Tidelands

“Now you can see my brother’s ferry,” she said, nodding towards the channel before them and the big raft moored before the ferry-house. “And farther up the channel, inland, is the wadeway. It’s underwater now so you can only see the cobbled bank that runs down to it.”

He saw the swirl and rush as the river flowing out past the ferry-house met the incoming sea.

“Is it very deep?”

“It rises more than six feet, and it’s fast. Everyone can cross at the lowest point, and people drive or ride. But everyone takes the ferry at high tide, or goes all the way round inland. You have to take the horses from the traces and take them across on the ferry and then take the coach across separately, so it’s a lot of work.”

“I’m surprised his lordship does not build a bridge.”

She shook her head and a lock of golden hair fell from the modest cap. “There’s no good ground for building,” she said. “It’s all sand till you get to the tide mill quay. And the mire moves in every storm. The wadeway gets washed away every spring tide, or in the winter storms. Master Walter’s father spends all his time rebuilding it, doesn’t he, sir? We’d never keep a bridge up. It’s all sand and silt.”

“So your brother is the gatekeeper to the entrance to the island?” James remarked. “Like a porter on a drawbridge to a castle.”

She smiled. “Yes. And our father before him, and his father before him.”

“Since when?”

“Since the Flood, I suppose,” she said irreverently, and then exclaimed: “Oh! Excuse me . . .”

“You don’t offend me,” he laughed. “I’m honored to be rowed by a daughter of Noah.”

“I think I’ve got one!” Walter exclaimed. “Like a pull?”

“That’s it,” Alinor confirmed. “Pull it out gently, gently, and swing it into the boat.”

He pulled too hard and the fish came flying out of the water, swinging into Alinor’s face.

“Watch out!” Father James said, catching the line and holding it away from her as the boy reached out to take the fish, and then flinched, as it writhed on the hook.

“I can’t . . .”

“If you want to eat it, you take hold of it,” Alinor advised him.

The tutor laughed. “She’s right. Take hold of it, Walter, and unhook it.”

Grimacing, the boy unhooked the fish and gasped as it wriggled from his hand and dropped into the basket, as Rob exclaimed: “Another! I have another!”

They were in the middle of a shoal of fish and as soon as they baited their hooks they were pulling them from the water. James and Alinor kept the boat in the middle of the channel as the boys fished, exclaiming at their catch and counting as the basket filled up, until Alinor said: “That’s enough, that’s all that you can eat today, and all that I can dry.”

“Don’t you sell them fresh?” James asked her.

“If my husband had a big catch on a Friday I would take it to Chichester Saturday market, but it takes two hours to walk there, and two hours back again. You can’t sell fish in Sealsea village—everyone catches their own—though I sometimes sell them at the mill. The farmers’ wives buy fish when they come to get their corn ground, or if a grain ship comes in they’ll buy some. Mostly, I dry them for sale, or salt them down.”

“Shall we row back in?”

“Can’t we go out to the hushing well?” Rob asked her. “Walter has never seen it.”

Alinor shook her head, and she and James timed their strokes together and rowed back to the pier. She shipped her oar and stretched out her hand to the pier timbers to pull the boat in, while Rob stood to drop the looped mooring rope over the worn pole.

“You’ll have to wait till you can row yourselves to go there,” she told Walter.

“Why won’t you go there, Mistress Reekie?” Walter asked her.

She steadied the boat as the boys got ashore, and Father James followed them. Then she stood up and handed them the basket of fish, balancing easily against the rocking of the boat.

“I am a foolish woman and I have a horror of deep water,” she told him. Father James put out his hand to help her onto the pier and she took it.

“But you’ve lived all your life on the water,” Walter remarked.

“All my life on the mire,” she corrected him. “Tidelands: neither land nor sea, but wet and dry twice a day, never drowned for long but never drying out. I never go out to sea; I don’t even go out to the deep heart of the harbor. My work has always been on the land with the plants and herbs and flowers. I’m only recently a boat owner, thanks to your father hiring Rob.”

Rob tied off the boat loosely so that it could fall with the tide.

“And now, shall I cook your fish for you?” she asked the boys.

“Can we cook it? On a fire with sticks?” Rob begged.

“Oh, all right.” She smiled, and James could see the love she had for her son. She turned to him. “Will you eat with the boys?”

“If I may,” he said. “Shall we all dine together?”

“You may not want to. Rob hopes to eat like savages around a fire.”

He had to stop himself tucking the tumbling lock of hair behind her ear. “Let’s be savages.” He smiled.