Tidelands

“Nearly, just one field to go. I was binding and stacking all day. Will you come this afternoon for gleaning?”

“Yes, I’ll bring your dinner,” Alinor promised.

Alys bowed her head in a prayer of thanks and rose from the table. “It’s funny Rob not being here,” she remarked. “Aren’t you lonely all the day?”

“I’m so busy I don’t have time to be lonely.”

“Because you look as if you’re listening for something.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. A footstep?”

Ashamed of herself, Alinor remembered watching James run along the sea-bank path, jumping the wet puddles like a boy running to his lover. “I’m not listening for anyone,” she lied.

“I didn’t say for anyone, I said for something.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t think that you missed my da anymore?” the girl asked gently. “We don’t—Rob and me. You needn’t worry for us.”

“I don’t,” Alinor said shortly.

“D’you just wish sometimes that everything was different? Aren’t you sick of everything? Not the king and the parliament—because I just don’t care for either of them—but something different for us. Something real, not preaching.”

“I wish I could see your future,” Alinor replied seriously. “I know you shouldn’t be stuck here, on the side of the mire, and no chance of marrying anyone but a farm lad or a fisherman, and no chance of earning more than pennies. But I haven’t the money to apprentice you to a trade, and I don’t know where you’d go into service. I don’t think you’d suit service—I’d be afraid for you, in service.”

Alys laughed. “You’re right there! I don’t want to be a servant to anyone. Not to a husband nor a master.”

“Alys, I do so wish for more for you.”

“You wish more!” the girl exclaimed. “Dear God, I pray on my knees for more! Has there been all this fighting and shouting and all the arguing among the men, and the only hope for women is a husband who’s a little bit better than a beast, or a wage of more than sixpence a day? What about Uncle Ned’s new world? What about land for everyone?”

Alinor looked at her bright-faced daughter. “I know,” she said. “There’s a lot of talk, but there’s no new world for people like you or me.”

“You mean women,” Alys said sharply. “Poor women. Nothing ever changes for us.”

Alinor heard the bitterness in her daughter’s voice and felt that she was to blame for having brought her into this world that favored men. “It’s true,” she said.

The girl knelt for her mother’s blessing, and Alinor stooped and kissed her daughter’s neat white cap. Alys rose up, and went out of the door. Alinor sat for a little longer on her stool at the table, facing the corner of the room where she kept her herbs and oils, and the little wooden box where she kept her treasures. It held her mother’s recipe book for remedies, the agreement for the cottage between her missing husband and Mr. Tudeley, and her red leather purse of valueless old coins. It did not seem much for a lifetime of hard work. Then she whispered to herself: “A woman like you in a place like this,” and rose up, and took her basket, and her little knife, and went out to cut herbs while they still were damp with dew.

It was a cool dawn, with strands of gray mist lying along the channels in the mire, melting the boundaries between land and sea and air. Alinor shivered in the morning chill, drawing a shawl over her head as she shooed the hens out of the cottage and down to the shoreline. She looked across her little garden to the harbor, where the water was shrinking away, draining from pools into swiftly ebbing channels, leaving acres of wet mud, sandbanks, and reedbeds. As the tide inched back to the sea, the little harbor birds, dunlin and knot, chased after it, running in and out of the waters on their long legs, suddenly flying up with their rippling calls, and then settling again in a flurry, to run to and fro. At the harbor mouth Alinor could see the flat gray of the sea, and the indigo line of the faraway horizon. From the far side of the mire came the thunderous rumble of the mill wheel turning. If James had already gone to France and was homeward bound, he would have a calm crossing. If he had gone to the king at Carisbrooke Castle, he could sail back to Sealsea harbor in three or four hours. If he had gone to meet the Prince of Wales at sea with his ships, then he could have gone out to sea and back within the day. Since she did not know where he had gone, there was no point in looking to the dark horizon for his sail. As a fisherman’s wife she knew this well, but still she looked for him.