Tidelands

“Who are you?” She could tell he was gentry by his beautifully cut dark jacket, by the lace at his throat. “What’re you doing here, sir?” She looked behind him for his servants, for his guard.

The empty graveyard stretched out in the eerie half darkness to the low wall of knapped flints shining darkly in the moonlight as if they had been washed over and left wet. The thickly crowned trees leaned over, casting a darker shade on the dark ground. There was nothing to see but the light of the moon throwing the shadows of the headstones onto the ragged scythed grass, and nothing to hear but the soft sigh of incoming tide under a full moon.

“I can’t be seen,” he muttered.

“Nobody here to see you.” Her abrupt dismissal of his fear made him look again at her oval face, her dark gray eyes: a woman as beautiful as a Madonna in an icon, but drab here in the unearthly half-light, her tattered kerchief hiding her hair, shapeless in her ragged clothes.

“What are you doing here at this time of night?” he asked suspiciously.

“I came to pray.” She would not tell this stranger that it was well known that a widow would meet her dead husband if she waited for him in the churchyard on Midsummer Eve.

“Pray?” he repeated. “God bless you for the thought. Let’s go in then. I’ll pray with you.”

He turned the heavy ring handle on the door and caught the bar as it lifted on the other side so that it made no sound. He led the way into the silent church, quiet as a thief. She hesitated, but he waited for her, holding the door open without another word and she had to follow him. When he closed the door behind them there was only the dim light from the old stained-glass windows, gold and bronze on the stone-flagged floor. The sound of the rising sea was shut out.

“Leave the door open,” she said nervously. “It’s so dark in here.”

He opened it a crack and a ribbon of pale moonlight stretched along the aisle to their feet.

“What did you come here for?” she asked. “Are you a gentleman from London?” It was the only explanation for his clean collar and his good leather boots, the little pack that he carried, and the warm intelligence in his face.

“I can’t say.”

She thought he must be one of the agents traveling the country seeking recruits for either parliament or king, except that nobody ever came to Sealsea Island, and he was alone without companions, or even horses, as if he had been dropped from the sky like a stormbringer, swung low from the clouds, for ill-doing to mortals, ready to blow away again on a summer gale.

“Are you smuggling, sir?”

His short laugh, nipped off when he heard his voice echo eerily in the empty church, denied it.

“Then what?”

“You cannot tell anyone you saw me.”

“Nor you tell of me,” she returned.

“Can you keep a secret?”

She sighed a cloudy breath in the cold musty air. “God knows I keep many.”

He hesitated, as if he did not know whether or not he dared to trust her. “Are you of the new faith?” he asked.

“I don’t know the rights or the wrongs of it,” she said cautiously. “I pray as the minister tells me.”

“I’m of the old faith, the true faith,” he confessed in a whisper. “I was invited here, but the people I was going to meet are away, and their house, where I would have been safe, is closed and dark. I have to hide somewhere tonight, and if I cannot meet with them, then I must somehow get back to London.”

Alinor stared at him as if he were in truth a faerie lord, and a danger to a mortal woman. “D’you say you’re a priest, sir?”

He nodded as if he did not trust words.

“One sent from France to do the heretic services with the hidden papists?”

He grimaced. “Our enemies would say that. I would say I serve the true believers in England, and I am loyal to the ordained king.”

She shook her head, uncomprehending. The civil war had come no nearer than Chichester, six miles north, when the little town had collapsed under a brisk siege from the parliament forces.

“They handed over all the papists when Chichester fell,” she warned him. “Even the bishop ran away. They’re all for parliament round here.”

“But not you?”

She shrugged. “No one’s done anything for me or mine. But my brother’s an army man, and very true to them.”

“But you won’t hand me over?”

She hesitated. “D’you swear you’re not a Frenchman?”

“An Englishman born and bred. And faithful to my country.”

“But spying for the king?”

“I am loyal to the ordained King Charles,” he told her. “As every Englishman should be.”

She shook her head, as if grand words meant nothing to her. The king had been driven from his throne, his rule shrunk to his household, his palace was little Carisbrooke Castle, on the Isle of Wight. Alinor knew nobody who would declare loyalty to such a king, who had brought war into his country for six long years.

“Were you going to stay at the Priory, sir?”

“I may not tell you who would have hidden me. It is not my secret to tell.”