The Tide Mill

by Richard Herley

  Heavy with fatigue, he opened his eyes. The room was so dim that the wick in the lamp must have burned down to the collar; but he could not have been asleep for too long, or the flame would have gone out altogether.

  He had brought the lamp from the workshop and set it on the floor to the right of his blanket. He turned that way and with his left thumb and forefinger adjusted the screw. No light could escape to the village or any boats in the channel: the walls had now been sealed, and he had been sure to fasten the door and shutters before taking out his tinderbox and striking, in the cold darkness, flint on steel.

  In a minute or so he would step outside to inspect the sky and tide, and from them judge the passage of time.

  He had told Eloise that he would be here. He would have untold her if he could, and slept like a rational being, at home. But untell her he could not, so he had condemned himself to a second pointless and uncomfortable night in the lathe-room.

  It was then that he saw her, on his left, watching him gravely, seated on her heels and with her hands resting on the skirts of her riding-habit. He had the absurd thought that he must still be dreaming, despite the crisp, logical and undeniable reality of the lamp, the floorboards, and the curlew’s continuing call. Moreover, he could distinctly smell sawn oak, tar, seaweed, and salt; and now a grey plover was calling too, far out over the mud, bemoaning its solitary state.

  He sat up, extended a tentative hand, and touched her left forearm. This also, the warm feel of her sleeve, like the living flesh beneath, was real.

  She caught her breath, more tense even than she had been on the ladder, and looked down at the wooden floor between them.

  Ralf remained silent, shocked, unsure what to do or say. He found himself studying her eyelashes, the shape of her nose, her mouth. Even by the light of one small lamp, the gloss of her hair, especially where it was drawn back, had retained undiminished its power to bewitch his eyes. Her hair no longer seemed dark-brown, but black. It revealed the enchanting roundness of her head. This morning’s chignon had been undone and replaced with a single thick braid, laced with a ribbon whose colour he could not quite tell. He noticed her gloves and fur hat, on the floor next to her right thigh.

  However much she was trying to disappear into herself, however intently she was staring at the floorboards, he could conclude only that she was here. She had come, of her own volition, to give herself to him. It was everything he had dreamt of, but dismay began to seep into the edges of his astonishment. Despite all his urgings, he had not expected this of her. His disappointment became tinged with feelings of another sort. He knew her to be courageous, but till now he had never suspected her of daring.

  She had begun to tremble. He could feel as well as see it.

  She was human, and so was he. For months their love-affair had taken place in their two isolated minds, becoming more and more frenetic and extreme. Only during their kiss, three months ago, had it been given an outlet. The kiss had been initiated by him. It had launched the assault that had finally overwhelmed her will to bring her here tonight. Not just her will, but her reputation, modesty, and sense of shame.

  Ralf knew how hard she had struggled. If there were guilt in this room, it was his. He ought to send her back. He should never have done this to her.

  But his will, also, had been overwhelmed. He leaned towards her and at the same time adapted his grasp to bring her closer. The tension increased in her arms and shoulders, in the feminine pliancy of her whole body. As ever, she was resisting. Her resistance was like the word no, carved in granite a mile high, rooted there by her father and the court, an obstacle so treacherous and difficult to scale that, till this morning, Ralf had impotently wandered back and forth along its base.

  And as he tried to press his lips to hers she lowered her head even further.

  He took the risk of releasing her arm, so that she could leave whenever she chose. Instead of taking her hat and gloves and rising to her feet, she remained in place.

  “The mill,” he said, not understanding why. “It’s for you.”

  Eloise looked up. He had found the magic key to a magic doorway, opening at ground level. The no did not have to be scaled at all. There was no incomprehension in her eyes, only recognition, fear, and, unmistakably, desire.

