Tidelands

“Ah, you’ve touched her,” Zachary guessed with spiteful satisfaction as James blanched. “You’ve touched her and she’s got your soul in thrall too.”

James walked back to the Old Bull inn and up the rickety stairs to the boys’ low-ceilinged room. They were in their nightshifts in the big bed together.

“I prayed for my father,” Rob confided.

“That was good,” James said. “We’ll see him again tomorrow. He’ll come here for breakfast. You go to sleep now.”

He watched them: Walter sprawled out to sleep, arms across the bed, feet to each corner, and Rob hunched into a ball. Then James quietly went from the room, downstairs to the private dining room.

Two men were seated on either side of the fire. As James came in, they rose up and clasped his hand, but no names were mentioned.

“You’ve seen him?”

“I have. I told him it’s to be midnight. And I’ve met the boatman, and agreed a price,” James confirmed. “You’ve bribed the guard?”

“Easily done,” the other said. “He’s not guarded as he was at Carisbrooke. That was the agreement with parliament, and they are true to it. They offered that he should be free to come and go here, limited only by his parole. They think an agreement is his only hope: fools.”

“If I am caught at the Hopkins house don’t wait for me. Get him away at all speed. The ship is the Jessie, by the quay and ready to sail.”

“I thought it was the Marie?” the second man demurred.

“He failed me. It is the Jessie.”

“Have you paid him?”

“Twenty crowns to go, twenty when we are safely home.”

“I’m going with him to France,” the first man said, “if he will allow me. I’m not coming back.”

“I have to return with the boatman to finish my mission here,” James said. He felt in his pocket and gave the second man a heavy purse. “But you can hold this for me. Be on the quay to pay the Jessie when it returns.”

“You won’t carry it?”

James shook his head.

“You don’t trust him not to steal it and throw you overboard?” The man was appalled. “What kind of comrade is this? On a venture like this?”

James was silent for a moment. “I don’t trust anyone,” he answered, hearing the ring of truth in his own words. “I don’t trust anyone, in this land which is sea, in these harbors that are not havens, in these ebbing tidelands.”

“What?”

“Anyway, if I don’t get down to the quay, get the person we have come for safely aboard, and pay the boatman.”

“What d’you mean, if you don’t get down to the quay?”

“If I’m caught,” James said flatly. “If I’m dead.”

At five minutes before midnight the three men pulled on their tall hats and wrapped their thick cloaks around their shoulders. James assumed that it was the damp air that made him shiver and long to stay by the fire for one minute, just one minute more.

“I’ll go ahead,” he said. “You come behind me and wait below his window, and you wait on the quay.”

“As agreed,” the first man said, irritable with fear. “For God’s sake, can we get on?”

All the windows were dark at the Hopkins house. There were no guards to be seen, but James had a suspicion that the commander of Carisbrooke Castle, an experienced army man, would have posted men to watch the doors, whatever promises the parliament might have made about the king’s freedom. The Hopkinses’ porter on their front door had been bribed to look away at midnight, but there was no way of knowing if there were spies hidden in the dark doorways or leaning against the dark walls. James peeled off from the main road and entered with assumed confidence through the garden door, walked around the vegetable and herb beds to the kitchen door. It was unlocked for early deliveries. James turned the handle and stepped into the quiet kitchen.

The spit boy rose up from his truckle bed by the fireside. “Who’s there?”

“Sssh, it’s me,” James said familiarly. “I didn’t know if anyone had remembered his sops in wine?”

“What?”

“The king. He takes bread and wine at midnight. Has anyone taken it up?”

“No!” the boy exclaimed. “Lord! This is always happening. And his servers have gone to the inn, and the cook gone to bed.”

“I’ll do it,” grumbled James. “I do everything.”

“D’you have the key to the cellar? Shall I wake the groom of the servery: Mr. Wilson?”

“No. The king doesn’t drink from your cellar. He has his own wine, in his own room. I have the key. You go back to sleep. I’ll serve him.”

He took a glass and a decanter from the cupboard in the hall and walked up the stairs. The door to the king’s room was locked on the inside, but as he approached it across the creaking floorboards of the landing he heard the clock on St. Thomas’s Church strike midnight, and at the same time the sound of an oiled bolt sliding back. He felt a sense of complete elation. He was on the threshold of the king’s bedchamber, the king was opening the door, the boat was waiting. “This is triumph,” James thought. “This is what it feels like to win.”

The king opened the door and peered out.

“Clarion.” James said the password, and dropped to his knee.

“Rise,” the king replied indifferently. “I’m not coming.”