But she shook her head. “No worse than many. I never complained of it. But he took a lot of feeding, and a lot of working for. It was tiring to be his wife, wearisome. But without him we’ve got very little money and few ways to earn it, and no way of saving. I fear for my girl—working at Mill Farm every day—as pretty as she is. She’s got to marry in two or three years and where I’m going to find her dowry, I don’t know. And I fear for my boy, growing up and not even his father’s fishing boat to inherit. He’ll get the ferry after my brother, I suppose, but not for years, and then it’s a hard life. I don’t know what’ll become of either of them.” She shook her head as if she had puzzled over this often. “Nor of me, either. God keep us all from begging.”
“You can’t beg,” he said, shocked. “You can’t be reduced to begging.”
“Well, we borrow,” she admitted, and he saw from the ghost of her smile that she meant that they poached game from Sir William’s lands.
“God does not forbid borrowing if it’s only rabbits,” he told her, and was rewarded by a mischievous gleam. “But you must be careful . . .”
“We are,” she said. “And Sir William only cares about his deer and the pheasants. Perhaps we’ll buy a boat somehow. Perhaps times’ll get better.”
“Don’t you have a man who would take your husband’s place?” he asked, thinking of her waiting for someone at the church on Midsummer Eve.
He was shocked by her disdain, as she turned her head away. He had met duchesses with less hauteur.
“I shan’t marry again.”
“Not even for a boat?” He smiled.
“Nobody with a boat would have me with two children,” she observed. “Three mouths to feed.”
“Is your daughter like you?” he asked, thinking that she must be as pretty as a princess in a story, like a princess in disguise.
“Not really,” she answered with a smile. “She has high hopes, she listens to her uncle, thinks that anyone can be anything, that the world is laid out before her, that everything has changed. She’s all for parliament and the people. I don’t blame her. I can’t help but hope for better for her, and for Rob.”
“Your son?”
Her face warmed at his name. “He’s born to be a healer. He’s got my mother’s gift. From a baby he was out in the herb garden with me, learning the names and their potency. And I’ve taught him how they’re used, and sometimes he comes with me, for a sickness, or a death. If I could only keep him at school so he could have book learning! A cunning man with learning can make a good living among people with money, in a town perhaps.” She shrugged. “Not here. I get paid in food and pennies for the herbs, and my patients are all poor people. The only gentry are at the Priory. I nursed her ladyship before she died, and I physicked her son a few months ago. Twice a year I go to the stillroom and restock it and make it tidy, but when his lordship is ill, he sends for the Chichester physician.”
“You are a cunning woman?” he asked. “What things can you do?”
“Herbs and healing only,” she answered carefully. She guessed that he would know nothing of the many careful gradations between healers who used natural cures and those who drew on dark arts and could sicken a whole village. “I’m a midwife. I used to have my license, when the bishop was in his palace and could grant a license—before he was thrown out and ran away. I can draw a tooth and set a bone, cut out a sore and heal an ulcer, but I do nothing else. I am a healer and a finder of lost things.”
“You found me,” he said.
“Were you lost?”
“I think that it is England that is lost,” he said seriously. “We cannot put our king from his throne, we cannot choose how we worship God. We cannot put parliament over everything. We cannot make war against the king appointed by God to rule us.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
He hesitated. “You said last night that your brother is for parliament?”
“He ran away to fight and he would have stayed with the New Model Army; but when my father died he had to come home again to keep his right to the ferry. Our family had the rights to the ferry for generations, and we are tenants of Ferry-house.”
“It’s the only way to cross to the mainland? Your brother’s wherry?”
“It’s not a wherry,” she corrected him. “It’s more like a raft on a rope across Broad Rife,” she said. “Broad Rife flows between Sealsea Island and the mainland. It’s not deep—you can wade across at low tide. The wadeway is cobbled, so you can’t get stuck in the mud. My brother keeps the wadeway, and ferries people who don’t want to get their feet wet, and women going to market carrying their spun yarn or their goods, and at high tide the wagoners, or Sir William, who loads his horses and carriage on the ferry when the water is too high.”
“He rows people across?”
She shook her head. “He pulls on a rope. It’s like a big raft, a floating bridge, big enough to take a wagon. At mid-tide the current’s very strong. The ferry is hooked fore and aft to an overhead rope so that he doesn’t get swept away by the tide and out into the mire, and then out to sea.”
He saw that she went pale at the thought of it. “Have you always been afraid of water?” he asked curiously. “Living here, on the shore?”
“The daughter of the ferryman and the wife of a fisherman.” She smiled. “I know full well that it’s foolish, but I have always had a terror of it.”
“Then how will you fish when you get your boat?” he asked.
She smiled and gave a little shrug, rising to her feet and picking up his bowl and his cup. “I’ll have to find the courage,” she said. “I can row and I can throw a net, and the children can help me. I won’t ever go out to sea on the deep waters. I’ll stay inside the harbor bar. And then, if your side gets your way, and the king comes to his own again and the church goes papist, I can sell fish in the market and at the doors on all the fast days.”
“I will send you money for a boat when I get home,” he promised her.
She smiled as if it was a pleasantry. “Where’s your home?”
He hesitated, but he wanted to trust her with the truth. “I live at my college in France,” he said. “My family sent me to the English college at Douai when I was a boy of twelve, and I stayed on and took my vows as a priest. When the war started, they were glad that I was safely out of the way. My father fought against parliament and was defeated, wounded at Naseby. Now, he and my mother are in exile, with the queen in Paris, and I am a seminary priest, sworn to come to England to bring people back to the true faith.”
“Isn’t it very dangerous to come to England?”
He hesitated. There was a death sentence for spying, and a death sentence for heresy. His college were proud of their history of martyrs, and kept candles burning before a wall of their carved names. When he was young he had longed to be one of the sainted dead. “My college has sent many martyrs to England, ever since King Henry turned from the true Church. The Church was changed, despite people’s wishes, more than a hundred years ago; but we never changed. I am following where many saints have trod.” He smiled at her wondering gaze. “Truly, I choose this. And there are many safe houses and many friends to help me. I can cross the country and never leave Roman Catholic lands. I can pray in a hidden sacred chapel every night. Now, the parliament has gone too far against the king, the army even more so. Now is our chance. All over the country, towns and villages are declaring for the king and saying that they want him back on the throne. People want peace, and they want to be free to worship.”
“Won’t you go back to your college till then?” she asked doubtfully, thinking that the day would never come.