Tidelands

“Provided I have a load and can turn a profit,” Zachary said. “My owner trusts me to manage the business.”

“I want you to meet a ship offshore and transfer some goods,” James said. “You don’t need to know more.”

“Smuggling?” Zachary asked quietly. “It can be done, but it is expensive.”

“I will pay you,” James promised him. “I will pay you well.”

“Would this be a barrel sort of goods? Or a chest sort of goods? Or more like a person?” he asked.

“You don’t need to know that,” James said. “All you need to know is that you will be well paid, and set sail a few minutes after midnight. I will come with you. Not the boys.”

“And how much am I paid for this nighttime jaunt? With Your Honor as shipmate? With these goods?”

“Twenty crowns as we leave, twenty crowns on the quayside when we come back; and no one the wiser,” James said.

Zachary tipped back his chair and put his sea boots on the barrel that served as a table. “No, I don’t think I’ll take it,” he said, smiling at James over the top of his cup. “It’s too much for ordinary smuggling and I’m no smuggler, I must tell you. And it’s too little for shipping the king off the island. If that’s your game, you’ll be hanged for it.”

“It’s what my other ship would have been paid,” James said coolly. “It’s the right price.”

“No, it isn’t. For—see? He wouldn’t do it for the price. Your fine friend didn’t appear. You don’t know why?” His sharp glance at James’s face told him that the handsome young man did not know why his ship had failed. “So, if he wouldn’t do it for the money, I don’t think that I will either.”

“I think you will,” James said. “For I can call the watch to arrest you, and I can tell the magistrate that you have abandoned a wife and thrown her children onto the parish at Sealsea. I can tell them that you deserted from the parliament navy and serve as a smuggler. I can tell them that you are an adulterer and possibly a bigamist. I can tell them that you are wanted on Sealsea Island, perhaps elsewhere. Your own son would give witness that his mother is waiting for you to come home and that the Sealsea church wardens want you for your tithes.”

“She is not!” Zachary slammed the table with the palm of his hand. “She’s not waiting! Damn you for all the rest of it, but don’t tell me that. She don’t miss me, she don’t want me. The boy might look for me, but she won’t.”

“I know that she does,” James said steadily, thinking of the white-faced woman waiting for this man’s ghost to speak to her on Midsummer Eve.

Zachary leaned forward confidingly. “Not her, because she’s a whore,” he said frankly. “One honest man to another: she’s a whore and a witch. They married me to her, though I had my doubts, but her mother—another witch—wanted my boat and my nets and my catch, and thought that I would keep her girl safe, in difficult times. Thought I would make a fortune. Maybe I swore that I would. Maybe I made all sorts of promises. I was so mad for her—and who do I blame for that, eh? I built our house right next door to her mother in the ferry-house so that they could carry on their trade as wisewomen together, and I looked aside when they did what they did. I brought home fish, I sent her to market for me, and I took the money she brought back. I had plans for another boat, but I was unlucky a few times. I was as good a husband as any on the island. I didn’t know what tricks that they would play on me. My wife and her mother, God curse them.

“One child we had: a daughter as beautiful as a faerie-born child. What did I know? Only that they had foisted a changeling on me from the moment that I saw her. Then came Rob—look at him! He could read as soon as he could walk, though I can’t spell my name. He knew the herbs as soon as he toddled into her garden. Used to name them by smell. Who smells leaves but a faerie child? They’re not my children. Nobody could ever have thought that they were my children! Look at them!”

“Then whose?” James demanded tightly.

“Ask her! She knows who she meets when she goes out into the full moon, when she goes out at Midsummer Eve, when she goes out to dance in the darkest of the nights of winter. She knows where she got these children. But I swear to you, it was not from me.”

James braced his shoulders against a superstitious shudder. He forced himself to speak steadily: “This is nonsense. Are you saying that you left her for no better reason than this?”