Tidelands

“I’m sure you’re right,” he agreed, knowing that the wages would be cut to the bone.

“Some of our neighbors—well, I don’t know how they get by,” she confided. “Scraping a living from the hedgerows, feasting like birds on berries and raw herbs.” Her envious gaze drifted down the table to Alinor and her daughter.

Around them everyone was helping themselves to food, passing bread, meat, the broth, cooked vegetables, and pouring the specially sweetened harvest ale.

“Hard times,” James said generally.

“Take Mrs. Reekie for one . . .”

Despite his sense that he should silence the gossiping woman, James could not help but lean forward.

“On the edge of starving last winter, I swear it. Knocking on the yard door and asking for work, anything. It was charity to buy her herbs. But now, from nowhere she has a boat, her son is in service at the Priory, and her daughter is making eyes at Richard Stoney and him a farmer’s son, the only son, and certain to inherit the farm! How’s that come about? For I know for a fact that her brother has nothing but the ferry and whatever was left of his army pay, and her husband has been gone for months.”

“Robert is my pupil,” he said cautiously. “He’s a good companion to Master Walter and paid for his service. Mrs. Reekie is well liked at the Priory.”

“By who?” she exclaimed as if scoring a point. “Who likes a common cottager so much that her son is suddenly Master Walter’s companion? Two months ago, the lad was bird-scaring for me after school, and glad of the work. Barefoot half the time. So where did she get the money to buy the boat? When she couldn’t afford shoes?”

James, knowing very well that it was a bribe for her silence about him, muttered that perhaps she had savings.

“Savings?” She snorted. “She has none! I say to my husband, please God that she does not fall on the parish, for we’re a poor church, and can’t support everyone, especially women who are neither widows nor wives, with a son and a daughter to keep. We can’t support a woman who may have beauty but not enough wit to keep her husband at home.”

“She has her craft and her boat and her herbs,” he protested. “I am sure she can keep herself.”

“She has no business keeping herself!” Mrs. Miller protested. “She’s neither a widow nor a wife, and when she walks across the yard, the work stops dead as if the Queen of Sheba was dancing on my cobbles. If her husband is gone, she should declare herself a widow and remarry—if anyone will have her, given what they say about her. If he’s alive, she should get him home. Then we’d all know where we are. She’s nothing but a worry as she is. Nothing but a worry to good wives. Who would give her money for a boat? And why? It’d better not be Mr. Miller, that’s all I can say!”

James finally understood the objection to Alinor. “She can’t be a worry to an established housewife like yourself,” he said soothingly. “There can be no comparison. Look at the dinner you put on today! Look at where you are in the world! The respect you are shown! You are blessed indeed. Mr. Miller must know that in you he has a helpmeet appointed by heaven.”

She flushed a little under his attention. “It’s not easy for me,” she reminded him. “Everything that I have, whether it is respect, or hams in the chimney, I have worked for. Every penny of my little savings I’ve worked for. Years of money I have saved up. Jane’s dowry is ready, for the first good husband to offer for her. You don’t find me without a penny to my name! But where does Goodwife Reekie get her money from? Her own husband swore she had faerie luck; perhaps he spoke true for once. How can she buy a boat if not by some double dealing? I tell you one thing: whenever she has something to sell, my husband buys a dozen of them—as if he needs lavender bags!”

James managed a false laugh, as if he thought the Millers’ grudging generosity to Alinor was funny; and unwillingly, Mrs. Miller smiled too. “Ah, well,” she said, recovering her temper. “No one is more charitable than me to our poor neighbors. I pride myself on my Christian spirit.”

James nodded his head approvingly. “It does you credit,” he praised her. “A woman so great as you in the neighborhood must show compassion to those who have less.”

“Was it Mr. Tudeley who chose her boy to be server to Master Walter?” she lowered her voice. “I thought it must be him.”

“I really don’t know.”

“But why would a man like him, his lordship’s steward, give a boy like Rob such a chance?” She slid a sideways glance at him. “I trust and pray that she has not played tricks on Mr. Tudeley. They say she can . . .”

James maintained a discouraging silence.

“. . . summon,” she said: an odd ambiguous word.

“Rob was chosen for his skills in the stillroom,” James repeated. “And because he’s a very clever boy.”

She hesitated. “I know she’s a good woman. I had her myself to the birth of my boy. But times are changing and if she can’t get a license for midwifery what is she to do? She might be an honest woman now, but what of the future?”