Tidelands

Of course, people would wonder at Rob’s good fortune and Alys’s betrothal, but she had not thought that people would weave Zachary’s superstitious hatred and her survival together into a faerie story of Zachary’s doom and her revenge. It was a dark note at the end of a day that had started with thoughts of drowning and dark water. She trudged along the bank, the mud crunching with frost beneath her worn boots, opened the door, and went in.

The cottage was in darkness, the fire under the cover, the candles snuffed out. Alys was asleep on her side of the bed and Alinor felt nothing but relief that she need not speak another word until the morning.

DOUAI, FRANCE, OCTOBER 1648

James spent a week in penitent silence, sleepless with the conflicting sense of guilt and desire. Every day he met with his confessor and step-by-step they went through his first encounter with Alinor, that she had saved him and without her he would have been lost on the unmapped tidelands. She had been a savior to him.

“But she is not your savior,” Father Paul said quietly as they knelt side by side in the chapel and looked up at the altar where the crucified Christ looked down on them, his painted face downcast. “She is no angel. She is an earthly woman and naturally disposed to sin.”

James bowed his head. He could not deny that she was disposed to sin. He spoke of the afternoon in the boat, he spoke of her desire. He spoke of the color of her hair and how a curl escaped from her cap and blew against her face. He spoke of her scarred hands and her rough linen.

“She was born into poverty, set in her place by God. It is not for you to defy God and rescue her. Did she ask to be baptized into the true faith?”

“No,” James said quietly.

“You have nothing else to offer her.”

His voice low and ashamed, James spoke of the feel of her mouth under his, of the strength of her body under the bulky clothes. He spoke of her smile and her little indrawn breath of desire. He said that when he touched her hand, her waist, her breast, he felt that he was, for the first time, a man. That he became himself, in loving her.

“A woman cannot bring insight,” Father Paul corrected him. “You do not know yourself by knowing her. All she taught you is carnal knowledge, that is all she knows.”

“But that was everything!” James said simply. He did not speak of the loft over the stable, nor of her beauty in the morning light when she had been as naked as Eve and as innocent as Paradise. “I love her, Father. Sin or not.”

“It is sin,” the priest steadily replied. “Don’t call it ‘sin or not,’ as if you had not received instruction, as if God had not given you reason. It is sin and you must put it from you.”

James sat back on his heels, his face pale. “To abandon her would break my word. I have asked her to be my wife.”

“You are not free to ask her.”

“And she was not free to consent,” James conceded. “They speak against her . . .”

“What do they say?”

“Nothing, superstitious nonsense, malice, all malice. Her own husband said she was whore to the faeries,” James tried to laugh. “Ignorant nonsense, that foolish countrypeople—”

His confessor did not laugh with him. “My son, you and I, far away from them, don’t know what they are speaking of. You can’t say that it is nonsense, you don’t know what she has done. We would have to inquire. A witchfinder would have to visit and ask questions. This is very serious. Does she have marks upon her?”

“No!” James was horrified.

“Does she fear the word of God in church, or the works of God, like deep water or high cliffs?”

James hesitated, thinking of her horror of water.

“Does she have a familiar, an animal that communes with her?”

He thought of the hens that clucked around her feet and slept in the corner of the little cottage, of Red the dog, of the bees, of the robin in her garden: “But this is her life . . .”

“Is her husband not likely to know better than you, who has been seduced by her? What if she is beautiful because Satan has thrown a glamour on her? What if she makes spells as well as physic? You told me that she expected to speak with the dead? What if this is not a helpless poor woman but an evil one?”

TIDELANDS, OCTOBER, 1648

Alys woke to the familiar sound of the small ale being poured from the jug and the scrape of the wooden spoon in the bottom of the iron pot of gruel. She got up from the bed and pushed her tumbled hair out of her eyes, pulling on her shirt over her head, and stepping into her skirt, haphazard, without looking.

Alinor pulled up her stool at the table and bowed her head in grace as Alys sat down at the other side and said: “Amen.”

They ate in silence and then Alys got to her feet and fetched the comb for her hair. Without speaking she handed it to her mother and sat at her feet as if she were a little girl again. Alinor gently unbraided her daughter’s long fair hair and combed it, gently teasing out every tangle and picking out the occasional twig or piece of straw.