Alys was in the line of binders, working alongside the other women laborers, following the reaping gang of men. Most of the men were stripped to the waist, their backs blistered from the sun, but the others, godly men, some of them puritans, wore their shirts modestly tucked into their breeches and tied at their sweating throats. The men were working in a line across the field in a punishingly hard rhythm: grasping a handful of wheat stalks, bending and slashing at the stalks with the sickle, straightening up and throwing the bunch behind them. Alys and other women followed them, gathering the cut stalks into armfuls, tying them with a twisted stalk, piling them in a heap for the wagon. Every so often Mrs. Miller or her daughter, Jane, came out of the house, crossed the yard, and stood at the gate to the field, her hand shielding her eyes, glaring across the field to make sure that the reapers were doing their job, and not leaving uncut wheat for the gleaners.
Alys was pale with exhaustion, her hands and arms scratched from hugging the stooks, her apron filthy, her hair falling loose under her working cap, walking in the line with the other women, bending and gathering the cut wheat, straightening up, tying it, stacking it, bending again. She was working alongside women from Sealsea Island that she had known from childhood; but there were also day laborers come from inland, and half a dozen women were travelers, a harvesting gang that went from one farm to another through the summer. They were paid by the job, not by the day, and they set an exhausting pace that Alys had to match: she was struggling to keep up.
Alinor waited at the gate and was joined by half a dozen other women who had the gleaning rights to the mill fields. They stood together, commenting on the richness of the crop and the heat of the day until Jane rang the bell in the mill courtyard and everyone in the field turned from their work to the shade of the hedgerow and the dinner break. The gleaners went into the field, some to meet husbands or children with their dinner. Alinor walked across the spiky stubble and wordlessly held out the pitcher of small ale to her daughter. Alys drank deeply.
“Thirsty work,” Alinor said, looking at her beautiful daughter with concern.
“Filthy work,” the girl said wearily.
“Nearly done,” her mother promised her. “Come and sit.”
The men gathered into one group, passing around flasks of ale, eating the food they had brought from their homes. The women gathered at a little distance. One woman untied a swaddled baby from her back and put him to the breast. Alinor smiled at her. It was one of the babies that she had delivered in the spring.
“Is he feeding well?” she asked.
“God be praised, he is,” the woman replied. “And I still name you in my prayers for coming to me in my time. D’you want to see him?”
Alinor took the baby into her arms and gently pressed her lips to his warm head, marveling at the warmth of his skull, and the tiny plump hands.
No one else spoke as they drank and ate their first food since breakfast. When Alys had finished the thick slices of bread and the last of the smoked fish, Alinor returned the baby to the young mother, and she and Alys shared the plums from Ned’s plum tree.
“I’m surprised at you eating fruit in the sunshine, Mistress Reekie,” one of the women remarked. “Aren’t you afraid of the gripe?”
“These are from my brother’s garden. We’ve eaten them every summer and never taken ill,” Alinor explained.
“I’d never eat fruit with the sap in it,” one of the older women declared.
“I stew most of them,” Alinor agreed. “And I pickle some, and make jam, and I dry a lot of them.”
“I’ll buy two jars of your stewed plums,” one of the women offered. “And a jar of dried plums. We had your dried gooseberries at Christmas and everyone wanted more. How much’ll they be this year?”
Alinor smiled. “Tuppence a jar, for them both. I’ll bring them to you with pleasure,” she said. “It’s been a good year for gooseberries too.”
“I’ll take a pound of them,” another woman offered.
The women stretched out their weary legs. Some of them lay back on the prickly stubble.
“Tired?” Alinor asked her daughter quietly.
“Sick of it,” the girl said irritably.
The bell, warning them that rest time was over, clanged in the mill courtyard. Mrs. Miller was a strict timekeeper. The men got to their feet, cleaned their sickles, and started to walk to the mill yard. They would bring the wagon, fork up the stooks, and take them to the barn for threshing.
