Tidelands

“What on earth have you been doing?” she asked as she tossed a leaf into the fire.

“Picking sloes,” Alys replied. “Since Mrs. Miller learned that Richard and I are to be married, she sends me out over the fields. As if she can stop us seeing each other! As if she gets any gain by putting me to humble work.”

Alinor combed the golden sweep of hair, watching the light fall on the thick waves, and then started to plait, starting from the front, so that it coiled around Alys’s pretty head.

“Have you decided?” Alys asked quietly, looking up trustingly into her mother’s face. “I came home early to help you, and Uncle told me you’d been called to East Beach. But I’ve told Mrs. Miller I was ill. She won’t expect me today. I can stay home today and help you be rid of this.”

“I have decided what to do.” Alinor drew a breath and told her. “It came to me yesterday almost like a vision, Alys, when I delivered Lisa Auster’s baby. I held her in my arms. She was no bigger than a kitten, and I saw how precious she was, such a miracle. Everything about her was perfect; she was a tiny person, her little eyelashes and her nails as small as the smallest shells on Wittering beach, and her eyes were dark blue, like yours were when you were born. I could see the light of the world in her. I can’t destroy such a perfect thing, Alys. It would be like breaking a blackbird’s egg. I understood what is sacred, for the first time in my life. This baby has come to me when I thought I would never have another. And I won’t kill it.”

“But you do know how?” Alys persisted.

“I know how, yes,” Alinor said quietly.

“Did your mother ever do it?”

“Yes, she did. When she judged it was best for the mother, or best for the child, poor thing, misconceived, miscarried, miserable. She would do it to spare suffering. I would do it, to spare another’s suffering. I believe it is right to do it—to spare pain. If I had my way a woman would be able to choose—whether to conceive, whether to labor, whether or not to bear a child. Men should not rule this, it is a woman’s own life and that of her child. But I won’t do it to my baby. I would rather have the pain than lose the baby.”

“Is it herbs?”

“Herbs first, and if the baby does not come away, then you take a spindle or a tanner’s needle, a long thin knife or a bodkin, and you pass it up inside the woman to stab the baby as it lies, curled inside,” Alinor said steadily as Alys listened horrified, her hands over her mouth.

“Six times you push the needle up, and you don’t know whether you are piercing the baby’s head, going through an eye or an ear or a mouth, or stabbing right through into the woman’s body. It is as savage as butchering a calf. Worse. You’re completely blind: you don’t know what you’re doing. The woman can bleed to death inside, or the baby can die but not come away and rot inside her. Or she seems to miscarry, but dies in fever. It is death for the baby and sometimes death for the mother. Do you wish that on me?”

Alys leaned against her mother’s knee and closed her eyes. “Of course not.”

“D’you want to take a tanner’s needle and stab your unborn sister in the face as she grows inside me?”

“Of course not,” the girl whispered as quiet as her mother.

“Neither do I,” Alinor said. “I can’t do it. I can’t bring myself to do it.”

“But what are we to do, Ma? This will ruin me, and you, and Rob.”

“I know,” Alinor said. “And it’s my shame, not yours nor Rob’s. I’ll think of a way that I can take it, all to myself.”

Alys leaned back against her mother’s knees. “There’s no way. Unless you go away, right away, right now, before anyone knows, and then what will become of Rob and me? We’re too young to lose both mother and father. You’ll make us orphans. And where would you go? And how can I be married without you? How can I have my baby without you?”

“I’m so sorry,” Alinor said, humbled before her daughter. “I really am, Alys. I will pray for guidance, and I’ll do anything that I can. Anything but killing this baby.”

“Whose baby?” Alinor turned and looked up at her mother. “Whose baby is it? Is it Sir William’s? Because he can pay for you to go away. Everyone knows he—”

“It’s not Sir William’s,” Alinor interrupted her. “And I can’t say whose it is. It’s not my secret, Alys. I’ve done very wrong, but I won’t make it worse by betraying him as well as myself.”

“It’s he who has betrayed you,” the girl said resentfully. “He’s ruined all three of us. He’s no better than my da.”

She stopped as she saw her mother flinch.

“Don’t say that, Alys. You don’t know—”

“He is worse than my da,” she persisted. “We’d have been less hurt if he had beaten you, like my da used to do. You protected Rob and me from our da. I’ve seen you take a beating that I thought would kill you. You stood between Da and us. But you won’t save us from this. What does it mean—if you won’t save us from this?”

DOUAI, FRANCE, NOVEMBER 1648