Tidelands

When the thick horn windows showed a cloudy light, he groaned with pain, staggered to his feet, and crammed his fists against his belly. She knew what was coming and tucked the pail beneath his buttocks as he voided himself, doubled over in agony.

“There,” she said, “there,” as if he were one of her sick children, and washed him with Beard-Papa water that she had brought from her home. She lowered the stinking pail on the pulley, and called to the stable boy to tip it in the midden and wash out the pail and return it. Then she washed her hands in the Beard-Papa water and made herself as comfortable as she could against the planking of the wooden wall, and once again took him in her arms and laid his head on her shoulder.

Alinor dozed, dreaming incoherent dreams of love, of a man who spoke of “a woman like you in a place like this,” of a world where women were not condemned in church before the men who were sinners like them, who had sinned with them. She dreamed of Alys and her sweetheart, Richard Stoney, of Rob and the life he might live if they were not poor and born to be poor, of Zachary sailing far away and saying into the wind of the dream, as he had once said so bitterly to her: “Your trouble is that nothing real is ever enough for you.”

She woke in daylight, cramped, with a sense of defeat. All her pride in her passion of the night was gone. She thought Zachary was right and that she had misled herself and misled her children, and he had spoken the truth—not when he said that she danced with faeries, but that she longed to be with them. All her life she had wanted more than the life she was born to; but this morning she knew she had sunk very low: a poor woman, about to be disgraced before her neighbors, working as that lowest of beings: a plague nurse, almost a layer-out, only one step above a porter of a plague cart heaped with dead bodies, calling for people to bring out their dead. She knew no work lower than a plague nurse, and her folly and her love had brought her down to this: locked up with a dying man, who was foresworn, and who had never said that he loved her.

Still, she held him; knowing herself to be a fool, and ashamed of her folly. But then she realized James was warm in her arms, not cold and stiffening, not sweating and dying. He was warm and sweet-smelling, like a man who would live, and his eyes were opening and his color was good.

“Alinor,” he croaked, as if he was saying her name for the very first time.

“Are you better?” she asked incredulously.

“I can hardly speak. I don’t know. Yes.”

“Don’t speak. You were very ill.”

“I thought I was going to die.”

“You’re not going to die. It’s not the plague.”

“Thank God. I thank God.”

“Amen,” she said.

Blearily, he looked around. “Are we in the net shed again?”

“No! The hayloft at the Priory. You fell sick. D’you remember?”

“No. Nothing.” He frowned. “I brought the boys home from Cowes.”

“You did. They’re safe. Then you had a great fever.”

He struggled with the memory of the lies that he had to uphold, but he could not remember them. He could not be sure anymore what was true and what was false. “I’m so thirsty.”

She offered him small ale and he drank it gratefully, but she allowed him only one cup. “Slowly, slowly, you can have more later.”

“I’m not sure what I said, what I may have spoken in my sleep . . .”

“Nothing that made sense,” she reassured him. “Sir William sent for me after midnight. He told me nothing. You were lying on a rug before the fire. He said only that you had fainted. When I got here, you were dazed with fever.”

He nodded. “I can remember nothing.”

She thought that he must spend his life forgetting half of it, and speaking of less, and now oblivion had come to him, like a curse in answer to a wish.

“His lordship sent for me and asked me to come up here with you to make sure that it was not the plague.”

“You came to me . . . although you said . . .”

“Yes,” she said steadily. “The lord of the manor sent for me. I had to.”

“But you agreed to nurse me.”

“His lordship asked me. I had to.”

“You came to me,” he insisted. “You chose to come.”

She showed him the sweetest, most generous smile. “I came to you,” she confirmed.

“And undressed me.”

“I had to see if you had the marks of the pox or the plague.”

“And stayed with me all night.”

“To watch over your fever.”

“You held me in your arms.”

“It was the only way you would lie still, and not toss and turn and throw off the covers.”

“I was naked in your arms.”

She pursed her lips. “For your own good.”

He was silent for a moment. “My God, I wish I could be naked in your arms again.”

“Hush,” she said, wondering how much they could hear in the stable below. “Hush.”

“I will not hush,” he whispered. “I have to speak. Alinor, I thought I would go away without seeing you again, I thought we would never meet. I have lost my faith—my God—I am forsworn so many ways. I have lost my king and my God and myself. But I thought there would be some meaning to my life if only I could see you again—and now you are here.”