Tidelands

“And I will marry someone so that my name continues, so that I have a son. But I will never love her as I have loved you, and I will spend the rest of my life missing you.”

Her hand was shaking so hard that the warm ale spilled onto the skirt of her gown.

“Is this your wish?” he asked incredulously. “Is this what you want for me? This misery?”

The maid of the inn came up to them. “Everything all right here?” she asked very loudly, breaking into the spell he was weaving around her. “Want another jug of ale?”

“Nothing, nothing,” James said, waving her away.

“Tell me that you will marry me,” he whispered. “Tell me that you love me as I love you—more than anything else in the world.”

Finally, Alinor looked up at him and he saw that her eyes were darkened with unshed tears. “I wouldn’t stoop to marry a man who’d kill his own child,” she said simply. “It’s not an honor that you offer me. If you’re the man who’d destroy his own baby in the womb then you’re not the man that I thought you were, and you’re not the man for me.”

He was as shaken as if she had slapped his handsome face. “Don’t you dare to judge me!” he burst out.

She shook her head, quite unafraid. “I don’t judge you. I’m just telling you that I agree with you. You won’t have me with the baby that I carry; I won’t come to you without it. We’re both losers, I think.”

She rose from her chair, and at once he got to his feet and put his hand on her arm. “You can’t go like this!”

“I can’t stay,” she replied quietly.

“I mean . . .” He meant that he could not believe that she could defy him, that she could turn down his wealth and name and love. He could not believe that she could refuse him, and prefer such a little thing—not even a baby yet—a homunculus that had barely quickened. It was a nothing, it was a nothing, less than a hen’s egg that he might eat for his breakfast, and yet she was putting it between them. It was not possible to imagine that she should choose a life of poverty and shame with a fatherless child over the comfort and wealth that he could offer her, and his name, his pride and his name.

“But I love you!” he burst out.

There was a world of sadness in the smile that she turned on him. “Oh, I love you,” she replied. “I always will. And I’ll take a comfort in that, when you’re gone away to your beautiful house and I’m here alone.”

Without another word, she turned and walked away from him, just as if he were not a young gentleman, and the son of a great man, just as if he were not the greatest prospect of her life: a husband of unimaginable wealth and position, and her savior from shame. She walked away from him without looking back. She walked away from him as if she were never coming back, and she left him alone at the table laid with breakfast in the best coaching inn of Chichester.

Alinor went home in a dream, setting one foot before the other. She did not hail any passing cart for a lift. There was only one that went by her, and she did not see or hear it. As she walked, it started to snow, little specks of white snow like a dust that whirled around her, and she pulled up the hood of her cloak and let it settle on her head and her shoulders. She could not feel cold; she did not know that it was snowing.

She watched her feet in her worn boots going steadily south down the road, through the village of Hunston, through Street End, and she felt the familiar rub of the ill-fitting left boot against her heel. She held her cape tied tightly around her waist and changed her basket from one frozen grip to another, hardly noticing the weight on one side or the other, nor how her back ached.

She sat on a milestone to catch her breath after an hour’s walking, and watched the snow fall on her gown, a speckle of white against the brown wool. When she got to her feet she brushed herself off and shook out her cape, gathered it around herself again, and walked on. She did not notice that her hands were so cold that they were white as the snow and her stubby fingernails were blue.

Ned’s ferry was tied up on the far side of the rife, outside the house, so Alinor clanged the dangling horseshoe with the new bar and saw him open the top half of the ferry-house door and then come out, a piece of sacking over his head and shoulders. He went hand over hand till the ferry was at her side and held the raft against the ebbing tide as she stepped in.

“You brought the snow with you,” he remarked.

“All the way,” she said as she stepped into the gently rocking ferry.

He noticed that she did not grasp his hand or cling to the side as she usually did. He guessed that she was distressed at Rob going away.

“How’s our lad? Was it all right there?”

“Fair,” she said. “They’re good people.”

“Did you leave him gladly?”

“Fair,” she said again. She gave him a small rueful smile. “He didn’t cling to me and beg me not to go.”

“Good lad,” he said. “He’ll do well.”

“I don’t doubt it.”