“I haven’t stolen. I’ve borrowed. He loves me. And she won’t catch me. It is worth the risk.”
“You think that now . . . you’ll think differently later.”
“I do think this now. So I acted now.”
“You’ll change. You’ll look back and this’ll seem like madness to you. And you’ll think I was mad not to stop you. I was wrong not to stop you. I should’ve taken the purse off you, the moment you brought it out.” Alinor choked on the rising bile in her mouth. “I thought it was my purse! My red leather purse filled with nothing but my little coins! I thought I was going mad.”
“Then I would have lost him. You heard them.”
“Even so. Better to lose him than—”
“I knew you wouldn’t go against me, Ma. I knew you’d never let me down.”
“I shouldn’t have gone along with you. This is a hanging matter, Alys. If you’re caught with that purse on you, they’ll hang you for a thief.”
“They won’t catch me. I’ll put it back. But I swear to you, that if I can’t marry him, I will die. If you forbid me, I’ll run away. If he were to leave me, I’d drown myself in the millpond.”
Alinor thought that she was the last woman in Sussex to argue against a desire that was more than life itself. How could she blame her daughter for doing nothing worse than she had done? Alinor had risked her life, going into the locked room above the stables with James, and since then she had lied to everyone.
“We’d better go back now to the tide mill, and put it back at once. If I call her into the yard, and you hurry into the house—”
“No. I know how to do it, really I do. I know when. She always goes out at dusk, every evening, to shut up the hens. She likes to shut them up herself. She’s afraid that I’ll steal the daytime eggs. She’s so mean. She goes out at dusk, and there’s never anyone in the kitchen then. I can put it back then.”
“How d’you know her hiding place?”
“I was in the yard when the corn merchants came, and she sold them corn that should have gone to the poor of the parish. They paid twice the price and the poor went hungry. It’s dirty money, Ma. Every time she does a deal that she knows Mr. Miller wouldn’t like, she keeps the money from him, and puts it into Jane’s dowry purse. Now and then, she sneaks it out to buy herself something special, or something for Jane’s bottom drawer. Once, she asked me to buy some gilt chains from the pedlar at the gate and the coins were hot and she had sooty fingers. I didn’t know where she kept the purse, but I knew it must be in the chimney. I just jiggled the bricks till I found the loose one.”
“This is a terrible risk.”
“I know. But I had to take it, Ma. I had to stop the Stoneys from saying no today. They won’t go back on their word, even if I can’t get the money. Richard will help me, and Mr. Stoney loves me—he’ll let me off. I’ll put the purse back, Mrs. Miller will be none the wiser, and when we get to market I’ll get some more wool for spinning. I’ll earn as much as I can before my wedding day, and I’ll give them all that I have at the church door. It won’t be sixty pounds, but it’ll be too late by then. They’ll never cancel the wedding. I’ll tell them then that I’ll owe the rest.”
Alinor shook her head at this solution. “It’s false dealing. Alys, it’s bad for us to be seen as cheats. If you cheat them on your wedding day, they’ll throw it in your face every quarrel you have. They’ll never trust you again.”
“Richard’ll never throw it against me.”
“His mother will.”
Alys shrugged. “Who cares? Once we’re married, she can say what she likes. I don’t care. It’s him I’m marrying, not her. And he’s worth stealing for, and cheating for. He’s worth anything.”
Alinor put a hand over her eyes as if the morning sun was too dazzling to bear. Vividly, in her mind’s eye, she saw Alys at the church door offering an underweight purse, the Stoneys’ white-lipped resentment, and her own shame.
“It’s no way to start a marriage,” she said miserably. “It’s not how you should be on your wedding day.”
Alys hugged her arm. “Ma, I know this is terrible for you, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but I can’t be stuck here, getting nowhere. I have to marry Richard. I have to be with him. I’m young, I want my life! I can’t be patient under misfortune like you. I can’t wait and wait for our da to come home, as if that would ever make anything better, when we know it’d be worse! I can’t creep about all humble, and hope that the neighbors are kind to my face while calling me a pauper and a faerie bastard behind my back.”
“They don’t say that!”
“It’s exactly what they say. Look how you have to fawn on Mrs. Miller. Look how you bow to Mrs. Wheatley. Look how you cringe to Mr. Tudeley, and that horrible tutor! We’re on the edge of charity all the time. We’re always leaching off someone’s goodwill. I can’t stand it. I’d rather be a thief than a beggar. I’ve got to take my chance now. I’ve got to live my life now!”
“Oh, don’t say that of him!”
“Mr. Tudeley is a monster!”
Alinor silenced her response, shamed by her own daughter, looked at Alys but could not find the words to reprimand her. “I’m not craven,” she said, her voice very low. “I don’t cringe. I don’t leach.”
“Yes, you do,” Alys said mercilessly. “Anyone can say anything to you, if they’ll only buy a bottle of plums.”
“I didn’t know you felt like this.”
“I’ve always hated being poor.”
“Rob, too?”
“Rob doesn’t matter!” Alys exploded. “This is not about your precious son, for once.”
Alys’s jealousy and her resentment stretched before Alinor for the first time, as if she was seeing the waste of Foulmire for the first time, in its vast emptiness, and smelling its mud.
“I can’t afford to offend anyone,” Alinor said quietly, the words forced from her. “If I want to earn enough to put food on the table for the two of you, I can’t afford pride.”
“I know,” Alys said.
“And Rob is not more precious than you.” She choked on her words. “Nothing in my world is more precious than you.”
“I know,” Alys repeated. She put her arm round her mother’s shoulder and held her closely. “I know what you’ve done for us. I don’t know half of what you’ve suffered—for us. You’ve been mother and father to us, I know. And it was too much for any woman to do on her own. I’m grateful, I am—really. But I’m only saying that I can’t be like you. I can’t do what you do. I can’t bend under the wheel. I can’t stand it. I’d rather risk everything than settle for a poor life, like you have.”
“You think I’ve settled for poverty?”
“Yes,” said Alys with the blunt cruelty of the young.
“I understand,” her mother said quietly. “I do understand wanting to be proud, being in love, being reckless.”
“Do you?”
She nodded, pressing her lips closed on her secret. Only last night she had been proud of her desire, entranced by lovemaking, and reckless. “I do know,” she repeated.
They stood for a moment, holding each other close, then they turned and walked side by side up the road to Chichester.
“I’m sorry,” Alys said quietly. “You know I love you. I didn’t mean to say all that.”
“I know.”
They walked a few minutes in silence then Alinor spoke: “This life isn’t what I intended for myself. It isn’t what my mother wanted for me. She thought Zachary was a man with his own boat, who’d do well. She thought we’d be neighbors, and she and I would work together, and he’d make a better life for me. She thought Ned would inherit the ferry, and have a good wife and a child of his own, and I’d have money coming in from Zachary and we’d live next door to my brother in our home. She couldn’t foresee that Mary would die, and that your father’d turn out bad.”