“No. There is one thing, a great thing, I have to do before I can go home.” He resisted the temptation to tell her more.
She guessed at once. “You’re never going to the Isle of Wight?” she whispered. “Not to the king?”
His silence told her that she was right.
“So you see why you should not be seen with me,” he said. “And I will never admit that I met you, that you hid me. Whatever happens, whatever befalls me, I will never betray you.”
Gravely she nodded. “If you want to go to the Priory, we should go through the mire while it’s low tide. We can see the steward as he has his breakfast, and if he won’t have you in the house, there’ll still be time to walk back through the mire before the tide gets too high.”
He got up from his seat on the nets, brushed down his jacket, and swung his cloak around his shoulders. “We go through the mire?”
She nodded again. “We shouldn’t meet anyone. Hardly anyone comes here. As we get to the Priory we’ll be in the hollow lane of bushes. If you meet anyone there you can just drop over the bank into the ditch and hide. If you have to run, follow the line of the ditch and it will take you inland. You can hide in the woods.”
“And what will you do?”
“I’ll say that I never saw you following me. That I was going out to the beach for tern eggs.” She turned and opened the door. “Wait here.”
Suddenly, like a cannonade on the still air, there was an explosion of noise, a cascade of water, and then a terrible rumbling sound.
“What’s that?” he demanded, starting up, hand to his precious pack.
“Just the mill,” she said calmly. “They’ve opened the millrace and now the millstones are grinding. It’s noisy on a calm day.”
He followed her out into the brightness of the morning. The mudbanks and the water pools gleamed like tarnished silver, stretching to the horizon, dazzling and strange. The grinding and the clanking noise went on, as if someone were rolling back the iron gates of hell on a stone pavement.
“So loud!” he said.
“You get used to it.” She led the way down the bank onto a little spit of shingle that went into the mud of the mire and then petered out at a shallow riverbed. He walked at her side, his pack on his back, the heels of his riding boots sinking into the cloying mud and coming free with a horrid little sucking sound. Suddenly the shallow ditch beside him rushed with a gout of water that made him jump.
She laughed. “That’s the millrace, the water from the tide mill.”
“Everything is so strange here,” he said, ashamed of flinching from the water, which was now pouring along beside them, in the landscape that was otherwise so still. “My home is in the North, high hills, moorland country, it’s very dry. . . . This is like a foreign land to me, like the Lowlands.”
“The miller opens the sluice gates on the millpond, so the water pours in to turn his wheel,” Alinor explained. “And then the water rushes out to sea.”
“Every low tide?” he asked, watching the torrent beside them.
“He doesn’t mill every tide,” she said. “There’s not enough demand for flour. But he stores grain and sends it to London when the price is right.”
He heard the resentment in her voice. “You mean that he profiteers? He buys the corn cheap and sends it away to sell at London prices?”
“He’s no worse than anyone else,” she said. “But it’s hard to see the grain ship going out with her sails spread when you don’t have the money for a loaf yourself, and you can’t earn enough to buy flour.”
“Doesn’t his lordship set the price of the loaf? He should do.”
She shrugged. A good landlord would set the price and make sure that the miller took no more than a scoop of wheat as his fee. “Sir William’s not always here. He’s in London. He probably doesn’t know.”
The track she was following was invisible to him as it turned away from the mill stream, to the higher ground of a little island of shingle and then another, set amid a waste of soft mud. The harbor water was gurgling and receding all around them, all the time. Sometimes they were on the firm footing of a shingle spit, with a deep pool on the seaward side, where he saw shoals of tiny fish left by the receding water; sometimes they walked over sand ridged by the departing sea and he remembered the danger of quicksands and stepped in her footprints. Often, he thought she could not possibly know the way around deep creeks that ran through the featureless marsh. But she turned one way and then another, tracing her way through, sometimes on the seabed, sometimes through the reed banks, sometimes on the wavering shore where half-submerged stanchions and mud-buried groynes showed that someone had once built a dike and claimed land, but then lost it again to the indifferent sea.
When she turned inland after more than an hour of walking, they went into an overhung lane where quickthorn trees pressed close on each side. He made sure that he was so far back that he could drop out of sight the moment that he saw someone, or heard her exclaim a greeting, and yet close enough that he could follow her as she took the twisting path that led them towards the high roofs of the Priory, just visible above the thick trees. Brambles trailed across the path, tugging at his sleeves. This path was rarely trodden: the farm workers preferred the road, and when the king was on his throne and Sir William had his favor, all the grand visitors drove their carriages from the mainland over the wadeway at low tide and entered by the ornamental gates to draw up to the double front door where a row of liveried servants bowed as the carriage doors opened. But the liveried servants had run away to fight for the New Model Army, and there had been no grand visitors since the war started and Sir William had joined the losing side.
The trees gave way to a scrubby-hedged meadow of badly mown hay, and the two of them went quickly across the open ground to the shelter of the high wall of knapped flints banded with red brick. Alinor paused, her hand on the ring handle of the wooden door.
“Is this your safe house? Were you expected? Shall I tell the steward your name?”
“I did hope to come here,” James admitted. “Sir William said he would meet me here. But I don’t know how much he told his steward. I don’t know if you are safe going in there and speaking of me. Perhaps I should go in alone.”
“Safer if you stay here. I can say that I met you by chance, and I’ve brought you to him. You wait here.” She gestured to a stack of hay, carelessly built of poor grass in the seashore meadow. “Get behind that, and keep a lookout. If I don’t come back within the hour then something’s gone wrong and you’d better run away. Go back along the shoreline; stay on the bank. You can hide until the tide’s low again this evening, and wade over the causeway at dusk.”
“God keep you safe,” he said nervously. “I don’t like to send you into danger. His lordship assured me I would be safe here. I just don’t know if he will have told his steward.”
“If he sends me to trick you, to bring you in for arrest, I’ll take my apron off as a signal,” she said. “When I’m coming, if I’m carrying my apron in my hand, run away.”
She was pale with fear, her lips tightly compressed. She turned without another word and went through the door in the wall into the kitchen garden. She walked past the tidy beds of herbs and vegetables to the kitchen door of the Priory, stepped out of her wooden pattens, and tapped on the door.
The cook opened the top half of the door, smiled to see that it was Alinor, and said: “I need nothing today, Goodwife. His lordship isn’t home till tomorrow and I don’t make eel pie for anyone else.”
“I came to see Mr. Tudeley,” Alinor said. “It’s about my boy.”
“There’s no work,” the cook said bluntly, lifting the lid on a giant stewpot and stirring the contents. “Not with the world as it is, and nobody knowing what will happen next, and no good coming to anyone, with the king missing, and parliament up in arms, and our own lord up and down to London every day of the week, trying to talk some sense into them, and nobody listening to anyone but the devil himself.”