Tidelands

Rob and Walter gathered driftwood and Alinor brought the embers from the damped-down fire in the cottage. James, going to help her, looked around the single room, the bed that she shared with her daughter, the stools where they sat, the table where they ate. It was a typical cottage for a poor working family, and he was struck how the bleak poverty strangely contrasted with the sharp and sweet smell of the place. It smelled of lavender and basil, like the Priory stillroom. Usually a hut like this would stink of old food and excrement, the heavy scent of unwashed people sleeping in their working shifts, but here the salt air blew in through the open door and the room was filled with a grassy smell of drying herbs. In one corner of the room there were cords strung from beam to beam, festooned with posies of herbs. Beneath them, a corner cupboard held a collection of glass jars, and on either side were shelves holding metal trays filled with wax for extracting perfume.

“Your stillroom?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “My corner. I have more room in the ferry-house. I use my mother’s stillroom there, as I used to do with her. This is just for the things from my garden here, while they’re fresh.”

Under her direction James sliced bread from the big loaf under the upturned pot on the table, and carried out four slices to serve as trenchers for the fish. The little fire was burning brightly.

“Will your daughter come home in time to eat with us?” he asked.

“No, she works late in summertime,” Alinor replied. “She won’t be back till sunset. I’ll cook her a mackerel and save it for her.”

Alinor cut and cleaned each fish, throwing the entrails into a pot for later use as bait, but leaving the heads and tails on. She gave the gutted fish to Rob, who skewered each one on a stick and handed them round. Alinor went to the house to wash the scales and blood from her hands and came out with four cups of small ale. Rob watched her give his missing father’s cup to James, but he made no comment.

When the skin on the fish was burned to a blackened crisp and the flesh inside was moist and hot, Alinor told the boys: “That’s done. You can eat them.” Walter nibbled his from the charred stick, but Rob put his between two hunks of bread and took mighty bites. When they had all finished eating they sat in silence, looking at the fire as the sun lay on the horizon, and the tide seemed to stand still, lapping at the pier but rising no higher. The hens came running up from the shoreline and rushed towards Alinor, confident of their welcome and hoping for crumbs. She greeted each one by name and gave each a little piece of her bread, and they pecked around her feet and clucked softly.

“We have to go,” said Rob. He looked to his mother and was surprised to see her gaze turn from him to his tutor.

“Oh, do you?”

James rose to his feet as if he did not know what he was doing. The hens scattered from the stranger; but he did not see them. “Yes, yes, I suppose we do. That’s sunset now. We should go.”

“I’ll lead the way back to the Priory,” she offered.

James wanted to agree, but there was no reason that she should guide them when her son was there.

“I can show the way,” Rob said, puzzled.

Slowly she rose from her fireside seat, and her boy came into her arms. She hugged him, and when he knelt for her blessing she put her hand on his head, whispered a prayer, and bent and kissed him. She dipped a little curtsey to Walter. “I’m glad you came,” she said to him. “You can come anytime, for your mother’s sake as well as your own, you know.”

He flushed. “Thank you,” he said awkwardly, for she was a Peachey tenant and they were, in any case, his fish. “Rob and I will come again.”

The two of them started down the path to the Priory, side by side, companionably silent. Alinor was left alone with James.

“Shall you come again?” she asked him, her tone carefully neutral.

“Yes,” he said, rushing into speech. “Yes. I want . . . I really want . . . May I come again? May I come back now, as soon as I have taken them home?”

She had a dizzy sense of the world turning too fast around her. She looked up and felt a jolt of desire as his brown eyes met her dark gray gaze.

“You can’t come through the mire on your own.”

“I’ll come the long way round. I’ll follow the road,” he said.

“Yes, you can come back tonight,” she agreed, and as if to deny her words she turned from him and kicked the embers of the fire so they were darkened and cool, and then she went along the bank towards her cottage without looking back at him.