Tidelands

James sat at the table, feeling the odd sensation of the floor moving under his feet, as if he were still riding the horse to the coast, still rising and falling on the waves of the sea. It was only travel sickness, but he thought that it would last forever: never again would the ground be firm beneath his feet. Then the door opened and a slight man came in, dressed in the neat modest clothes of a London tradesman. He shook James’s hand with a steady grip.

“You won’t be staying long.” It was a statement rather than a question.

“I won’t,” James promised him. “I’m grateful to you for the refuge.”

The man nodded.

“You’re not of the old faith?” James asked tentatively.

“No,” the man said. “I’m a Presbyterian, though I think, as Cromwell does, that a man should be free to worship in his own way. But unlike the radicals, I think the country is best ruled by a king and lords. I can’t see that a man can be a plowman by day and a lawmaker by night. We each have our trade, we should stick to it.”

“Was the king a good brother in the guild of monarchy?” James asked him, smiling slightly.

“Not the best,” the man said frankly. “But if my goldsmith does faulty work I make a complaint and ask him to do it again. I don’t put my baker in his place.”

“Are there many who think like you in London?”

“A few,” the man said. “Not enough for your purposes.”

“My purpose is to get information for the queen and prince and a letter to their friends,” James said cautiously. “That’s all.”

“That’s only half the job. Your purpose should be to get him back to his throne and you back to your own home, wherever that is. All of us in the place we were born to. All of us doing the trade we were brought up to.”

James nodded. “In the end, of course.” Briefly he thought of his home and his mother’s herb garden, and of his dream of Alinor standing at the gate. “I have hopes,” he admitted. “But for now, I have to know what is happening.”

“I’ll take you to Westminster,” his host said. “You can see for yourself. A wonder I never thought I’d see. The army holding the gate of the houses of parliament and the king commanded to answer to them.”

TIDELANDS, DECEMBER 1648

In the cold dark days of December Alys kept the ferry, pulling it over to the north side as soon as she heard the clang of the iron bar against the horseshoe, and answering every knock on the door or holler from the road. She was polite and cheerful with every traveler, and more than one wagoner paid her a penny tip as well as his threepenny fee for her pretty smile. The two women moved into the ferry-house at once. It was the only way that Alys could mind the ferry in the hours of darkness, and they were both glad to be in the bigger warmer house when the east wind brought frost across the harbor and the rain turned to sleet.

Alinor, waking in her childhood bed, seeing once again the familiar painted beams on the limewashed ceiling, felt as if she had never been married and never left home to live with Zachary in the little cottage. Sometimes she woke and thought that her mother was in the little bedroom next door and her brother, Ned, snoring in the bed beside her own, but then she felt the baby move deep in her belly, and remembered that she was a girl no longer; she had given birth to two children and was now expecting a third.

The two women worked side by side during much of the day, weeding the winter garden, brewing ale and selling it at the kitchen window to people crossing on the ferry, baking bread with the yeast from the ale froth, dipping rushlights in the wax from the bees, and sorting seeds for spring. Their pregnancies were easy to hide. The growing curve of Alinor’s belly was disguised under her voluminous winter skirt and aprons, and Alys spent her days wrapped in her uncle Ned’s canvas cloak to keep her warm and dry on the water.

There was little hard laboring work to be done on Mill Farm in the winter months. The men did most of the hedging and the ditching. Plowing and harrowing would not start till spring. Alinor took her daughter’s place at the mill, working in the kitchen and dairy: breadmaking, ale brewing, and cheese making.

Before sunrise in the morning, and at sunset every winter afternoon, Richard Stoney walked down the track from the mill to sit with Alys in the ferry-house kitchen, or to pull the ferry for her so she could stay indoors and spin. Alinor came upon the two of them, wrapped in each other’s arms, when it was time for Richard to go home.

“Soon you won’t be parted,” she told them.

“And then we’ll never be parted again,” Richard promised.

Alinor was cooking dinner, a fish stew made from Alys’s catch from Broad Rife, when there was a sharp bark from Red, and then a loud knocking on the back door of the ferry-house. Her first thought was of James, but when she threw open the door, it was one of the Sealsea Island famers standing on the stone doorstep.

“It’s my mother,” he said. “Granny Hebden. She’s sinking fast.”

“God bless her,” Alinor said at once.