Tidelands

“Yes,” he said. “And we shall have all day and all night,” he said. “This is like a dream, as if I still had fever.”

At once she put the back of her hand against his forehead. “No,” she said. “No fever and it’s no dream.”

“And tomorrow . . .”

“Let’s not think of tomorrow till we have to,” she whispered, and he drew her down to him, as he lay on the bed and pressed her against him.

The hours went by unnoticed. Two or three times Stuart called from the yard below, and Alinor threw on her gown and let down the rope from the window. He passed up food, water for washing, ale for drinking, but they hardly noticed how often he came, nor what he brought. Alinor made up the bed with clean linen and they both lay down together naked, made love, fell asleep, and woke to make love again. They watched the sun set over the marshes from the west window, and they saw the moon set. All night they stirred and woke and made love and slept, as if there was neither night nor day, and they needed no light but the flickering candle that made their moving bodies glow.

“I never knew that it was like this,” James confessed. “When the brothers spoke of the love of a woman in the seminary I thought it was somehow harder and cruel.”

“Was this your first time? Your very first?” Alinor asked, feeling a pang of guilt as if she had sinned against James and taken his innocence.

“I’ve been tempted,” he said. “When I was in hiding and traveling from one house to another. There was a lady in London, and another at a house in Essex, I knew that I felt desire; but it always felt like sin, and I could resist it; but this feels right.”

Alinor imagined that the handsome young priest had been desired by more than one woman, receiving him into her house and hiding him from everyone, delighting in the secret. She laughed at the thought of it and at once his face lightened. “You must think me a fool,” he said. “To be a virgin at my age!”

“No,” she assured him. “I’ve learned to despise a man who has been with many women and loved none. Zachary was the only man I was ever with, and he was a hard husband. They were right to teach you that at the seminary. Hard and bitter and . . . thankless.” She found the truest word. “It was a thankless task being wife to Zachary.”

He took a bright lock of her hair and twisted it around his third finger as if it were a ring. “And have you had no man since him?”

She looked at him. “Did he tell you otherwise?”

He shook his head. “He told me all sorts of fears and terrors,” he said. “I was not asking because of his lies, but because I cannot believe that no one courted you.”

“I had no desire,” she told him. “If anyone had asked me—but nobody speaks of such things on Foulmire—I would have said that I was one of those women who feel no desire. For me, it was always pain and harsh treatment. Zachary said that I was cold as stone to him, and I thought there was no other way to be. I never knew that it could be like this.”

He smiled at her and touched her warm cheek with his finger.

“When I delivered a baby sometimes, and the woman asked me when she could lie with her husband again, I never understood why she would want to. I would tell her she must wait for two months, until she was churched, and I used to wonder why she complained that it was so long.”

“Would it seem long to you now?”

“A day would seem too long a time to wait, now.”

“So now you understand love?”

“For the first time.” She smiled at him. “So it is the first time for me too, in a way.”

He kissed her hand. “The woman of stone has melted?”

“I’ve become a woman of desire.”

Later in the night they woke, ravenously hungry, and ate the rest of the bread and cheese, good white bread from the Priory bread oven, smooth hard cheese with a salty crust from the Priory dairy.

“Zachary spoke of something,” James said tentatively, afraid of the darkening of her eyes, of her turning away.

“Oh, he’s one that never stopped speaking,” she said, with a smile. “He thundered like the tide mill at every low tide.”

“He said that Ned had a wife . . .” he began.

His words were like a blow. He had knocked the smile off her. At once she went as white as guilt.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . Don’t say anything,” he begged her. “You need say nothing. It was just . . .”

“Did you believe him? Will you repeat to Sir William . . . what he said? Whatever it was he said? Are you bound by your vows to tell the minister at St. Wilfrid’s?”

“No, I’ll never say. I wouldn’t have said anything now but . . .”

“But he made you wonder,” she said slowly. “For all your learning, and your languages, and your knowledge—for all your faith!—he made you wonder. He made you . . . afraid.”

“I’m not afraid!” he started up, but she put a gentle hand on his shoulder.