“But you’ve lived all your life on the water,” Walter remarked.
“All my life on the mire,” she corrected him. “Tidelands: neither land nor sea, but wet and dry twice a day, never drowned for long but never drying out. I never go out to sea; I don’t even go out to the deep heart of the harbor. My work has always been on the land with the plants and herbs and flowers. I’m only recently a boat owner, thanks to your father hiring Rob.”
Rob tied off the boat loosely so that it could fall with the tide.
“And now, shall I cook your fish for you?” she asked the boys.
“Can we cook it? On a fire with sticks?” Rob begged.
“Oh, all right.” She smiled, and James could see the love she had for her son. She turned to him. “Will you eat with the boys?”
“If I may,” he said. “Shall we all dine together?”
“You may not want to. Rob hopes to eat like savages around a fire.”
He had to stop himself tucking the tumbling lock of hair behind her ear. “Let’s be savages.” He smiled.
Rob and Walter gathered driftwood and Alinor brought the embers from the damped-down fire in the cottage. James, going to help her, looked around the single room, the bed that she shared with her daughter, the stools where they sat, the table where they ate. It was a typical cottage for a poor working family, and he was struck how the bleak poverty strangely contrasted with the sharp and sweet smell of the place. It smelled of lavender and basil, like the Priory stillroom. Usually a hut like this would stink of old food and excrement, the heavy scent of unwashed people sleeping in their working shifts, but here the salt air blew in through the open door and the room was filled with a grassy smell of drying herbs. In one corner of the room there were cords strung from beam to beam, festooned with posies of herbs. Beneath them, a corner cupboard held a collection of glass jars, and on either side were shelves holding metal trays filled with wax for extracting perfume.
“Your stillroom?” he asked her.
She shrugged. “My corner. I have more room in the ferry-house. I use my mother’s stillroom there, as I used to do with her. This is just for the things from my garden here, while they’re fresh.”
Under her direction James sliced bread from the big loaf under the upturned pot on the table, and carried out four slices to serve as trenchers for the fish. The little fire was burning brightly.
“Will your daughter come home in time to eat with us?” he asked.
“No, she works late in summertime,” Alinor replied. “She won’t be back till sunset. I’ll cook her a mackerel and save it for her.”
Alinor cut and cleaned each fish, throwing the entrails into a pot for later use as bait, but leaving the heads and tails on. She gave the gutted fish to Rob, who skewered each one on a stick and handed them round. Alinor went to the house to wash the scales and blood from her hands and came out with four cups of small ale. Rob watched her give his missing father’s cup to James, but he made no comment.
When the skin on the fish was burned to a blackened crisp and the flesh inside was moist and hot, Alinor told the boys: “That’s done. You can eat them.” Walter nibbled his from the charred stick, but Rob put his between two hunks of bread and took mighty bites. When they had all finished eating they sat in silence, looking at the fire as the sun lay on the horizon, and the tide seemed to stand still, lapping at the pier but rising no higher. The hens came running up from the shoreline and rushed towards Alinor, confident of their welcome and hoping for crumbs. She greeted each one by name and gave each a little piece of her bread, and they pecked around her feet and clucked softly.
“We have to go,” said Rob. He looked to his mother and was surprised to see her gaze turn from him to his tutor.
“Oh, do you?”
James rose to his feet as if he did not know what he was doing. The hens scattered from the stranger; but he did not see them. “Yes, yes, I suppose we do. That’s sunset now. We should go.”
“I’ll lead the way back to the Priory,” she offered.
James wanted to agree, but there was no reason that she should guide them when her son was there.
“I can show the way,” Rob said, puzzled.
Slowly she rose from her fireside seat, and her boy came into her arms. She hugged him, and when he knelt for her blessing she put her hand on his head, whispered a prayer, and bent and kissed him. She dipped a little curtsey to Walter. “I’m glad you came,” she said to him. “You can come anytime, for your mother’s sake as well as your own, you know.”
He flushed. “Thank you,” he said awkwardly, for she was a Peachey tenant and they were, in any case, his fish. “Rob and I will come again.”
The two of them started down the path to the Priory, side by side, companionably silent. Alinor was left alone with James.
“Shall you come again?” she asked him, her tone carefully neutral.
“Yes,” he said, rushing into speech. “Yes. I want . . . I really want . . . May I come again? May I come back now, as soon as I have taken them home?”
She had a dizzy sense of the world turning too fast around her. She looked up and felt a jolt of desire as his brown eyes met her dark gray gaze.
“You can’t come through the mire on your own.”
“I’ll come the long way round. I’ll follow the road,” he said.
“Yes, you can come back tonight,” she agreed, and as if to deny her words she turned from him and kicked the embers of the fire so they were darkened and cool, and then she went along the bank towards her cottage without looking back at him.
The waxing yellow moon had turned the water of the mire to a yellowy shine, and the land to tarnished black as James turned off the main road at the ferry-house, walked quietly past Ned’s back garden, and then loped along the sea bank to Alinor’s cottage. He had left the boys in the schoolroom, evening prayers done, tasked with reading and completing some mathematical exercises, and putting themselves to bed. James did not know what was ahead of him. He did not know if he would find Alinor alone, or if her daughter would be there. He did not know, if he found her alone, what he should say, or what he should do, nor what she might allow. He could not imagine how he had dared to ask to return, nor why she should have consented. He knew that he must not break his oath of celibacy. He was sworn to the Church; he could not consider a woman as a lover, he should not even be alone with a woman outside of the confessional. But, at the same time, he knew he could not stay away.
As he walked along the path from her brother’s house, ducking below the blackthorn boughs, the high tide licking the raised bank, he did not think what he was doing, only that he could do nothing else. He thought he was a fool to run through the dusk to see a woman who was little more than a cottager, a poor woman, a woman far beneath him in the eyes of the world. But he knew that he could not help himself, and he was reveling in the sense of his own helplessness. Promised to God, engaged in a conspiracy for the King of England, he should have no time to fall in love. But as he ran, he knew very well that was what he was doing: he was falling in love. He could not stop himself feeling a leap of joy as he recognized that he was falling, unstoppably, in love with a woman as if he were an imaginary knight in a poem and she the greatest of ladies in a castle.
She was waiting for him. As he saw her slim silhouette at the outermost end of the rickety wooden pier, her dress gray against the gray waters, her white cap pale against the night sky, he knew that she had gone out to the end of the pier so that she could watch the bank path and see him walking towards her. Instead, she had seen him running like a lover to his love. He skidded to a walk at the sight of her as she came down the pier, stepping carefully over the rotting planks, so that as he arrived where the steps met the bank and held out his hand to help her, they were handclasped before they had even said one word.