Alinor handed a bag with a shoulder strap to Alys. The women who held gleaning rights on the mill fields formed themselves into a line at the foot of the field. They were careful to spread out fairly so that no one woman was given a broader sweep than another and they looked jealously down the line to see that no one was taking an advantage. Mothers and daughters, like Alinor and Alys, took care to stand wide apart to give themselves the maximum area. The line moved forward.
Wearily, the women who had worked all day for cash, now labored for themselves, bending to the ground to pick up every fallen ear of wheat, even individual grains. In some strips an inexperienced reaper had missed a stand of wheat, or crushed it down as he stood, and there the gleaners could snatch handfuls of grains. Slowly, they moved like an advancing line of infantry across a battlefield, never getting ahead of each other, holding their advance, holding the spacing between them. Alinor, her eyes fixed on the ground, bending and picking, bending and picking, was almost surprised to come to the blackthorn hedge at the end of the field, and realize that they had finished. Her bag was filled with ripe pale heads of wheat.
“Both ways,” one of the older women declared.
Alys muttered resentfully, but Alinor nodded. Nothing should be wasted, nothing should be missed. “Both ways,” she agreed.
The women changed the line, as well as turning the direction, so those who had been on the hedge at the left and those who had been on the extreme right were now at the center, so that no one would walk the same part of the field twice. Once again, they edged forward, their eyes on the ground, their hands snatching at heads of wheat, even scraping individual grains, pressing everything into their gleaners’ bags, some of them filling their upheld aprons. Only when they came to the hedge at the end of the field again did they straighten their backs and look around them.
The sun was low in the sky, sinking into drifts of gold and rose clouds. Alinor looked at Alys’s heavy bag and her own. “Good,” was all she said.
They walked together to the mill yard. Mrs. Miller had the scales out in the yard and was weighing the gleaners’ wheat, and marking the weight on a tally stick, as a record. Alinor and Alys tipped the contents of their bags into her scale and snapped off the few stalks. Mrs. Miller added weights on the scale until she said begrudgingly: “Three pounds two ounces.” Her daughter, Jane, marked the hazel stick with three thick gouges around one end and two small cuts at the foot and then sliced it in half with a little hatchet. Alinor took their half with a word of thanks, and put it in her bag. Jane Miller tossed the other into the tally stick box as a record of what the Reekie women were owed in flour, when the wheat was milled.
“Bring some of your cordial when you come tomorrow for harvest home,” Mrs. Miller told Alinor, as she turned to weigh another gleaner’s load. “My back feels like it’s on fire, bending over this all day.”
Alinor nodded. “I’m coming to glean in the afternoon. I’ll bring it then,” she said.
The water in the harbor was low, the millpond brimming, gates gently bumping together, pushed shut by the dark weight of the water in the deep pond. As the weary women walked to the white-painted gate of the yard, one of the miller’s young men walked around the millpond wall, balanced like an acrobat on the top of the gates, the dark waters lapping below him. He shouted boldly: “Good night! See you tomorrow!” to Alys.
All signs of her fatigue fell away in a moment. She could have been a princess hearing a tribute. She did not answer him, but she inclined her head, smil
ed very slightly, and walked on. Alinor, watching her, saw her weary daughter transformed.
“Who was that?” Alinor asked, hurrying her steps to catch up.
“Who?”
“That young man?”
“Oh, I think that’s Farmer Stoney’s son, Richard,” she said.
“Farmer Stoney from Birdham?”
“Yes.”
“Handsome young man,” Alinor observed.
“I’ve never noticed,” Alys said with immense dignity.
“Quite right,” her mother replied with a hidden smile. “But I noticed, and I can tell you: he’s a very handsome young man. He’s the only son, isn’t he?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Alys exclaimed, and strode ahead of her mother along the track to the ferry, so that when Alinor came up, Alys was standing beside her uncle Ned in the ferry, one hand on the rope, waiting for her mother.
