The young man looked up and for the first time his father saw his boyish smile. “No,” he said. “She knows me as Father James. I pass as a tutor called Mr. Summer. She has risked everything for me and she doesn’t even know my name.”
TIDELANDS, NOVEMBER 1648
Alinor knocked on the door of the Mill Farm dairy and entered on Mrs. Miller’s irritated shout. Richard Stoney was carrying in extra pails of milk, the maid ahead of him with the yoke on her shoulder.
“I’ve come for two pails of milk, if you’ve any for sale,” Alinor said.
“We’ve more than we can use today,” Mrs. Miller said. “Bessy’s calf fell into the ditch and broke her neck. Bessy’s still in milk.”
“Oh, poor thing,” Alinor said. Mrs. Miller looked at her askance.
“Poor me,” she said. “I’ve lost a good calf. I’ll have to have it butchered for veal.”
“Yes,” Alinor agreed, who had never tasted the luxury meat in her life. “I thought I’d make cheese for Chichester market.”
“I’ll carry the milk to Ferry-house for you, Mrs. Reekie,” Richard said politely.
Mrs. Miller scowled at him. “She’s not your mother-in-law yet,” she said coldly. “And you work for me.”
The young man flushed. “I beg pardon,” he said shortly.
“I can manage, if I may borrow the yoke,” Alinor said. “Will you take it off Alys’s wages?”
“You’re asking for credit?” Mrs. Miller said nastily.
“I can pay you now, if you prefer,” Alinor said steadily.
“No, no, you can keep your ha’pennies. I’ll take it off her wages at the end of the week.
“Thank you.” Alinor smiled, and put the well-worn wooden yoke on her shoulders, lifted the two brimming pails, and set her shoulders to find her balance. Richard opened the dairy door for her.
“You get yourself into the mill,” Mrs. Miller ordered Richard. “He’s milling this morning and the tide won’t wait, not even for such as you.”
Richard ducked his head and trotted across the yard. As Alinor walked slowly with the yoke across her shoulders, watching the milk slopping in the pails, she heard the miller shout to Richard to open the sluice. She stood for a moment at the yard gate to watch the lad lightly running along the pond wall to turn the great iron key to open the sluice. The water from the pond poured into the millrace, and slowly, the mill wheel started to turn. There was a roar of creaking wood as the rush of waters forced the wheel round and round, and then the tumble of water on the other side of the tide-mill quay as the millrace gushed like a waterfall out into the harbor, bursting like a tide of green foam into the muddy rife. Alinor walked towards the wadeway, her head turned from the raging water of the millrace as the miller engaged the grinding stones inside the mill and there was a deafening rumble of stone against stone. Alinor crossed on the wet cobbles of the wadeway, stepping around the puddles of icy water, to the ferry-house on the other side.
Ned was felling an old apple tree in the garden at the rear of Ferry-house. The trunk was wide and knotted, and Ned had sharpened his axe and stripped to the waist to swing, and then hammer in the wedges so the spreading boughs fell away from the house. He raised his hand to Alinor as she came around the house and into the back door of the dairy.
“The copper’s boiling in the laundry room for you,” he called to her.
“Thank you!” she shouted back and went into the dairy.
The room was freezing cold, and the floor still damp from washing. Alinor poured one pail of milk and then another into the wooden trough, and then went to and fro from the laundry with earthenware jugs filled with boiling water from the copper. She put the jugs among the milk until it was warmed through, and then poured in a small measure of rennet. Outside, she could hear the regular thud of the blade into the wood and the occasional pause when Ned rested on the handle and drew a breath.
Slowly, the warmed milk was splitting into curds and whey, solidifying. Alinor took down a seashell, one of the cleaned clam shells that her mother had always used to test the thickness of the curds and whey. She spun it on the surface, and when it was steady, she rolled up her sleeves and drew her hands, her fingers outstretched like claws, through the thickening mixture. The curds were growing solid. It was time to drain them.
The stink of the milk and rennet turned Alinor’s stomach and she opened the dairy door to take a few breaths of cold air at the doorway. Red, the dog, sat up and looked hopeful that he might get into the dairy and steal cream.
“You sick?” Ned shouted from the yard. “Sick again? You’re white as whey!”
“I’m fine,” Alinor lied, and went back to her work.
From the front of the house she could hear the clang of the metal bar against the hanging horseshoe as a traveler on the far side of the rife summoned the ferry.
“Alinor, can you do it?” Ned asked her, gesturing at his nakedness, and the tree half felled. “It’s low tide. It’s dead calm.”
Alinor shook her head. “Forgive me, Brother,” she said. “You know I can’t.”
