Tidelands

“You have to be rid of this,” Alys pressed. “Richard can’t marry me if you are shamed, and that would break my heart and his, and our child would be born out of wedlock. You’ll have a bastard child, and a bastard grandchild. We can’t survive that. Your child is the ruin of us all: you, me, and Rob. You have to end it. I’ve never asked you for anything, Ma, but I am asking you for this.”

Her mother sat silent, her face white.

“Your shame is my shame,” the girl repeated. “When the Stoneys hear you’re with child they’ll throw me off. I’ll never see Richard again. Then we’ll both be stuck here, both of us, with our bastards, without husbands. Don’t you think they’ll turn us out, with our big bellies on us? Don’t you think Mrs. Miller, and all the goodwives like her, will have us out of the parish before we can make a charge on it? And every husband shouting that we should go, to show that it wasn’t him?”

“Two babies,” was all that Alinor could say.

“Two bastards,” her daughter corrected her. “Pauper bastards. They’ll die in the poorhouse together. No one will let us raise them.”

“I’ll think about it.” Alinor drew a breath. “I will think about it today and tell you tonight.”

“You should have thought before,” her daughter said crudely.

Alinor flinched as if she had been struck. “I know,” she said, her voice very low. “I know how grave this is.”

“If you don’t finish it here, today, then my life is ruined. Rob’s, too,” Alys loaded her mother’s guilt. “Nobody will take him as an apprentice if his mother is a bawd who keeps a bawdy house on the mire. Nobody’ll ever marry me with a bastard child and my mother with hers. We’ll be ruined whores. My uncle Ned won’t even let us on his ferry. We’ll never get off the island at high tide. And when they come to drive us out, nobody will save us. Rob will have to watch them throw stones and mud and fish guts at our backs.”

Alinor nodded. She could imagine the reflection of torches in the water as the good people of Sealsea Island gathered at dusk to rid themselves of two friendless sluts. “I know.”

“Get the herbs ready,” Alys ordered. “I’ll come home early and we’ll do it this evening.”

She pulled on her jacket, and she took her distaff, her hank of fleece, and her spindle and she walked out of the door, spinning as she walked up the bank towards the ferry, to go to the mill where she would work as hard as any man, to earn the money for her dowry for the marriage that she was determined to make.

Left alone, Alinor started work on the daily tasks: shooing the hens out of the door, picking up the eggs, sweeping the floor, washing the two wooden gruel bowls, and rinsing the ale mugs. She swept the embers under the earthenware fire guard and made the marks against fire in the ashes of the hearth. She tied her cape around her shoulders, and went outside to gather firewood. And then she stood, looking at the harbor as if she had never seen it before, gazing at the gray horizon, wondering if she would ever again see a ship coming up the deep-water channel and hope that it was bringing the man she loved.

She had been so long in such a daze of missing James, and trusting him to return, that she could not now change the rhythm of her thoughts. She could not understand that she was no longer patiently waiting; now she was in crisis. She could not bring herself to face the problem and solve it. She sank down on the bench and, as the sky overhead darkened with a great flock of wintering geese and she heard their loud complaining cries and heard the beating of their great wings, without knowing it, under her cape her cold hand crept to her flat belly as if she would hold the tiny baby safe inside.

Later that morning Alinor was raking over the barley in the malthouse at Ferry-house. As she leaned on her rake and inhaled the warm scent of the barleycorns, a young lad put his head in the door and said: “Are you the wisewoman?”

Alinor, feeling far from wise, replied: “Yes. Who asks?”

“An oyster fisherwoman,” he said. “Down at East Beach.”

“Did her husband send for me?” Alinor asked, shoveling the barley grains rapidly into a pile so that they could continue heating.

“He’s at sea. His mother sent me for you. She gave me this.” The boy handed over a silver sixpence.

“I’ll come at once,” Alinor said, reassured that there would be money to pay her fee. East Beach fishermen were notorious: on a poor island they did poorly. “I’ve got to fetch my things.”

“I’m to come with you and help carry,” the youth said. He was pale with fright at having to serve a wisewoman. Alinor was known on East Beach to be a mistress of unknown arts. The fishermen of East Beach had drunk with Zachary when he had boasted about his wife’s strange powers. And then Zachary was gone, and his ship was gone, for no reason, on a clear day, and one or two said that she had sent him down with his ship and her faerie lover had danced like St. Elmo’s fire, in the rigging.

“We’ll walk across the mire to St. Wilfrid’s and then to East Beach,” Alinor decided.