She heard, as a woman in love will always hear, the promise of love more than the meaning of the sentence. “Here, with me,” she repeated.
“Without fail.”
“Can’t you refuse to go?” she demanded. “Can’t you say you’ve changed your mind?”
He smiled. “But I have not changed my mind,” he said. “I think as I did about everything, and I cannot break my word. There are men depending on me; there is a great man depending on me. Nothing has changed . . . except . . .”
She was silent, while she waited for him to say what had changed.
“My heart,” he told her.
TIDELANDS, AUGUST 1648
Alinor worked as usual, through the next weeks of summer storms and sudden days of heat, which made a haze on the mire that looked like palaces and streets and warehouses. The visions made her wonder what James was seeing, if he was admitted into great buildings or was walking down beautiful streets, far bigger and cleaner than Chichester, far grander than anything she had ever seen, if the gates of palaces opened for him, if there were garden doors into beautiful houses.
She walked to Chichester market and at the secondhand clothes stall she bought Alys a pair of boots, hardly worn and with a good sole that would keep her feet warm and dry through the coming autumn and winter. She bought linen shifts and caps for both of them, and a new petticoat for Alys. She bought a ribbon to trim it, since Alys had so few pretty things. It was too hot to imagine that winter would ever come, but the secondhand clothes were cheapest in August, so Alinor bought her daughter a winter shawl and a cape of waxed cloth that would keep her dry when she had to go out across the ferry to the tide mill or work outside.
Alinor attended church and saw Rob, she picked fruit in the ferry-house garden, she worked in the Mill Farm dairy. She delivered hanks of spun wool to the wool merchant and received, in return, her pay and a bale of fleeces for spinning. She went through every day, her eyes down, her behavior demure, as if she were not burning up inside, white cap on her feverish forehead, gray dress wrapped as tight as an embrace around her waist. She took the boat out on a turning tide at slack water and laid four lobster pots, holding her nerve, though the boat rocked as she leaned over the side. She drew them in again next day, heaving against the weight of the pot and the rope, with two snapping monsterlike lobsters inside. She baited the pots again with stinking fish, threw them out, then rowed to the mill quay with her catch, and sold it to a couple of farmers’ wives for fourpence each.
“You look well,” Mrs. Miller said, staring at Alinor’s flushed smiling face as she pocketed the pennies.
“I’m just the same,” Alinor said, though her heart pounded too fast.
“I don’t know how you can bear the work.” Mrs. Miller looked disdainfully from Alinor’s soaked hem to the stinking bait jar. “Especially this work. In this heat.”
“Oh,” said Alinor, as if she had not noticed.
She went to her beehive and watched the bees coming and going with their determined purpose from the little doorway at the foot of the skep. “Something has happened to me,” she told them. “Something very important.” She listened to the warm comforting rumble of the hive as if the swarm was agreeing that it was important to them too; but she did not tell them what it was. She weeded her vegetable bed on her knees with her little hoeing stick, the sun hot on her back. She stood up, suddenly dizzy, her hands empty, as if she were walking in her sleep, and remembered the morning when she had looked through the cottage door at the unearthly whiteness of the sky and thought herself enchanted.
The wheat in the harborside fields was a rippling sea of gold, ready for harvest, the miller more and more fearful of a summer storm in this year of terrible rain. Finally, Mrs. Miller declared that they would start the harvest, and all the poor cottagers nearby were summoned to Mill Farm for the work.
Alys was one of the binding gang that followed the reapers, picking up the cut wheat, binding it into a stook, and loading it into the wagon. It was painfully hard work and when Alys came home, her arms were scratched by the stalks and her back was aching from bending and lifting and throwing stooks into the wagon. She worked from dawn—harvest days were long days—and her face was white with exhaustion. She was paid for extra hours with a small loaf of wheat bread baked in the mill’s big bread oven, in the harvest bake—one for each reaper and binder on top of their daily pay. It was a luxury that the Reekies only tasted at harvesttime. The rest of the year they baked their own coarse bread of mixed grains.
Alinor bathed Alys’s arms and face with elderflower water. She fed her nettle soup to ease the stiffness in her back and arms. Alys drank her soup and ate her bread in silence.
