Tidelands

It was going to be another hot day, once the mist burned off. He had said that he would return within the month, but she knew him so little, she did not know if he was a young man who would remember a promise made to a woman, especially to a poor woman of no importance. Perhaps he was in danger, and could not choose when to go or stay? Or perhaps he was a man who was careless with his words, as men are, and he was not counting the days as she was counting them? Or perhaps the kiss had meant nothing, and the words had meant nothing either.

She turned her back on the harbor and bent over her herb beds, picking the herbs that were unfurling their fresh leaves, tying them in little posies and tossing them in her basket. When she had harvested one bed, she moved on to another until she had picked everything that was fresh, and then she went back into the house and tied them on the strings that looped from one beam to another. The earlier dry posies she took down and put into little wooden boxes, each labeled with Rob’s careful script with the name for the herb, sometimes the Latin names, sometimes the old names that her mother had taught her: eyebright, heartsease, and scurvy grass.

She brushed the crumbs from the wooden plates out of the front door and felt the warmer air. The sun was burning off the mist. She watched the garden birds fly down to feed—the robin that lived in the garden all year round and a pair of blackbirds that nested and reared their young in the blackthorn hedge that ran behind the little cottage. She rinsed the two cups, from her breakfast with Alys, in the last of the clean water, then tipped the bowl over the plants at the side of the door. She picked up the empty bucket and walked to the dipping pond, on the inland side of the bank, holding the worn post as she lowered the bucket into the clean water. She heaved the slopping pail back up the steps, stood the bucket by the open door, and ladled water into the three-legged iron cooking pot that sat among the red embers. She took one of the fresh bunches of herbs and set it to seethe in the pot. Her mother’s recipe called for some honey, and she spooned a careful measure from the jar where the comb oozed. Leaving it to simmer, she went outside with a sacking bag, an old flour bag from the mill, to gather driftwood for the fire. She walked along the line of the high tide, picking up twigs for kindling and bigger pieces of wood. When the sack was filled she hefted it onto her back and walked back to the cottage.

The water in the pot was almost boiled away, the herbs a dark green sludge in the bottom. Alinor poured it into a tray and set it to dry on the table; threw a piece of clean muslin over it to keep off the flies.

The sun was rising through the thick banks of rain clouds, and it was getting hot. Alinor put on her working hat, with the wide brim over her face and the fall of linen over the back of her neck to protect from the dangerous glare of the morning sun, and went back out to the garden at the side of the cottage where she grew vegetables: peas, beans, and cabbages. As she dug at the sturdy deep roots of a dock leaf, her hens saw her, and came rushing up from the shoreline. They scratched companionably, looking for worms and little insects in the turned earth, clucking contentedly at Alinor, and she scolded them gently. “You go down to the shore, don’t you scrape up my plants.” One copper-brown hen pecked up a little worm and made a funny grunting noise of appreciation. Alinor, alone under the arching sky with the empty harbor before her, laughed as if she were with friends. “Was that good, Mistress Brown?” she asked. “Tasty?”

Alinor worked all the morning, and as the sun started to slowly descend from the midday high, she went into the house, cut four slices of day-old rye bread, took two smoked fish from the rack at the chimney, a pitcher of small ale from the cool damp corner, and put them all in a little sack to eat with Alys before they started gleaning.

The tide was flowing in, there was only a quiet hiss from the hushing well as Alinor walked along the raised bank to her brother’s house and found him picking plums from the fruit tree. “Want some?”

“I’ll take some for Alys’s dinner. I’ll come tomorrow and pick the rest for bottling and drying.”

“It’s a good year. Look at the branches.”

They admired the tree, the branches bowed down with the purple fruit. Alinor ate one. “Sweet,” she said. “Very good.”

“Going to the mill for gleaning?”

She nodded, glancing at the ferry bobbing as the in-rushing tide met the flowing river.

“I’ll take you over,” he offered. He led the way down the steps to where the ferry was moored to a post, pulling on the rope and sidling in the tide. He untied it and looped the painter around the overhead rope, which stretched from one side of the swirling deep water to the other.

“Running fast,” Alinor observed.

“It’s been such a wet summer,” he said. “I’ve never known the rife so high at harvesttime. Come on.”