Tidelands

by Philippa Gregory

  “Oh, aye, that’s what we say, is it?” Zachary said unpleasantly. “I’m glad it has turned out so well for us all.” He turned as if he thought they might let him go, but at once Rob laid hold of his arm.

  “But you will come home now, Da? Now that you’re not in the navy anymore?”

  “I can’t immediate,” he said, looking again to James for help. “I got out of the navy when they went over to the prince. When the ships went to Prince Charles, I got away. I couldn’t have looked your uncle Ned in the eye if I had served the king! Now could I? But I had to indenture myself to the ship Jessie and so I’m bound to serve in her for another year. She’s a coastal trader, all around England and all around France. I’m never here. Never stop sailing. But as soon as I’ve served my time I’ll come back to you, for sure.”

  “But what shall I tell Ma?” Rob pressed him.

  “Tell her that! Ask this tutor of yours to explain. He understands, don’t you, sir?”

  “Very well,” James said levelly.

  Rob looked at him with hope. “You do?”

  “I understand that your father was bound to the navy and is now bound to a trading vessel. That’s quite usual. He’ll be able to come home when his term is over, but we can tell your mother that he is alive and well, and will return.”

  “If it suits her,” Zachary said. He turned to James and, unseen by his son, closed his eye on a wink.

  James swallowed distaste. “But you must have a drink with us and talk with your son now we have so luckily found you,” he said heartily. “It’s such a chance! We only came to Newport to see the sights of the island and catch a glimpse of the king, and we have found you.”

  Walter did not look as if it were much of a treat for him, but Zachary brightened at the invitation to take a drink. “We can go in here,” he said, indicating one of the quayside alehouses. “I have a slate here and I wouldn’t mind bringing them some trade.” He winked again at James. “Gentry trade,” he said. “Carriage trade. That’ll surprise them.”

  “Certainly,” James said pleasantly, and led the way into the room, looking around quickly to ensure that although it was a poorhouse, serving fishermen and the harbor traders, it was not bawdy or unsafe for the boys.

  Walter and Rob took their seats at a small table in the corner while the men stood at the doorway to the kitchen to order their drinks. Zachary entered into a brief whispered discussion with the landlord that James cut short by saying, “Tell him I will clear your slate.”

  “Kindly of you,” Zachary said, instantly suspicious.

  “I may have work for you,” James said.

  “Happy to help a friend of the Peacheys. Or perhaps you’re a friend of my wife?”

  James was stony-faced at the slur on Alinor. “This is for the Peacheys,” he said. “I think I may be able to put some business your way.”

  “Oh, aye,” Zachary said, agreeably. “Boys, would you take a slice of beef and bread? I know boys are always hungry.”

  Walter, uncomfortable, shook his head.

  “We just dined,” James explained. “They’ll take a glass of small ale and then they’ll go back to our inn.”

  “Fair enough,” Zachary said. “I’ll take a measure, since you’re buying.” He nodded to the landlord, who poured a spirit from a blackened bottle under the table. Zachary raised his earthenware cup in a toast to his son. “It’s good to see you, my boy,” he said fondly. “And looking so fine!”

  The boys were awkward at the table. Rob did not take his eyes from his father’s face but asked no more questions. After a while, James told them that they could make their way back to the inn and go to bed. “I will make arrangements with your father,” he promised Rob.

  “Will you, sir?” Rob’s brown eyes were trustingly on his face. “Shall we see him tomorrow?”

  “I’ll ask him to breakfast with us.”

  “Thank you, sir, because . . . I have to ask him . . . I have to be able to explain to my mother how it was.”

  James thought of Alinor’s poverty and the terrible risk to her reputation since this man had abandoned her and their two children. “I’ll speak to him,” he promised, and was ashamed at his own duplicity when the boy’s face cleared.

  The men waited until the boys had left and the door had closed behind them.

  “What d’you want with me?” Zachary said bluntly. “You needn’t cony-catch me.”

  “I need your ship,” James said. “I agreed with a coastal trader to meet me here, but he has failed. I need to commission a voyage out to sea.”

