He gave her a hard look. “If anyone asks, you will tell them that his lordship is generous to poor tenants.”
She dipped a curtsey again. “Yes, sir. I know, sir.”
She turned and walked to the lych-gate with Alys on one side of her, Rob on the other. The two women, mother and daughter, kept their eyes on the ground, and their white-capped heads bowed, the picture of submissive obedience.
“He doesn’t know about the rabbit then,” Alys said with satisfaction.
TIDELANDS, JULY 1648
Rob did not have clothes fit to wear to the Priory and stubbornly resisted the preparations, saying that he did not want to go into service with the Peachey son and heir. He said that he did not know him, that they would not be able to play together, for how could a son of the Peachey family wrestle with the son of a fisherman, or race frogs? But when his mother told him of the food he would eat in the great hall, of the five shillings that would come to them at once, and that it would pay the next quarter’s rent, buy the family a boat, and pull them out of the poverty that always yawned before them like the trough of a drowning wave, he stopped complaining and went to the ferry-house after dinner to borrow a jacket that had once belonged to Alinor’s father, and a pair of Ned’s old boots.
Ned walked back with his nephew at low tide, his dog, a water dog with a bright rufous coat, trotting at his heels.
“Sister,” he said brushing Alinor’s forehead with his lips.
“Brother,” she replied.
She poured him a mug of small ale and he drank it sitting on the bench at the doorway with his back against the cottage wall, overlooking the harbor, his dog, Red, sitting at his feet, looking longingly at the hens as they pecked along the scum at the low waterline.
“I brought you one of those little tokens that you like so much.” He dug into the pocket of his jacket, bringing out a tiny metal disc, snipped into shapelessness and tarnished black.
“Oh, thank you, Ned,” she said with pleasure. “Where did you find it?”
“In the dipping pond behind the house. It’s been so wet, I think it must’ve washed out of the ditch. It caught my eye. How would anyone lose a coin beside a pond?”
“So long ago,” she said, turning the little token over in her hand. “It makes you wonder what they were doing there, doesn’t it? So many years ago. Standing there, with this coin in her hand. Perhaps she threw it in for a wish.”
It was a coin from the time of the Saxon kingdom, from when the Saxons had ruled the tidelands, pushing through the reed banks and the mud in their longboats, building their farmsteads on the islands. Alinor had collected the tokens since childhood, and kept them in her treasure box. Her mother had laughed at her as a miser with a hoard of fool’s gold, but had praised her sharp eyes and told her to watch carefully in case one day she found a coin of value. Only once had Alinor found a beaten coin of silver and they had taken it to be assayed and weighed in Chichester. The goldsmith had given her sixpence for it, a fortune to the little girl. All the other coins in her collection were made of bronze or enameled silver, the valuable metal rubbed off over the years. But she had never wanted them for their value. She loved them for their age, for the sense of them belonging to a forgotten time, to people who were not remembered anymore, the coins engraved with strange symbols and shapes rubbed to invisibility.
The people of Sealsea Island called the coins “faerie gold” and told stories of treasure hoards of priceless coins and the dark horsemen who guarded them, who would strike a thief blind and seal his eyelids with molten silver, but everyone knew they were just sea wrack: washed in and out by the sea, found in waterside mud, and valueless.
“Why would his lordship take Rob into service?” Ned asked as Alinor spat on the little coin and polished it on the hem of her gown, held it up to the setting sun and tried to decipher the blurred image. “Why pay him so well?”
“This looks like a lion,” she said, admiring the little token. “It really does. Do you think it’s a coin from old England?”
“Aye, perhaps. But why Rob?”
“Why not?” she demanded. “Don’t you remember when I cured Master Walter of his croup last May? Rob came with me then. He picked the herbs from their garden and helped me in their stillroom. We’ve been there a few times since the death of her ladyship. We’re going back tomorrow to harvest their herbs and dry them. Mr. Tudeley said it was to help us since the disappearance of Zachary.”
“They could have helped before. He’s been gone more than six months.”
She shrugged. “They don’t count the days like us.”
“They don’t count anything,” he said resentfully.
“I know, but if Rob can earn good money and get an education at the same time then perhaps he can do better than his father. Maybe he can get away from here, perhaps even to Chichester.”
“If they don’t lead him into sin. Sir William was for the king, not for parliament. He might have surrendered and begged for pardon but he doesn’t serve in the new parliament, and he’s not mustered for the New Model Army. By rights, he should be calling up his men and marching north against the Scots. If he ever meant his promise to parliament, this is his chance to prove it. But I doubt it’s a godly household.”
Alinor glanced sideways at her brother, at his shock of thick brown hair and his stocky shoulders. He was bitter at being called away from the army just as they were winning, forced to come back to pull the ferry over a muddy rife, when he had got away from the island and thought that the world was changing forever and that he was part of that change.
“You’ll always guide Rob,” she assured him. “He won’t forget your teachings. He knows where he comes from, and what we believe.”
“What d’you believe?” he challenged her. “I don’t know what you believe.”
Her gaze slid away from him. “Ah, I’m like our mother and grandmother, Ned. I don’t always understand; but sometimes I feel . . .”
“He’ll never be an army man,” he said regretfully. “He’ll never serve under Cromwell. He’s missed his chance at that. And now you’re putting him into service to a cavalier lord . . .”
“His lordship was pardoned, and he paid his fine for backing the king,” she said, resolutely turning her mind from the memory of the priest walking into the Priory, confident it was a safe house for a papist, for a royalist spy. “Rob takes after you. He won’t forget what’s right. And Sir William will serve in a godly parliament, whatever regrets he has for the old days. It’s over for the king and his lords. You told me so yourself.”
“I don’t trust him, nor any of them who say they’re sorry and get their lands back as if there’s no harm done, when hundreds of good men will never come home again. I’d have had Rob in the army; I’d have had him march to war on the side of God. If he was my boy, I’d send him out to my old troop now. There’s still a chance the Scots will come down on us. Some say the Irish are coming.”
“Surely the war’s over?”
“Not till the king signs a peace treaty, and means it.”
“Ned, I can’t let my boy go,” she said apologetically.