Alinor paused on the bank, as some of the other women and a few of the reapers hurried past her to take their place on the ferry to go to their homes on Sealsea Island. Alys went among them, collecting the copper coins and calling out the promises to pay to Ned. Only when the ferry was full and ready to go did Alinor go down the bank and take tight hold of the side of the craft, and she was first off at the other side. The women laughed at her. “She’d be no good as a barker for you!” they teased Ned. “Nobody would ever take your ferry if they saw your sister’s face!”
Alinor raised a hand at the old joke. “I’ll come to pick plums tomorrow before gleaning,” she said to Ned.
He nodded. “I’m always here,” he said. “The good lord knows that I am always here.”
Alys and Alinor went about their chores in the shadowy cottage in weary silence. Alys opened the door for the gently clucking hens and they hurried into their corner of the cottage to roost. Both women drank a cup of small ale, and then Alinor washed her face and hands in a bowl of water and Alys followed her, using the same water and throwing it out of the door on the lavender and marigold plants. She knelt before her mother as Alinor combed out her fair hair and then plaited it for the night, resting her hand on her daughter’s head for a blessing. Alys, still on her knees, turned towards the bed and said her prayers, burrowed in like a mole.
“Sweet dreams,” Alinor said gently, and saw her daughter’s hidden smile.
Alinor twisted her own thick locks in a knot and tucked them under her nightcap, laid her shirt and gown over her stool, and got into bed in her linen shift. They lay side by side in bed together.
“I’m as tired as a dog,” Alys remarked, and fell asleep at once, like a child.
Alinor lay silent, her eyes wide open in the darkness. Perhaps tomorrow he would come back. Or perhaps the day after. Then she too fell asleep.
Just after midnight she started up at the loud knocking on the door. Her first frightened thought was that her husband, Zachary, had come home and was pounding on the door in a drunken rage, as he used to do. Then, as she jumped from the bed and went to the door and shot the bolt, she thought, confused by sleep, that the war had started again and the soldiers for the army, or the cavalry of the king, were knocking down her door. Her last thought, as she threw the door open, was that it was James, come for her; but there, on the doorstep, was Farmer Johnson of Sealsea.
“Thank God you’re here. It’s Peg,” he said shortly. “You must come, Mrs. Reekie. Her time’s come early, I think. We need you at once. I came as fast as I could. Come now! Can you come now?”
At once her dreams and fears vanished. “Farmer Johnson.”
“I’ve got a pillion saddle on my horse waiting for us at Ferry-house. Come! Please come!”
“One moment.” She closed the door on him and in the darkness pulled on her skirt and jacket that were laid on the stool. She found her cap, and pulled it on.
“What is it?” Alys asked sleepily from the bed.
“Mrs. Johnson’s baby, come early,” Alinor said pushing her feet into her boots.
“D’you want me to come with you?”
“No, you go to work in the morning. If it all goes well—God willing—I’ll meet you at gleaning and harvest home. If I’m kept overnight, you stay at Ferry-house.”
Alys nodded in the darkness, turned over, and went back to sleep immediately. Alinor picked up her sack, a box of dried herbs and some bottles from the cupboard, and stepped out into the cool nighttime air. The tide was coming in, seeping over the mud and climbing the bank towards the cottage and the sleeping girl.
“Quickly,” said Farmer Johnson. “What’s the safest way?”
“Follow me,” Alinor told him, and led the way, sure-footed along the top of the bank, the waves lapping in the darkness below them till she could see the ferry-house, her family home, as a dark bulk on the skyline. Her brother, woken by Farmer Johnson’s gallop up the road, held a lantern for the two of them to walk round the front of the house by the dark rife, to the road, and then led the farmer’s horse to the stone mounting block beside the track to Sealsea village.
Farmer Johnson heaved himself into the saddle and Alinor stepped onto the mounting block and then seated herself behind him, her feet on the pillion step, her back supported by the saddle.
“Hold tight,” her brother said, and she nodded and took a grip of the farmer’s wide belt.
“Look for Alys in the morning,” she replied. “She’s working at the mill tomorrow. Make sure she has some breakfast.”
“Aye. God bless you, and the godly work you do.”