  “Which way?” Zachary asked sarcastically. “For this is an island. It is out to sea in every direction.”

  “South, towards France.”

  “That’s what I do, once a week.”

  “You’re the ship’s master?” James confirmed. “You can sail when and where you want?”

  “Provided I have a load and can turn a profit,” Zachary said. “My owner trusts me to manage the business.”

  “I want you to meet a ship offshore and transfer some goods,” James said. “You don’t need to know more.”

  “Smuggling?” Zachary asked quietly. “It can be done, but it is expensive.”

  “I will pay you,” James promised him. “I will pay you well.”

  “Would this be a barrel sort of goods? Or a chest sort of goods? Or more like a person?” he asked.

  “You don’t need to know that,” James said. “All you need to know is that you will be well paid, and set sail a few minutes after midnight. I will come with you. Not the boys.”

  “And how much am I paid for this nighttime jaunt? With Your Honor as shipmate? With these goods?”

  “Twenty crowns as we leave, twenty crowns on the quayside when we come back; and no one the wiser,” James said.

  Zachary tipped back his chair and put his sea boots on the barrel that served as a table. “No, I don’t think I’ll take it,” he said, smiling at James over the top of his cup. “It’s too much for ordinary smuggling and I’m no smuggler, I must tell you. And it’s too little for shipping the king off the island. If that’s your game, you’ll be hanged for it.”

  “It’s what my other ship would have been paid,” James said coolly. “It’s the right price.”

  “No, it isn’t. For—see? He wouldn’t do it for the price. Your fine friend didn’t appear. You don’t know why?” His sharp glance at James’s face told him that the handsome young man did not know why his ship had failed. “So, if he wouldn’t do it for the money, I don’t think that I will either.”

  “I think you will,” James said. “For I can call the watch to arrest you, and I can tell the magistrate that you have abandoned a wife and thrown her children onto the parish at Sealsea. I can tell them that you deserted from the parliament navy and serve as a smuggler. I can tell them that you are an adulterer and possibly a bigamist. I can tell them that you are wanted on Sealsea Island, perhaps elsewhere. Your own son would give witness that his mother is waiting for you to come home and that the Sealsea church wardens want you for your tithes.”

  “She is not!” Zachary slammed the table with the palm of his hand. “She’s not waiting! Damn you for all the rest of it, but don’t tell me that. She don’t miss me, she don’t want me. The boy might look for me, but she won’t.”

  “I know that she does,” James said steadily, thinking of the white-faced woman waiting for this man’s ghost to speak to her on Midsummer Eve.

  Zachary leaned forward confidingly. “Not her, because she’s a whore,” he said frankly. “One honest man to another: she’s a whore and a witch. They married me to her, though I had my doubts, but her mother—another witch—wanted my boat and my nets and my catch, and thought that I would keep her girl safe, in difficult times. Thought I would make a fortune. Maybe I swore that I would. Maybe I made all sorts of promises. I was so mad for her—and who do I blame for that, eh? I built our house right next door to her mother in the ferry-house so that they could carry on t
heir trade as wisewomen together, and I looked aside when they did what they did. I brought home fish, I sent her to market for me, and I took the money she brought back. I had plans for another boat, but I was unlucky a few times. I was as good a husband as any on the island. I didn’t know what tricks that they would play on me. My wife and her mother, God curse them.

  “One child we had: a daughter as beautiful as a faerie-born child. What did I know? Only that they had foisted a changeling on me from the moment that I saw her. Then came Rob—look at him! He could read as soon as he could walk, though I can’t spell my name. He knew the herbs as soon as he toddled into her garden. Used to name them by smell. Who smells leaves but a faerie child? They’re not my children. Nobody could ever have thought that they were my children! Look at them!”

  “Then whose?” James demanded tightly.

  “Ask her! She knows who she meets when she goes out into the full moon, when she goes out at Midsummer Eve, when she goes out to dance in the darkest of the nights of winter. She knows where she got these children. But I swear to you, it was not from me.”

