound to the Priory until Walter goes to Cambridge.”

  “Hasn’t the tutor gone away?”

  “A few more days, Rob tells me. The tutor’s left them lessons.”

  “I’d give my eyeteeth to be on the road with my troop, to be beside my brothers for another battle, to defeat the enemies of the country and bring the king to justice,” Ned said. “King Charles has to answer for this now. He’s called the Welsh to rise against us, and now he’s summoned the Scots down on us. God knows what he’s promised to the Irish. He uses them all against us, against us English, his own people. He has to be finished, once and for all.”

  Alinor compressed her lips on contradictions. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t speak ill of him.”

  “Of him?”

  “Of the poor king.”

  “Then you understand nothing,” he said with brotherly contempt. “You may be very learned in your flowers and your herbs and your healing, but you’re a foolish woman if you don’t know that Charles is a man of blood and has brought nothing but grief to us. He never means peace when he says he wants peace. He never thinks that he is defeated when his own sword has been taken from his hand. He has to stop! I swear to God I think we will never make him stop.”

  She rose to her feet as he became angry. “I know, I know,” she soothed him. “It’s just that I don’t want Rob going to war, or Alys trapped in a country at war. I don’t want you going away again, and of course I don’t know where Zachary is this evening.” She felt that tears were burning behind her eyes. “There are good men in danger, going into danger—” She broke off, unable to speak of James and the secret conspiracy that she knew was taking him away from her. “I don’t know what to pray for,” she said in a sudden rush of honesty. “I don’t even know what to wish for, except for peace . . . and that it was all over . . . and I was free . . .”

  “Ah,” he said, his anger leaving him at the sight of her tears. “Ah, you pray for peace, you’re right. And there’s nothing for you to fear. Colonel Hammond will have the king safely mewed up at Carisbrooke. Parliament and the army will agree what must be done with the king, and even if parliament are such fools as to come to an agreement with him, they won’t let him raise troops to shed our blood again. We’ve won against the king, and we’ve probably won against the Scots, too, and even now the news of the battle is coming south as we sit here. It might be all over already, and it’s me who is a fool, pining to march north, thinking I could return to the days when I was among my comrades, led by Cromwell and commanded by God. It’s probably all done already.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I can pray that it’s over.”

  Alys was slow to wake, her arms and back aching. The two women had the rest of the white loaf for breakfast with Ned’s cheese.

  “So delicious.” Alys dabbed up every crumb. “I think I shall marry the miller and eat wheat loaf every day of my life.”

  “You’ll have to get rid of Mrs. Miller,” her mother pointed out. “And I think you’ll find that she won’t make way for you.”

  “How I’d love to be rid of her!” Alys remarked. “I should throw the two of them—her and her helpless husband—off the quay, and marry their son, and inherit the mill.”

  The miller’s son was a little boy of six years old named Peter. Alinor had delivered him herself. “And Jane could be your sister-in-law,” Alinor smiled. “That’d be a happy house.”

  “I’d marry her off somewhere,” Alys asserted. “But nobody’d have her.”

  “Oh, the poor girl,” Alinor said. “Don’t be unkind, Alys. Anyway, have they nearly finished the harvest?”

  “Nearly, just one field to go. I was binding and stacking all day. Will you come this afternoon for gleaning?”

  “Yes, I’ll bring your dinner,” Alinor promised.

  Alys bowed her head in a prayer of thanks and rose from the table. “It’s funny Rob not being here,” she remarked. “Aren’t you lonely all the day?”

  “I’m so busy I don’t have time to be lonely.”

  “Because you look as if you’re listening for something.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. A footstep?”

  Ashamed of herself, Alinor remembered watching James run along the sea-bank path, jumping the wet puddles like a boy running to his lover. “I’m not listening for anyone,” she lied.

  “I didn’t say for anyone, I said for something.”

  “I know.”

  “I didn’t think that you missed my da anymore?” the girl asked gently. “We don’t—Rob and me. You needn’t worry for us.”

  “I don’t,” Alinor said shortly.

  “D’you just wish sometimes that everything was different? Aren’t you sick of everything? Not the king and the parliament—because I just don’t care for either of them—but something different for us. Something real, not preaching.”

  “I wish I could see your future,” Alinor replied seriously. “I know you shouldn’t be stuck here, on the side of the mire, and no chance of marrying anyone but a farm lad or a fisherman, and no chance of earning more than pennies. But I haven’t the money to apprentice you to a trade, and I don’t know where you’d go into service. I don’t think you’d suit service—I’d be afraid for you, in service.”