The farmer clicked to his big horse and the animal started to walk, and then went into a shambling canter. Alinor held tight, one hand wrapped inside his belt, the other gripping her sack of precious bottles and herbs clinking in her lap. The mud track to Sealsea village was deeply rutted and puddled, but they stayed on the grassy verge, and as the sky lightened they could see the way ahead of them. After two miles, the horse recognized his home, dropped down into a walk, and turned into the gateway of the farm. Ahead of them the riders could see the moving lights in the downstairs windows as the servants went to and fro. Alinor felt the familiar sense of excitement at what was before her: anxiety that she would be faced with some complication of birth, confidence in the vocation that she had learned from her mother, that she had taught herself, that she was born to do. She had an illuminating sense of standing at the gateway to life and death and feeling no fear.
The farmer pulled up the horse and turned in the saddle, holding Alinor’s sack of physic as she stepped down to the mounting block, and then he handed her the precious sack and dismounted himself. “This way, this way,” he said, leaving the horse to stand at the door as he hurried Alinor inside.
“Here’s Goodwife Reekie,” he said to an older woman, whom Alinor recognized as his mother.
“At last!” she replied rudely. “You took your time!”
“Good morning, Mistress Johnson,” Alinor said politely. “How does Margaret do?”
“Poorly,” the woman said. “She can’t sit down and she won’t lie down either. She’s tiring herself out walking up and down.”
“For God’s sake!” Farmer Johnson cried out. “Why didn’t you make her rest? Goodwife Reekie, make her rest!”
“Let me see her,” Alinor said calmly. “Farmer Johnson, would you ask them to boil up some water and bring it in a bowl? With soap and linen? And some hot mulled ale for her to drink? And d’you have any wine you can heat up for her?”
“I’ll get it, I’ll get it all!” he assured her. “Boiled water in a bowl and mulled ale and mulled wine. I’ll get it all.”
He rushed towards the farmhouse kitchen, roaring for servants, as his mother led Alinor up the wooden stairs to the master bedroom.
The room was stifling hot, a fire of heaped logs in the fireplace and the windows shuttered and covered with tapestries. In the center of the room, one hand gripping the post of the bed, was Margaret Johnson, very pale in a stained nightgown. Her own mother was pulling ineffectually at her hands and urging
her to lie down on the bed and rest, for assuredly this could go on for days, and she would die of exhaustion before the baby came, or die of hunger during labor.
“Alinor,” she said in a little gasp as Alinor came through the door.
“Now, Margaret, how are you going on?” Alinor spoke gently.
“My waters have broken; but now nothing is happening,” she said. “And I am so hot, and so grieved. I think I have a fever—could I have a fever? And I am breathless.”
“You might have a fever,” Alinor said, taking in the disordered room and the ill-concealed panic of both the older women, the housemaid piling another log on the fire. “But it is very hot in here, and you are bound to be breathless if you are walking around and talking.”
“I told her so,” her mother confirmed, “but she’ll listen to no one, and we wanted them to send for you hours ago, but Mother Johnson said no, and now she’s tired herself . . .”
“Do you have any lavender in the garden?” Alinor turned to Farmer Johnson’s mother. “Could you gather me some fresh heads for the floor?” She turned to Margaret’s mother. “Could you go and see that they are bringing the water I asked for?”
“The house is at sixes and sevens,” the woman replied. “I daresay they’ve let the kitchen fire go out, and there is nothing for anyone.”
“If they can’t manage the birth of a baby, I’m sure I don’t know why,” Mrs. Johnson said rudely. “I had ten in that very bed. One was born dead and one came before its time . . .”
Alinor herded the two women from the room before Mrs. Johnson could tell more terrifying tales, and suddenly there was a silence broken only by the crackle of new wood burning in the fireplace. “It is very hot,” Alinor remarked. “Don’t put another log on.”
The maid shrank back, as Alinor drew back the tapestry and opened the window.
“Night air?” Margaret said fearfully.
Alinor dropped the tapestry so no one would see that the window was opened but a cool breeze came into the room and Margaret sighed with relief.
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