Tidelands

It was a coin from the time of the Saxon kingdom, from when the Saxons had ruled the tidelands, pushing through the reed banks and the mud in their longboats, building their farmsteads on the islands. Alinor had collected the tokens since childhood, and kept them in her treasure box. Her mother had laughed at her as a miser with a hoard of fool’s gold, but had praised her sharp eyes and told her to watch carefully in case one day she found a coin of value. Only once had Alinor found a beaten coin of silver and they had taken it to be assayed and weighed in Chichester. The goldsmith had given her sixpence for it, a fortune to the little girl. All the other coins in her collection were made of bronze or enameled silver, the valuable metal rubbed off over the years. But she had never wanted them for their value. She loved them for their age, for the sense of them belonging to a forgotten time, to people who were not remembered anymore, the coins engraved with strange symbols and shapes rubbed to invisibility.

The people of Sealsea Island called the coins “faerie gold” and told stories of treasure hoards of priceless coins and the dark horsemen who guarded them, who would strike a thief blind and seal his eyelids with molten silver, but everyone knew they were just sea wrack: washed in and out by the sea, found in waterside mud, and valueless.

“Why would his lordship take Rob into service?” Ned asked as Alinor spat on the little coin and polished it on the hem of her gown, held it up to the setting sun and tried to decipher the blurred image. “Why pay him so well?”

“This looks like a lion,” she said, admiring the little token. “It really does. Do you think it’s a coin from old England?”

“Aye, perhaps. But why Rob?”

“Why not?” she demanded. “Don’t you remember when I cured Master Walter of his croup last May? Rob came with me then. He picked the herbs from their garden and helped me in their stillroom. We’ve been there a few times since the death of her ladyship. We’re going back tomorrow to harvest their herbs and dry them. Mr. Tudeley said it was to help us since the disappearance of Zachary.”

“They could have helped before. He’s been gone more than six months.”

She shrugged. “They don’t count the days like us.”

“They don’t count anything,” he said resentfully.

“I know, but if Rob can earn good money and get an education at the same time then perhaps he can do better than his father. Maybe he can get away from here, perhaps even to Chichester.”

“If they don’t lead him into sin. Sir William was for the king, not for parliament. He might have surrendered and begged for pardon but he doesn’t serve in the new parliament, and he’s not mustered for the New Model Army. By rights, he should be calling up his men and marching north against the Scots. If he ever meant his promise to parliament, this is his chance to prove it. But I doubt it’s a godly household.”

Alinor glanced sideways at her brother, at his shock of thick brown hair and his stocky shoulders. He was bitter at being called away from the army just as they were winning, forced to come back to pull the ferry over a muddy rife, when he had got away from the island and thought that the world was changing forever and that he was part of that change.

“You’ll always guide Rob,” she assured him. “He won’t forget your teachings. He knows where he comes from, and what we believe.”

“What d’you believe?” he challenged her. “I don’t know what you believe.”

Her gaze slid away from him. “Ah, I’m like our mother and grandmother, Ned. I don’t always understand; but sometimes I feel . . .”

“He’ll never be an army man,” he said regretfully. “He’ll never serve under Cromwell. He’s missed his chance at that. And now you’re putting him into service to a cavalier lord . . .”

“His lordship was pardoned, and he paid his fine for backing the king,” she said, resolutely turning her mind from the memory of the priest walking into the Priory, confident it was a safe house for a papist, for a royalist spy. “Rob takes after you. He won’t forget what’s right. And Sir William will serve in a godly parliament, whatever regrets he has for the old days. It’s over for the king and his lords. You told me so yourself.”

“I don’t trust him, nor any of them who say they’re sorry and get their lands back as if there’s no harm done, when hundreds of good men will never come home again. I’d have had Rob in the army; I’d have had him march to war on the side of God. If he was my boy, I’d send him out to my old troop now. There’s still a chance the Scots will come down on us. Some say the Irish are coming.”

“Surely the war’s over?”

“Not till the king signs a peace treaty, and means it.”

“Ned, I can’t let my boy go,” she said apologetically.

“Not even to serve the Lord?”

“He’s all I have.”

“And now, if he’s wearing Peachey livery, he won’t even take the ferry after I’m gone,” he said resentfully. “So I came back to keep the ferry and the house in the family for nothing.”