  James braced his shoulders against a superstitious shudder. He forced himself to speak steadily: “This is nonsense. Are you saying that you left her for no better reason than this?”

  “Damn her to the deep! She left me!” Zachary exclaimed. “I may have been the one that was pulled out of the alehouse and thrown into the navy, but it was her who left me, years before that. She unmanned me; she can do it with a look. I could do nothing in her presence. I grabbed her once and was going to force her, but my hand went weak and my blood went like ice. I was going to make her do her duty by me—you know what I mean, a man has rights over his wife, whether she was willing or not—but I couldn’t. She looked at me with eyes like a curse, and I went as soft as a dead fish. I swear to you, she was killing me. I could do nothing with her: not beat her nor swive her. She was killing me from the cock up.”

  “She was?”

  “She drained me of life, I tell you. I could be no husband to her, and when I went with some drab I couldn’t do the act there either, for thinking of her. What is that but a curse on me? And after her mother died, it got worse. I thought that when her mother died her power would go, but it was as if she added the old witch’s power to her own. I was a baby in my own house. More of a baby than Rob, less of a voice than Alys. The press gang took me away, but by God I was glad to go!”

  “Would you ever come back?” James asked.

  “Never! Never! I’d rather die than go back to her. I’d rather drown. She’s a whore, I tell you. A whore to faerie folk. She’s a witch, I tell you. She can make a child without a man; she can prevent a child despite a man. She can kill a child in the womb and blast a man’s cock with one icy breath.”

  “Dear God, what are you saying?” James could no longer hide his fear at the man’s words—the worst things a man could hear: a woman that could shrink his potency, kill his children. “I know her! This isn’t possible for a woman like her. It isn’t possible for any mortal woman!”

  “You can say that, Priest,” the man said, his voice low. “You can say that who has never seen her naked, who has never touched her warm skin, who has never longed for her. But the taste of her mouth is like drinking henbane—she makes you thirsty for more and more, and then she drives you mad.”

  “I’m no priest,” James said, quickly, ignoring what Alinor’s husband said about the woman he loved.

  Zachary’s lip curled. “As you wish,” he said coldly. “But something stinks of incense here and it’s not me.”

  There was a silence between the two men.

  “Anyway,” James said, trying to recover his authority, trying to banish the image of Alinor whoring to a faerie lord, “I have no time for this nonsense. I am offering you a voyage or arrest. Which will it be?”

  “Twenty crowns to take the trade out, to a meeting of your saying. Twenty crowns to bring you back?”

  “Yes,” James said.

  “And we never speak of this again, and you take that boy back to her and tell her that you never saw me?”

  “I can’t make him lie, but I can make up some excuse.”

  “So that she does not look for me?”

  “She would not come looking for you.”

  “She has the sight, fool. She can see me if she pleases, unless there is the deep sea between us. She cannot see me through deep water, I know that. She’s afraid of deep water because she has no power over it. But if I ever sail into Tidelands again the mire will boil beneath my keel and throw me up like sea wrack before her door, and she will destroy me with one look.”

  “You speak like a madman.”

  “What d’you think killed her sister-in-law?” the man suddenly demanded.

  “What?” James was thrown off course again. “What sister-in-law?”

  “See how little you know her?” He turned and shouted over his shoulder for another drink. The landlord brought it in silence, and silently James waited for him to pour, and for Zachary to take a thoughtful swig.

  “Go on,” James said through his teeth.

  “So you don’t know that either! Her sister-in-law. Ned’s wife. Her that she didn’t like. What killed her, d’you know?”

  “I didn’t even know . . .”

  “Exactly. You know nothing. She struck her dead from jealousy. So the poor mortal woman would not bear the child in her womb.”

  “She would never do such a thing.”

  “She did. I know it. For it was my child.”

  “You put Edward Ferryman’s wife with child?”

  “Yes, and my wife killed it, for spite.”

  There was a long silence. Zachary drained his mug and pushed it towards James, hoping for more.