  The King’s sanction, with its promise of dismemberment and death, was rising within him like his own aphrodisiac blood. Again he tried to place his lips on hers, seeking her consent, and again it was withheld, but less convincingly. Her hands rose to his shoulders to push him away. This did nothing but emphasize her nearness, and her touch inflamed him even more. Now it was his turn to resist. He did so easily. As she concentrated all her strength on pushing harder and harder, her mouth inadvertently gave ground, softening in its tactical retreat. In the clarity of the instant before he capitalized on his gain, Ralf was aware that he was about to commit not just a mortal sin, but a crime against the Crown. He was willing to barter his torn and tortured body, in chains, for a single kiss. The idea, fusing spectacularly with the sensations she was generating, unleashed an unstoppable surge of energy.

  She had read his mind. Into the bargain she flung the erotic vision of her neck on the sword-block. She cared no more than he did. All notions of safety were thrown in the furnace.

  The resulting explosion of flame hid an artful change of balance. Under cover of their kiss, she let him think that it was he who was causing their bodies to decline towards the blanket. The pretence continued even as she fought to stop him discovering the way into the bastion of her riding-habit. Her fingers, in opposing his, yet managed to direct him under the blind hem to the first of the concealed buttons. So much of his attention was devoted to their kisses that, without this delicious hindrance, he might never have found the second, or the third or fourth or fifth. The sleeves presented another difficulty. He decided to come back to them once he had made progress with the bliaut, whose fastenings had been contrived purely to baffle a masculine mind. The otherworldly feel of the deep-red material, silk crepe, was like nothing he had ever known. Very far now from discouraging him, she eloquently communicated, with a sigh, her pleasure in his exploration of her crepe-clad breast.

  At this Ralf became worried. Except for inadvertent glimpses of Imogen when younger, he had never seen feminine nakedness before. His knowledge stopped at kissing. The vaunts of the Rushton apprentices were quite inadequate to this.

  Had he hesitated? Had she sensed his anxiety? He felt the tingling charge of her hands under his tunic and shirt, sliding up his back. With that he discovered the trick to opening the bliaut, and clumsily attacked the remaining hooks and eyes. Underneath, guarded by what seemed like hundreds of tiny buttons, he found a pink silk shirt.

  “Wait,” she said, and sat up. The riding-habit fell away and became an adjunct to the blanket. Her feet were perfect, as he saw when she removed her calf-boots and lincoln tights. Next came her bliaut, and, button by pink button, as he looked on, the shirt. Below that, suspended on narrow shoulder-straps, she was wearing a shift in sheer, golden silk. She found her silver crucifix and looked down at it, acknowledging what it was. He thought she was going to take that off as well; instead she reached behind her and nimbly began to unravel her braid.

  Stupefied, Ralf saw her hair set free. It made another night. He gazed in wonder and put a hand to his mouth.

  “Do you know what to do?” she said.

  “Not really.”

  “You didn’t … you’ve never ..?”

  He shook his head.

  The subtlety of her smile reminded him of this morning – yesterday morning, now, – upstairs in the granary, when he had handed her from the ladder.

  It went badly. He had imagined this too many times: her fragrance, the feel of her hair, the final undressing, the eager suppleness of her flesh against his; except that his imaginings had been ill informed, pallid and jejune, and he had never needed for her, in vain and much too late, to try and intervene.

  Only after
wards did they notice how cold the room had become. She wrapped her riding-habit round them, the lining against their skin. Lying with his face against her breast and his head cradled in her arms, Ralf became conscious of the steadying thud of her heart. He wanted to apologize, but it was not necessary. She already understood. He thought of his resolution to make her his wife, and had the strangest feeling that they had lain cocooned in furs before.

  At last his journey without her was over. He had come home.

  He remembered his first meeting with Godric and the sense of predestination that had revisited their friendship ever since. Eloise was part of that. More: she was the greater part.

  He said, “Can you hear the curlews?”

  “Yes.”

  The distant curlews, and the greenshanks too, all the shorebirds, belonged in their unknown past.

