Tidelands

Nobody remarked aloud that the two Reekie children had been blessed with extraordinary opportunities, given that they had been born in a fisherman’s cottage to a ferryman’s daughter and a wastrel father who was now missing. Nobody said that their good luck could only be something other than chance, charm, or ability. Nobody repeated the old story that they were faerie born, that their own father had sworn it, and that their good looks and good fortune were the gifts of their mother—a faerie concubine, beloved of the unseen world, and guided by it. But almost everyone thought: how else could the Reekie children be so undeservingly blessed? How else could their mother walk out of a violent marriage with her head high and not a mark on her? How else should Zachary so conveniently disappear? Nobody would say such a thing on Alys’s wedding day, but a number of people thought it, and glanced to each other, and saw that others were thinking it too.

Alys was about to go into church and Alinor about to follow her when Mrs. Stoney delayed them at the church porch. “D’you have the dowry?” she asked. “You’re supposed to give it to me here.”

Alinor halted, and turned to her daughter. Alys flushed a little, and reached into the pocket of her gown under her apron.

“If it’s short you’d better tell me now,” Mrs. Stoney said harshly. “Before you go a step farther.”

“It’s not short,” Alys said.

Alinor tried to nod as if she were confident that Alys had all the money. They had worked all the hours at the mill, and spun, but even with the ferry money and Rob’s wages, she thought that Richard must have donated all his inheritance.

Triumphantly, Alys handed over the purse, and Mrs. Stoney weighed it in her hand and then opened it and peeped inside. Alys’s face was like a sculpture in stone as she looked at her mother-in-law. The woman tipped the coins into her hand: gold crowns, silver shillings, no small coins, no coppers at all: a fortune.

“You got it,” she said, as if she still could not believe it.

“Of course,” Alys said.

“Of course,” Alinor repeated.

Mrs. Stoney tucked the purse into the pocket of her cape. “Then we can go in,” she said. “I’ll put this in our treasure chest at Stoney Farm tonight.”

She turned and went into church, past the standing room for the workingmen at the rear of the church, and took a seat in a pew near the front, while the usual pew owner shifted up sulkily. Alys took her mother’s hand and went to stand at the back, waiting to be called up to the altar. Richard was waiting at the front of the church.

“Next Sunday, that’s where I’ll be,” Alys whispered to her mother, nodding at Mrs. Stoney’s determined occupation of the prestigious front pew. “And you shall sit beside me. That’s worth scraping up for pennies, isn’t it? We’ll have our own pew.”

“That wasn’t pennies,” Alinor said, still stunned that Alys had a dowry purse with the full amount.

Her daughter smiled up at her. “Richard,” she whispered. “I told you he would not risk losing me.”

The door of the church behind them opened, and Sir William strolled up the aisle of the church, nodding to his tenants left and right, showing no signs of mourning for the king he had lost and the defeat of his cause. His face was set in its usual lines of calm indifference. His eyes flickered over the men at the back of the church and he ignored Ned and other known roundheads. Behind him, as always, in order of precedence came his household; before them came his guest: James Summer.

Alinor, standing with Alys, unnoticed at the rear of the church, closed her eyes. She felt herself go rigid as an iron bar on an anvil. She had not thought that James would still be at the Priory. It had not occurred to her that he would come to church for Alys’s wedding day. Alinor gripped the back of the pew against the falling sense of faintness. She bit her lip. She held herself as if she were a fragile thing that might crack and dissolve, as if she might be exhaled if she did not hold her breath.

The minister announced the first hymn, the parish stumbled through an unfamiliar song with the musicians sawing away on tabor and fiddle. Alinor opened her eyes, came to her senses, and opened and closed her mouth as if she were singing too.