“Yes,” she said. “I can pray that it’s over.”
Alys was slow to wake, her arms and back aching. The two women had the rest of the white loaf for breakfast with Ned’s cheese.
“So delicious.” Alys dabbed up every crumb. “I think I shall marry the miller and eat wheat loaf every day of my life.”
“You’ll have to get rid of Mrs. Miller,” her mother pointed out. “And I think you’ll find that she won’t make way for you.”
“How I’d love to be rid of her!” Alys remarked. “I should throw the two of them—her and her helpless husband—off the quay, and marry their son, and inherit the mill.”
The miller’s son was a little boy of six years old named Peter. Alinor had delivered him herself. “And Jane could be your sister-in-law,” Alinor smiled. “That’d be a happy house.”
“I’d marry her off somewhere,” Alys asserted. “But nobody’d have her.”
“Oh, the poor girl,” Alinor said. “Don’t be unkind, Alys. Anyway, have they nearly finished the harvest?”
“Nearly, just one field to go. I was binding and stacking all day. Will you come this afternoon for gleaning?”
“Yes, I’ll bring your dinner,” Alinor promised.
Alys bowed her head in a prayer of thanks and rose from the table. “It’s funny Rob not being here,” she remarked. “Aren’t you lonely all the day?”
“I’m so busy I don’t have time to be lonely.”
“Because you look as if you’re listening for something.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. A footstep?”
Ashamed of herself, Alinor remembered watching James run along the sea-bank path, jumping the wet puddles like a boy running to his lover. “I’m not listening for anyone,” she lied.
“I didn’t say for anyone, I said for something.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t think that you missed my da anymore?” the girl asked gently. “We don’t—Rob and me. You needn’t worry for us.”
“I don’t,” Alinor said shortly.
“D’you just wish sometimes that everything was different? Aren’t you sick of everything? Not the king and the parliament—because I just don’t care for either of them—but something different for us. Something real, not preaching.”
“I wish I could see your future,” Alinor replied seriously. “I know you shouldn’t be stuck here, on the side of the mire, and no chance of marrying anyone but a farm lad or a fisherman, and no chance of earning more than pennies. But I haven’t the money to apprentice you to a trade, and I don’t know where you’d go into service. I don’t think you’d suit service—I’d be afraid for you, in service.”
Alys laughed. “You’re right there! I don’t want to be a servant to anyone. Not to a husband nor a master.”
“Alys, I do so wish for more for you.”
“You wish more!” the girl exclaimed. “Dear God, I pray on my knees for more! Has there been all this fighting and shouting and all the arguing among the men, and the only hope for women is a husband who’s a little bit better than a beast, or a wage of more than sixpence a day? What about Uncle Ned’s new world? What about land for everyone?”
Alinor looked at her bright-faced daughter. “I know,” she said. “There’s a lot of talk, but there’s no new world for people like you or me.”
“You mean women,” Alys said sharply. “Poor women. Nothing ever changes for us.”
Alinor heard the bitterness in her daughter’s voice and felt that she was to blame for having brought her into this world that favored men. “It’s true,” she said.
The girl knelt for her mother’s blessing, and Alinor stooped and kissed her daughter’s neat white cap. Alys rose up, and went out of the door. Alinor sat for a little longer on her stool at the table, facing the corner of the room where she kept her herbs and oils, and the little wooden box where she kept her treasures. It held her mother’s recipe book for remedies, the agreement for the cottage between her missing husband and Mr. Tudeley, and her red leather purse of valueless old coins. It did not seem much for a lifetime of hard work. Then she whispered to herself: “A woman like you in a place like this,” and rose up, and took her basket, and her little knife, and went out to cut herbs while they still were damp with dew.
It was a cool dawn, with strands of gray mist lying along the channels in the mire, melting the boundaries between land and sea and air. Alinor shivered in the morning chill, drawing a shawl over her head as she shooed the hens out of the cottage and down to the shoreline. She looked across her little garden to the harbor, where the water was shrinking away, draining from pools into swiftly ebbing channels, leaving acres of wet mud, sandbanks, and reedbeds. As the tide inched back to the sea, the little harbor birds, dunlin and knot, chased after it, running in and out of the waters on their long legs, suddenly flying up with their rippling calls, and then settling again in a flurry, to run to and fro. At the harbor mouth Alinor could see the flat gray of the sea, and the indigo line of the faraway horizon. From the far side of the mire came the thunderous rumble of the mill wheel turning. If James had already gone to France and was homeward bound, he would have a calm crossing. If he had gone to the king at Carisbrooke Castle, he could sail back to Sealsea harbor in three or four hours. If he had gone to meet the Prince of Wales at sea with his ships, then he could have gone out to sea and back within the day. Since she did not know where he had gone, there was no point in looking to the dark horizon for his sail. As a fisherman’s wife she knew this well, but still she looked for him.
It was going to be another hot day, once the mist burned off. He had said that he would return within the month, but she knew him so little, she did not know if he was a young man who would remember a promise made to a woman, especially to a poor woman of no importance. Perhaps he was in danger, and could not choose when to go or stay? Or perhaps he was a man who was careless with his words, as men are, and he was not counting the days as she was counting them? Or perhaps the kiss had meant nothing, and the words had meant nothing either.
She turned her back on the harbor and bent over her herb beds, picking the herbs that were unfurling their fresh leaves, tying them in little posies and tossing them in her basket. When she had harvested one bed, she moved on to another until she had picked everything that was fresh, and then she went back into the house and tied them on the strings that looped from one beam to another. The earlier dry posies she took down and put into little wooden boxes, each labeled with Rob’s careful script with the name for the herb, sometimes the Latin names, sometimes the old names that her mother had taught her: eyebright, heartsease, and scurvy grass.
She brushed the crumbs from the wooden plates out of the front door and felt the warmer air. The sun was burning off the mist. She watched the garden birds fly down to feed—the robin that lived in the garden all year round and a pair of blackbirds that nested and reared their young in the blackthorn hedge that ran behind the little cottage. She rinsed the two cups, from her breakfast with Alys, in the last of the clean water, then tipped the bowl over the plants at the side of the door. She picked up the empty bucket and walked to the dipping pond, on the inland side of the bank, holding the worn post as she lowered the bucket into the clean water. She heaved the slopping pail back up the steps, stood the bucket by the open door, and ladled water into the three-legged iron cooking pot that sat among the red embers. She took one of the fresh bunches of herbs and set it to seethe in the pot. Her mother’s recipe called for some honey, and she spooned a careful measure from the jar where the comb oozed. Leaving it to simmer, she went outside with a sacking bag, an old flour bag from the mill, to gather driftwood for the fire. She walked along the line of the high tide, picking up twigs for kindling and bigger pieces of wood. When the sack was filled she hefted it onto her back and walked back to the cottage.