Alinor shook her head. “Nothing.”
“So perhaps, he’s still alive? If you didn’t see him, then he’s not dead. He could still come home.”
“Or perhaps I have no sight.”
“Perhaps that. Perhaps you met a black cat and he truly saw you.”
Alinor smiled. “Don’t speak of it,” she reminded her daughter. She thought of the priest, waiting for his gruel in the net shed. She wondered if he had truly seen her, like the black cat of her daughter’s dream.
The girl ran her fingers through her thick fair hair and pushed it back from her face, then pulled her cap over the golden plait. She sat down to put on her boots. “I wish to God we knew,” she said irritably. “I don’t miss him, but I’d like to know I can stop looking for him. And it’s not fair on Rob.”
“I know,” Alinor said. “Every time a ship comes to the tide mill quay I ask for news of him, but they say nothing.”
The girl lifted up a boot and poked her finger through the hole in the sole. “I’m sorry, Ma, but I need new boots. These are through at the toes and the sole.”
Alinor looked at the patched uppers and the mended soles. “Next time I have money, next time I go to market,” she promised.
“Before winter, anyway.” The girl pulled on her worn boots. “I might bring a rabbit home tonight. I set a snare yesterday.”
“Not on Sir William’s fields?”
“Not where the keeper ever goes,” she said mischievously.
“Bring it home and I’ll stew it,” Alinor promised, thinking of the extra mouth to feed if the priest did not leave till the evening ebb tide.
The girl knelt before her mother and Alinor rested her hand on the tender nape of the girl’s neck. “God bless you and keep you safe,” she said, thinking of her daughter’s young prettiness, and the miller and his men who watched her as she crossed the yard and joked of the husband she would have in a few years’ time.
The girl smiled up at her mother as if she knew her fears. “I can fend for myself,” she said gently, and went out, shooing the hens out of the door and out of the gate so that they could pick their way down to the shoreline.
Alinor waited till she heard the crunching sound of footsteps on shingle recede, as her daughter walked along the shore to the ferry crossing at the rife. Only when she could hear nothing outside but the calling of the seabirds did Alinor spoon the warm gruel into the spare bowl, her missing husband’s bowl, and take his carved wooden spoon and his own wooden cup filled with small ale, and carry them back along the bank to the net shed.
She tapped at the door and went in, ducking her head below the crooked lintel. He was asleep, sprawled over the nets, his good woolen cape spread under him, his beautiful curling hair tumbled around his face. She observed his pallor, and the dark long sweep of his eyelashes, the sleeping strength of his body, his chest and arms and the length of his legs in the expensive riding boots. Nobody would take him for anything but a stranger, foreign to this impoverished island off the south coast of England. One glance would tell anyone that he was a nobleman. He was as out of place, sprawled on the stinking nets in the ramshackle shed, as she would have been among the silks and perfumes of the king’s court, in the old days, when the king had a court in London.
She thought it was disrespectful to wake him, but then the cooling bowl in her hand reminded her that if she left the gruel beside him and he woke to found it cold and congealed he would be nauseated. So she bent down, put the cup of ale on the floor, and gently shook the toe of his boot.
His eyelashes flickered at once and he opened his eyes and sprang to his feet in one movement. “Ah! Goodwife,” he said.
She held out the bowl and the mug of small ale. “Gruel,” she said. “I know it’s not good enough for you.”
“It comes from you, and it comes from God, and I am grateful,” he replied. He put the bowl and spoon and mug on the floor and he knelt down and spoke a long whispered grace in Latin. Alinor, not knowing what to do, bowed her head and whispered “Amen” as he finished, though she had been told by the minister—they had all been told—that God did not speak in Latin, that God spoke in English and should be addressed in English and that everything else was a sham and a heresy and a papist mockery of the truth of the Word.
He sat cross-legged on the nets as if they were not crawling with vermin, and he ate the gruel like a hungry man. He scraped the wooden bowl with the wooden spoon and drained the cup of small ale.
“I’m sorry, there’s no more,” she said awkwardly. “But I’ll bring you some fish soup if you’re here at dinnertime.”
“It was very good. I was hungry,” he said. “I am grateful to you for sharing your food. I hope that you did not go without to feed me?”
She thought with a brief pang of guilt of her boy, who would have eaten more at breakfast. “No,” she said. “And my daughter might bring home some meat for dinner.”
He narrowed his eyes as if he was trying to conjure a calendar and see if there was a holy day or a fast day that he should observe. He smiled. “It’s St. John’s Day. I shall be glad to dine well, but if there is only a little I beg that you take it for yourself and your children. You do a great service to me and for God by hiding me here. I don’t want you to go hungry. I am accustomed to it.”
Her face lit up as she laughed, and he was struck again by her sudden transformation. “I wager I’m more accustomed than you!”
He had to stop himself from touching her smiling cheek. “You’re right,” he conceded. “Fasting is my choice, part of my faith.”
“I thought I’d guide you to the Priory this morning,” she offered. “If you want to try the steward there, and see if he’ll take you in.”
“I should be glad of your help. I should be glad to meet with him. Do we go back the way we came?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then I can find my own way. I’ll go alone. I won’t put you in danger.”
“It’s the mire,” she reminded him. “I have to guide you. I can walk ahead of you, so that we’re not seen walking together.”
He nodded. “You must keep your distance.”
“Very well.”
They were silent for a moment. “Will you sit?” he invited her. “Sit and talk with me?”
She hesitated. “I have to go to my work.”
“Just stay a moment?” He wondered at himself, seeking her company when he should have been using the solitude for prayer.
She sank to the floor, tucking her feet under her rough woolen skirt. The room was shadowy, smelling of salt and seaweed and the foul undertone of marsh mud. The floor was tamped-down earth, the nets flung carelessly one on top of another, the lobster pots rotting with their load of old seaweed and shells.
“What should you be doing, if I were not delaying you?” he asked her.
“This morning I’d be weeding in the garden, and cleaning the house, picking the herbs, for drying or distilling, probably spinning. This afternoon I’ll go up to my brother’s house at the ferry, to start barley in the brewhouse for our ale. I’ll make bread from the yeast. Sometimes I work at Mill Farm—in the dairy or bakery—or I weed or dig or harvest, depending on the season.” She shrugged. Clearly there were too many tasks for her to list. “As it’s Midsummer Day I’ll pick herbs again this evening, those in my own garden and those that I grow at the ferry-house, and I’ll distill in the ferry-house stillroom. Sometimes, someone sends for me, for childbirth or sickness. I go to church some evenings. It’s good to sit, just for a moment.”
“You must be lonely?”
“No—though I miss my mother,” she conceded.
“Do you not miss your husband?”
“I’m glad to be rid of him,” she said simply. “Except for the loss of the boat.”
“He was unkind to you?” He gripped his hands in his lap to stop himself covering her clasped hand with his own. He thought the man must be a monster to hurt such a woman as this—and what was the minister of the church doing, what was her brother doing that he did not protect her?