  “What did you mean,” she said, “about the mill?”

  Ralf tried to explain. He told her about his talk with Godric by the river, his subsequent conversation with his father, and the moment, by the slip at Rushton, when Linsell had come up with the idea. He told her about their interview with the Steward, and about the walk the next day, with Imogen, to see the site. He reminded her of their own excursion, last midsummer’s eve, to this very spot. He described each step of the project, and said that each step, like the unfinished mill today, had been secretly, devotedly, by him, dedicated to her.

  He looked up. Her eyes were filling with tears.

  “O Ralf,” she said. “If you only knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  She did not answer at once. “How much I love you.”

  “What were you going to say?”

  She silenced his question with another kiss and he saw his earlier misgivings in all their fault. She had been right, and very brave, to seize this fragment of happiness for them both. Outside the freshly tarred, weatherboarded walls of their mill there was no one who would agree. The freezing night air, kept at bay only by the warmth of her skin, had settled on a uniformly hostile world. Judgement dwelt in every stone on the shore, in every atom of mud, in every withered leaf of the trees round the church and Hall. It stretched to the dark horizon, to the pole star, and spread its stain across the Milky Way. Out there, they would be deemed sinners. But how could this ever be wrong? The world was mad. Sanity, love, resided here, in her arms. She was the sanest person he had ever met. Even now it was not too late for her to rejoin the squalid, temporal society of madmen outside the mill. Such were her generosity and truth that she would rather stay.

  “Are you sure?” he whispered, as she gave him to understand that, like him, she was ready to begin anew.

  “Yes. I’m sure.”

  * * *

  Watching her dress, Ralf felt yesterday’s mere certitude yielding to true peace. There could not have been a gentler or more wonderful end to his boyhood. Her gift would be with him always. Overflowing gratitude and affection threatened to dim his vision. As he wiped at his eyes she paused and looked at him.

  Half smiling, she reached out and with her index finger rubbed, once, at the tip of his nose. “All gone.”

  With her bliaut still unfastened, he drew her to him and hid his face in her hair. “Eloise, let’s run away.”

  “We can’t. Don’t talk about it. Don’t spoil —”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Please stop apologizing to me, Ralf. You’ve nothing to apologize for. I’m the one who should apologize.”

  It could not be helped. Despite the supervising skill of his father and the care of the men, including himself, who had nailed up the boards; despite the thoroughness of the construction and tarring, the night was already seeping through the walls and into the mill. As soon as she stepped outside, she would again be immersed in it, and so would he.

  He let her finish dressing, and finished dressing himself. As he buckled his boots, he said, “When can we meet again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “More than anything.”

  Solving the problem with a ready practicality which surprised and even delighted him, she suggested that she leave a signal somewhere when another meeting became possible. If he went to the path beside the churchyard and found a white pebble touching the yew, in a fork of roots, it would mean she could come to the mill that night. If he found two pebbles, she would come the night following; if three, the night after that. She would only set out if, having checked after the evening bell, she found the pebble or pebbles had been removed.

  “My father and mother will be at court till the fifteenth, but I don’t know about my aunts.”

  This overt mention of the Baron subdued them both. For the first time tonight, Ralf felt a pang of conscience.

  “Will you confess?” he said. “To Father Pickard?”

  Her melting dark eyes had looked just like this at their first meeting, years ago, by the wall of her father’s house. She said, “You needn’t see me again if you don’t want. I’ll understand.”

  “O my sweet love, that’s not what I meant.”

  “Then what is there to confess? You have given me absolution.”

  It was not he, but she, who needed protecting. She was already resigned to being caught.

  “We must be very careful,” he said.

  “You’ve thought about it, too.”

  “I told you last night. I’d rather be dead.”

  In desperation, she put her hand on his lips. “That’s enough.”