  James took a shuddering breath against these horrors, casually asserted. “Stop this slander. It means nothing to me. I don’t know these people, and I don’t care about them. We are here to make an agreement: that you will sail for me.”

  “You’re here for an agreement. I’m here for drink.”

  James nodded over his shoulder to the landlord to pour another draft. “Will you sail for me or not?” he demanded, his voice very low.

  “I will.”

  “And if I agree to tell her that you will never return, do you swear that you will not?”

  “Willingly. Didn’t you hear me? I’ll never go back to her.”

  Zachary stuck out a dirty hand. Reluctantly, James shook it. When the warm palm with the old scars pressed against his own, he was reminded with a shock of Alinor’s skin.

  “Ah, you’ve touched her,” Zachary guessed with spiteful satisfaction as James blanched. “You’ve touched her and she’s got your soul in thrall too.”

  James walked back to the Old Bull inn and up the rickety stairs to the boys’ low-ceilinged room. They were in their nightshifts in the big bed together.

  “I prayed for my father,” Rob confided.

  “That was good,” James said. “We’ll see him again tomorrow. He’ll come here for breakfast. You go to sleep now.”

  He watched them: Walter sprawled out to sleep, arms across the bed, feet to each corner, and Rob hunched into a ball. Then James quietly went from the room, downstairs to the private dining room.

  Two men were seated on either side of the fire. As James came in, they rose up and clasped his hand, but no names were mentioned.

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “I have. I told him it’s to be midnight. And I’ve met the boatman, and agreed a price,” James confirmed. “You’ve bribed the guard?”

  “Easily done,” the other said. “He’s not guarded as he was at Carisbrooke. That was the agreement with parliament, and they are true to it. They offered that he should be free to come and go here, limited only by his parole. They think an agreement is his only hope: fools.”

  “If I am caught at the Hopkins house don’t wait for me. Get him away at all speed. The ship is the Jessie, by the quay and ready to sail.�
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  “I thought it was the Marie?” the second man demurred.

  “He failed me. It is the Jessie.”

  “Have you paid him?”

  “Twenty crowns to go, twenty when we are safely home.”

  “I’m going with him to France,” the first man said, “if he will allow me. I’m not coming back.”

  “I have to return with the boatman to finish my mission here,” James said. He felt in his pocket and gave the second man a heavy purse. “But you can hold this for me. Be on the quay to pay the Jessie when it returns.”

  “You won’t carry it?”

  James shook his head.

  “You don’t trust him not to steal it and throw you overboard?” The man was appalled. “What kind of comrade is this? On a venture like this?”

  James was silent for a moment. “I don’t trust anyone,” he answered, hearing the ring of truth in his own words. “I don’t trust anyone, in this land which is sea, in these harbors that are not havens, in these ebbing tidelands.”

  “What?”

  “Anyway, if I don’t get down to the quay, get the person we have come for safely aboard, and pay the boatman.”

  “What d’you mean, if you don’t get down to the quay?”

  “If I’m caught,” James said flatly. “If I’m dead.”

  At five minutes before midnight the three men pulled on their tall hats and wrapped their thick cloaks around their shoulders. James assumed that it was the damp air that made him shiver and long to stay by the fire for one minute, just one minute more.

  “I’ll go ahead,” he said. “You come behind me and wait below his window, and you wait on the quay.”

  “As agreed,” the first man said, irritable with fear. “For God’s sake, can we get on?”

  All the windows were dark at the Hopkins house. There were no guards to be seen, but James had a suspicion that the commander of Carisbrooke Castle, an experienced army man, would have posted men to watch the doors, whatever promises the parliament might have made about the king’s freedom. The Hopkinses’ porter on their front door had been bribed to look away at midnight, but there was no way of knowing if there were spies hidden in the dark doorways or leaning against the dark walls. James peeled off from the main road and entered with assumed confidence through the garden door, walked around the vegetable and herb beds to the kitchen door. It was unlocked for early deliveries. James turned the handle and stepped into the quiet kitchen.