Tidelands

“I have to tell you something.”

“Anything! Anything!”

The hens clucked again at the voices. “Hush,” she said, drawing him away from the henhouse. “I have to tell you . . .”

He took her hand. “Of course. What is it, my love?”

She drew a breath again, as if she could not speak. Then her words were so soft he had to lean towards her to catch them. “I am with child,” she said.

For a moment he did not understand what she was saying; he could not hear the words. Each single word made sense, but together they made no sense at all and he could not understand it—coming from her, to him.

“What?”

“I am with child.”

“How?” he asked stupidly.

She found a ghost of a smile. “The way it usually happens. When we were in the hayloft together.”

“But how?” he asked again. “How could it be?”

“What should prevent it?”

“I thought you would prevent it!” he retorted, too loudly for caution.

“Hush,” she said again, and led him farther down the path to the bottom gate, so that they could not be heard from the house.

Irrelevantly, he suddenly thought how much he hated a winter vegetable garden, so dark and muddy and nothing growing. He thought how poor it was, and how ugly. He thought how much he disliked it that the hens recognized her voice and clucked back at her. The future Lady Avery should not pull turnips and feed her own hens; and her hand in his was rough. “Are you sure?”

Now she smiled. “Of course I am sure.”

Her smile infuriated him, as if she thought him a fool. “I do understand well enough,” he snapped. “It’s not that I know nothing. It’s just that I thought that you—a married woman, a wisewoman—would have made sure that it did not happen.”

She shook her head; she was maddeningly serene. “I don’t do that sort of work.”

“It’s not work when it is for yourself!” he argued like a Jesuit. “It would be work, and a sin, if you were preventing the child of another: a sinful woman, or an adulteress. But for yourself there is no sin in a woman choosing to eat some herbs, or drink some drink, as soon as you knew. Or better still, before you did the act!”

“Did the act?” she repeated, as if she could not understand his words.

“Then it would be no sin at all as there would be no intent. D’you see? If there is no evil intent then there is no sin. Why did you not take the herbs the morning that we parted?”

“I was thinking of nothing but us, nothing but us and the hayloft as if it were a time outside time,” she admitted. “I was longing for the evening when I would see you again. Then you were gone, and I was just longing.”

She tightened the shawl across her rounded belly. “Of course, once I knew, I thought what I should do. I thought about it all night long. It was a long night, and a cold one . . .” She trailed off. She wanted to tell him how bright the beach of shells had been in the moonlight, the heavy stones that she had chosen, the thought of walking into the mire, the certainty of death by drowning, and her revelation that the life of their baby was a joy to her.

Then she saw his face, closed and angry. “But I would never have done it. I wouldn’t use herbs to poison any baby. I certainly wouldn’t poison my baby. And I’d rather die than poison a baby of ours.”

She saw his shoulders hunch with an instant revulsion. “It’s not a baby yet,” he said. “Not in law. Not till it quickens. Not in the sight of God. Has it quickened yet? No?”

Wonderingly she looked from his scowling eyes to his hardened mouth. “Yes,” she said quietly. “Of course. We conceived him in September. I felt him move at Christmas. I know there is life in him. He sleeps and wakes inside me, I can feel him. Perhaps he dreams.”

“It’s not a boy child!”

Again, she looked at him with her steady dark gaze. “Of course, no one can say for sure. But it is a child, and I believe it is a boy.”

“It’s not. It’s a nothing. It’s not too late . . .”

“Too late for what?”

“For you to take the herb or the drink or whatever it is that you know. Not too late for that.”

“Not too late for me to push a bodkin into my belly to kill it in the womb,” she remarked.

He gulped. “Of course, I wouldn’t want you to do that. But, Alinor . . .”

“Yes?”

“Alinor, I want to take you to my home, I want you to live there as my wife. You will be the next Lady Avery.”

At once she was diverted. “Is that your name?”

“Yes, yes, what of it? That’s not the point. What I am saying is that I cannot take you to my mother and my father if you are big with a child and you are still another man’s wife. If you allow it to be born, it will take Zachary’s name. I cannot raise a child named Reekie in my own home! Bad enough that my mother will have Alys and Robert as her grandchildren! I cannot, Alinor. You must understand, I cannot. It would be to shame you, and shame me and my name.”

“I didn’t know that was your name,” she repeated. “Avery! Are you Lord Avery?”

“No. My father is a baronet. Not that it matters.”

“But I’ve thought of you all this time as James Summer. Is your given name not James? How shall I call you anything else?”