  He wanted to hold her again. Instead he led her to the porch and down the steps. The narrow moon was outdone by the flare of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Sirius made a jewel in the collar of Orion’s larger hound; the giant himself, wheeling westwards, had crossed due south. With him he had turned the heavens: the time was between three and four. Ralf did not even need to look at the state of the tide, which, an hour or two from low water, had uncovered wide tracts of starlit mud.

  “Look!”

  Down through Leo, a streak of light was plunging towards the sea: a meteor, a shooting star.

  He said, “I don’t care if the sky falls in, not now.”

  “We can end it, if you want.”

  “If we did, it would be for you.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Three hours before dawn. At worst.”

  She had tethered her horse in the shelter of the workshed. There was just a breeze, or the frost would have been thicker on the thatch, which took its glow from the northern sky. Ralf made a stirrup of his hands and helped to lift her: Bella had no saddle, only a headstall. Eloise’s face was indistinct, but he knew that she would soon be unable, any longer, to hold back her tears.

  Nothing remained to be said. She started forward along the track. He climbed the bund and, for the second time in less than a day, stood and watched her go.

  * * *

  In the lathe-room, Ralf noticed an unexpected scroll of something at the edge of the blanket, and found it to be the ribbon from her braid. At the zenith of their love-making the blanket had got pushed aside. Mostly hidden, the ribbon had been overlooked. To see its colour he held it near the lamp. He might have known it: deep-red, the precise shade of her bliaut. He adored her colour-sense and her taste in clothes. When they were married, he would have to find the money for that.

  Ralf carefully pulled the ribbon straight, between the first and second fingers of his left hand, then rolled it up and put it in a corner of his pocket. The next time he saw her, he would ask if he could keep it: for ever.

  Lifting the blanket to fold it, his eye was arrested by a small, dark stain on the floor. He moved the lamp closer, and vividly recalled the urgent moment when she had winced, her fleeting pain giving way to a mystical and reassuring smile. Blood-crimson was also the colour of sealing-wax, detached now from its ribbon and the vellum of her skin. And it was he, Ralf Grigg, who had dissolved the divinity of the King.

  “My God.”

  On his haunches, he
shut his eyes. “My God,” he breathed again, all innocence gone, comprehending at last the magnitude of their crimes. High treason. The meed of that was bodily death. But for their crime against heaven the penalty was eternal: spiritual death, damnation, everlasting torment by the fiends of hell.

  Yesterday, on the ladder, he had said it. “Damn everything.” O to take back those words! Their lives were ruined. They had tasted the fruits of marriage without God’s sacrament. How could it have happened?

  He loved her, that was how.

  But if he really cared for her, would he not have stopped it long ago, or never let it start? Or had faith, and waited? Was this nothing more than lust? “You have given me absolution,” she had said, as if she had no sense of wrong. But her conscience too was on the rack. She knew as well as he did how powerless they had been.

  What did she see in him, a carpenter’s son? What awaited her on her wedding-night? Her groom, whatever he was called, would surely not be fooled.

  “No,” Ralf told himself, his mind in pieces. She could be no one’s bride but his. Yet it was impossible. How could he gain her father’s permission, still less support her on a tradesman’s wage? They could not run away, as well she knew, for they would be found, and caught, and put to death.

  He stood up. Last week his father had moved the site-chest, containing small tools, from the workshed to the mill. It stood in a corner of the meal-room. Ralf had a key.

  He returned with a one-pound hammer, a punch, a broom, and a handful of nails. In the uncertain glow of the lamp he started work. Only one floorboard was affected. He punched the heads of its nails right through, so that they no longer engaged with the wood. Each blow of the hammer, each ringing impact on the square head of the punch, hardened his sense of wrongdoing. Had it sounded thus at Golgotha? And had the wielder of that hammer, then, sensed the onset of the cosmic shame that would indelibly poison his soul?

  This was not how love should be. Love was not furtive. It should not depend on secrets, or deceit, or hiding the truth from Linsell Grigg.