  Alys laughed. “You’re right there! I don’t want to be a servant to anyone. Not to a husband nor a master.”

  “Alys, I do so wish for more for you.”

  “You wish more!” the girl exclaimed. “Dear God, I pray on my knees for more! Has there been all this fighting and shoutin
g and all the arguing among the men, and the only hope for women is a husband who’s a little bit better than a beast, or a wage of more than sixpence a day? What about Uncle Ned’s new world? What about land for everyone?”

  Alinor looked at her bright-faced daughter. “I know,” she said. “There’s a lot of talk, but there’s no new world for people like you or me.”

  “You mean women,” Alys said sharply. “Poor women. Nothing ever changes for us.”

  Alinor heard the bitterness in her daughter’s voice and felt that she was to blame for having brought her into this world that favored men. “It’s true,” she said.

  The girl knelt for her mother’s blessing, and Alinor stooped and kissed her daughter’s neat white cap. Alys rose up, and went out of the door. Alinor sat for a little longer on her stool at the table, facing the corner of the room where she kept her herbs and oils, and the little wooden box where she kept her treasures. It held her mother’s recipe book for remedies, the agreement for the cottage between her missing husband and Mr. Tudeley, and her red leather purse of valueless old coins. It did not seem much for a lifetime of hard work. Then she whispered to herself: “A woman like you in a place like this,” and rose up, and took her basket, and her little knife, and went out to cut herbs while they still were damp with dew.

  It was a cool dawn, with strands of gray mist lying along the channels in the mire, melting the boundaries between land and sea and air. Alinor shivered in the morning chill, drawing a shawl over her head as she shooed the hens out of the cottage and down to the shoreline. She looked across her little garden to the harbor, where the water was shrinking away, draining from pools into swiftly ebbing channels, leaving acres of wet mud, sandbanks, and reedbeds. As the tide inched back to the sea, the little harbor birds, dunlin and knot, chased after it, running in and out of the waters on their long legs, suddenly flying up with their rippling calls, and then settling again in a flurry, to run to and fro. At the harbor mouth Alinor could see the flat gray of the sea, and the indigo line of the faraway horizon. From the far side of the mire came the thunderous rumble of the mill wheel turning. If James had already gone to France and was homeward bound, he would have a calm crossing. If he had gone to the king at Carisbrooke Castle, he could sail back to Sealsea harbor in three or four hours. If he had gone to meet the Prince of Wales at sea with his ships, then he could have gone out to sea and back within the day. Since she did not know where he had gone, there was no point in looking to the dark horizon for his sail. As a fisherman’s wife she knew this well, but still she looked for him.

  It was going to be another hot day, once the mist burned off. He had said that he would return within the month, but she knew him so little, she did not know if he was a young man who would remember a promise made to a woman, especially to a poor woman of no importance. Perhaps he was in danger, and could not choose when to go or stay? Or perhaps he was a man who was careless with his words, as men are, and he was not counting the days as she was counting them? Or perhaps the kiss had meant nothing, and the words had meant nothing either.

  She turned her back on the harbor and bent over her herb beds, picking the herbs that were unfurling their fresh leaves, tying them in little posies and tossing them in her basket. When she had harvested one bed, she moved on to another until she had picked everything that was fresh, and then she went back into the house and tied them on the strings that looped from one beam to another. The earlier dry posies she took down and put into little wooden boxes, each labeled with Rob’s careful script with the name for the herb, sometimes the Latin names, sometimes the old names that her mother had taught her: eyebright, heartsease, and scurvy grass.

  She brushed the crumbs from the wooden plates out of the front door and felt the warmer air. The sun was burning off the mist. She watched the garden birds fly down to feed—the robin that lived in the garden all year round and a pair of blackbirds that nested and reared their young in the blackthorn hedge that ran behind the little cottage. She rinsed the two cups, from her breakfast with Alys, in the last of the clean water, then tipped the bowl over the plants at the side of the door. She picked up the empty bucket and walked to the dipping pond, on the inland side of the bank, holding the worn post as she lowered the bucket into the clean water. She heaved the slopping pail back up the steps, stood the bucket by the open door, and ladled water into the three-legged iron cooking pot that sat among the red embers. She took one of the fresh bunches of herbs and set it to seethe in the pot. Her mother’s recipe called for some honey, and she spooned a careful measure from the jar where the comb oozed. Leaving it to simmer, she went outside with a sacking bag, an old flour bag from the mill, to gather driftwood for the fire. She walked along the line of the high tide, picking up twigs for kindling and bigger pieces of wood. When the sack was filled she hefted it onto her back and walked back to the cottage.

