Tidelands

“I . . . It is . . . We met . . .”

Inwardly, she cursed the priest who had taken her boy from his home, over the seas, and brought him back speechless with distress. “Are you hungry?” she asked him, to give them both time.

“No!” he exclaimed, thinking that she could not waste her bread on him, that it would be hard for her to earn it when everyone knew that she was an abandoned wife.

“Have a cup of ale, then,” she said gently, and went to the jug and poured them each a cup. Then she sat beside him, and clasped her hands in her lap to keep herself still. “Tell me, Rob. It’s probably not that bad. It’s never as bad—”

“It is bad,” he insisted. “You don’t know.”

“Tell me then,” she said steadily. “So that I do know.”

“I saw my da,” he said quietly, his face downcast. “At Newport, on the island. He had a ship, he’s master of a coastal trader. It’s called the Jessie.” He snatched a quick look at her face. “Did you know?”

“No, of course not, I’d have told you.”

“He could’ve come home to us months ago,” he said. “But he didn’t.”

She gave a little sigh. “This doesn’t shock me,” she promised him. “Nor hurt me, neither.”

“I saw him, and I called his name, and he saw me and he ran,” Rob said, his voice quavering a little. “I didn’t think it at the time, but now I think that he knew me at once, and ran from me. But I went after him like a fool, and Walter and Mr. Summer after me.”

Now she flushed, a deep humiliated blush that rose from her neck to her forehead. “Master Walter and Mr. Summer were there, too?”

“Course they were! They met him.”

“Oh, no!”

“Yes.” He nodded. “Awful. We all went with him into an inn, a small dirty place where he had a slate. I think Mr. Summer paid foreverything. And he said he’d been pressed by the navy, the parliament navy, and escaped from them when they went over to the prince, and then he got a passage on a coastal trader. He said he’d come to breakfast with us the next morning, but he didn’t. He went on an errand for Mr. Summer and never came back. We thought we might see him in Cowes, but though I went down to the quayside he wasn’t there, and they hadn’t seen his boat. Mr. Summer says that he won’t come back here.”

With one hand shading his eyes so he did not see her face, he stretched out his other hand and she gripped it tightly.

“I don’t even know there was an errand,” he said, his palm clamped over his eyes. “It may be that they lied to me, thinking I was a child, thinking I am a fool. Maybe he just ran away, and Mr. Summer lied for him.”

“This isn’t your fault.” She felt that she could wail with pain that anyone should turn from Rob, that his own father should run from him. “This is the fault of the man that Zachary is, not the boy that you are. He can’t live with me: p’raps that’s my fault. But it’s nothing that can be blamed on you. You’ve been a son that anyone would be proud of, and Alys a daughter that anyone would love. Zachary cannot live with me, nor I with him. But that’s our fault. It doesn’t fall on the two of you.”

“Did you ever think he’d come back?”

“I didn’t know,” she confessed. “As the months went on, I thought it less and less likely, but I didn’t know. Just this Midsummer Eve I went to the graveyard in case his ghost was walking, so that I’d know for sure that he was dead. God forgive me, Rob, I was hoping he was dead so that we wouldn’t have to think of him anymore. When I didn’t see his ghost, I knew he must be alive, and was choosing not to come home to us. But it’s still not your fault, Rob.”

She felt a pulse of shame that she had met the priest in the graveyard when she should have been undertaking a vigil for the ghost of her husband, and now he had met Zachary, and they had spoken together of her. She could not imagine what Zachary might have said. If he had repeated the wild accusations he used to make—of her taking faerie gold for whoring in the other world, of her witchcraft and unmanning him—she would be shamed before James Summer forever. If he had convinced James that Ned’s wife had died because Alinor was negligent or worse: murderous; then she might face questioning. She closed her eyes at the shame and the danger that Zachary could still bring her. They sat side by side, both blinded with distress for a moment.

“It’s not your fault, Rob,” she repeated steadily. “And much of it’s not my fault either.”

“What’ll we do?” Rob asked anxiously. “If he doesn’t come back? You’ve got the boat now, but you can’t sell fish to fishermen, and when Walter goes to university I’ll have to find other work, and nothing’ll pay as well. And Alys can’t marry without a dowry.”

“I don’t rightly know what we’ll do,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. “But I have the herbs and the babies. I’ve been paid by Farmer Johnson. Everyone will go on having babies, God bless them. And if peace comes, and the bishop comes back to his palace, then I’ll get my license from him, and I’ll be able to charge more and I’ll be called out to more homes.”