  The water in the pot was almost boiled away, the herbs a dark green sludge in the bottom. Alinor poured it into a tray and set it to dry on the table; threw a piece of clean muslin over it to keep off the flies.

  The sun was rising through the thick banks of rain clouds, and it was getting hot. Alinor put on her working hat, with the wide brim over her face and the fall of linen over the back of her neck to protect from the dangerous glare of the morning sun, and went back out to the garden at the side of the cottage where she grew vegetables: peas, beans, and cabbages. As she dug at the sturdy deep roots of a dock leaf, her hens saw her, and came rushing up from the shoreline. They scratched companionably, looking for worms and little insects in the turned earth, clucking contentedly at Alinor, and she scolded them gently. “You go down to the shore, don’t you scrape up my plants.” One copper-brown hen pecked up a little worm and made a funny grunting noise of appreciation. Alinor, alone under the arching sky with the empty harbor before her, laughed as if she were with friends. “Was that good, Mistress Brown?” she asked. “Tasty?”

  Alinor worked all the morning, and as the sun started to slowly descend from the midday high, she went into the house, cut four slices of day-old rye bread, took two smoked fish from the rack at the chimney, a pitcher of small ale from the cool damp corner, and put them all in a little sack to eat with Alys before they started gleaning.

  The tide was flowing in, there was only a quiet hiss from the hushing well as Alinor walked along the raised bank to her brother’s house and found him picking plums from the fruit tree. “Want some?”

  “I’ll take some for Alys’s dinner. I’ll come tomorrow and pick the rest for bottling and drying.”

  “It’s a good year. Look at the branches.”

  They admired the tree, the branches bowed down with the purple fruit. Alinor ate one. “Sweet,” she said. “Very good.”

  “Going to the mill for gleaning?”

  She nodded, glancing at the ferry bobbing as the in-rushing tide met the flowing river.

  “I’ll take you over,” he offered. He led the way down the steps to where the ferry was moored to a post, pulling on the rope and sidling in the tide. He untied it and looped the painter around the overhead rope, which stretched from one side of the swirling deep water to the other.

  “Running fast,” Alinor observed.

  “It’s been such a wet summer,” he said. “I’ve never known the rife so high at harvesttime. Come on.”

  She stepped down to the raft and held to the rail that ran on either side. He smiled at her fear. “Still agauw? The ferryman’s daughter?”

  She shrugged at her fears. “I know. I’ll walk home on the wadeway.”

  “You’ll get wet feet,” he warned her. “It’s high till dusk tonight.”

  “Hold tight to the rope,” she begged, as the current took the raft and pushed it farther up the rife, and the rope on the overhead line went taut and the ferry rocked.

  Ned went hand over hand to haul the ferry across the swiftly flowing rife. They reached the other side in moments and she was off the raft and up the steps to the safety of dry
land before he had even tied up. “See you tonight,” he said. “You’d best come on the ferry. No point getting soaked.”

  “Thank you,” she replied, and started off down the track along the shoreline to where the mill and the granary stood beside the stone quay with the deep water lapping at the quayside.

  For once, it was peaceful in the mill yard. The water wheel was stilled; there was no rushing torrent in the millrace. The millpond was quietly filling, the great sea gates pushed open by the incoming waters, the little waves lapping up the pond wall, the water level rising steadily. Inside the mill the great grinding stones were parted and the cherrywood cogs detached. The miller was bagging up flour, and the two lads were humping it to the quayside, ready for the high-tide ships of the flour merchants.

  “Good day, Mr. Miller,” Alinor called as she went past the open door.

  He was white as a ghost from his flour-dusted hair to the hem of his white apron. But his smile was warm. “Good day, Mrs. Reekie! Come for gleaning?”

  “Yes, and I’ve brought Alys’s dinner.”

  “She’s a lucky girl to have you for a mother. Will you come to the harvest supper? Shall we have a dance, you and I?”

  Alinor smiled at the old joke. “You know I won’t dance. But, of course I’m coming.”

  She waved her hand, and walked across the yard between the mill and the house, through the gate at the north of the yard and into the wheat fields. The fields looked shorn, the wheat stooks dotted around on the stubble. As Alinor went through the open gate, a flock of rooks rose up before her, one after another like a string of black rosary beads.