“Not even to serve the Lord?”
“He’s all I have.”
“And now, if he’s wearing Peachey livery, he won’t even take the ferry after I’m gone,” he said resentfully. “So I came back to keep the ferry and the house in the family for nothing.”
“You might have a son of your own,” she said gently, though he was a widower at thirty.
He hunched his shoulder. “Not me. We ferrymen make poor husbands.”
“Ah, God bless her,” Alinor said quietly. Ned’s young wife, Mary, had died in childbirth, Alinor helpless to save her. “God forgive me that I couldn’t—”
“Long ago,” he said, shrugging off the pain. “But I’d not take another wife and put her through that.”
“Another wife might not—”
“So Rob should be my heir and take the ferry!”
“He still might! He won’t serve the Peacheys forever. It’s only till Master Walter goes to Cambridge. But even a few months in the schoolroom will be the making of him. He’ll be able to go anywhere, to any family, anywhere in England. That’s better for him than being stuck here.”
“But you and I are still stuck here!”
She frowned at the bitterness in his tone, and put her hand on his. “I’ve never hoped for better, I don’t hope to leave. But now, with Rob’s wage, I’ll be able to buy a fishing boat, and start putting something aside for Alys’s dowry. And just because we’re stuck here doesn’t mean we can’t dream of something better for our boy.”
“I s’pose,” he said grudgingly. “But dream for Alys, too. That’s a girl with high hopes! She’s going to make her way in the world.”
“Perhaps,” Alinor said uneasily. “But it’s not a very good world for a hopeful girl.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Red, the dog, glanced at them both as if wondering if anyone would throw something into the water for him to fetch.
“You never thought like this before you went away,” she remarked. “You’d never have said ‘stuck here’ then.”
“No. Because then I never knew there was a world north of Chichester. But when I was with the army at Naseby, I talked with the other men—men who had come from all over, all over the kingdom, all of us coming together to fight for what we believed, knowing that God was guiding us, knowing that the moment was then—it started me thinking. Why should the king own all the land, every acre of it, and you and I perch on a spit of shingle halfway into the mire? Why should the Peacheys have all the fields and the woods? Shouldn’t all the lands belong to all the people? Shouldn’t every Englishman have his own plot to grow his own food, so that nobody starves in a rich country?”
“Is that what they say in the army?” she asked curiously.
“It’s the very thing that they are fighting for,” he said. “The talk that started with the rich men of London complaining about their taxes turned into a roar from the poor men of England asking: What is right? What about us? If the king is not to own everything, then neither should the lords, nor should the bishops. If the king is not to own everything, then every Englishman should have his own garden and the right to fish his own river.”
He had surprised her with his vehemence. “You’ve never spoken of this before.”
“My nephew was never apprenticed to the service of a royalist lord before!” he exclaimed angrily. “With the king held, but plotting as if he’d never lost a battle, and cavaliers up in arms all around the country, the Scots coming down on us, the Irish raising troops! Have you heard the news from Essex?”
She shook her head. “Only what the minister said.”
“They’ve declared for the king, the fools. The army’s had to march on Colchester and set a siege against royalists.”
She looked aghast. “They’ve never started fighting again?”
“And the ships of the parliamentary navy have gone over to the king. We’ve lost the admiral’s own flagship and half a dozen others.”
“What will they do? Will they sail into London?”
“Who knows what they’ll do, the traitors? Ship in the Irish? Rescue the king from the Isle of Wight?”
“Oh, Brother, don’t say it’s war? Not again.”
“It’ll be war forever until the king agrees to make peace, and keeps to his word,” Ned predicted. “He says one thing to parliament and then sends for the Scots and the Irish. Even the Welsh. The army should take him themselves, force him to swear peace, and then make him keep his word.”
“I thought he was in prison at Carisbrooke Castle?”
Ned shook his head in disgust. “He’s holding court as if he were at Whitehall. He drives in his carriage all around the island, visiting the lords and ladies as if he were newcome to his throne. They say that he’s welcome everywhere he goes. He never stops writing his letters and planning his escape. I thank the Lord that the commander of the castle is Robert Hammond. He’s a good man. I know him myself; he had his own troop in our army. At least he can be trusted to keep the king safe, and in the end, I swear we’ll put him on trial for making war against his own people.”
“On what charge? Wasn’t it parliament that rebelled against the king?”
“He raised his standard first. He turned his guns on apprentice lads and clerks. He armed his lords and set them up on great horses to ride us down. He turned against us. You’re signing your boy up to the wrong side, Sister. Nobody is going to love a cavalier at the end of this summer, when they’re all defeated.”
“I don’t want him on any side,” she said fretfully. “I just want him in a good place, and my daughter with a dowry, and a fishing boat to earn my own living.”
He subsided and took a deep draft of ale. Red put his soft chin on his master’s knee. “Ah, I can talk. Talk is all I do now. For all that I marched and prayed and fought, as soon as Da died I came home to the ferryboat. I was on the winning side with my heart set on it, and now I ship a cavalier lord to and fro whenever he hails the ferry. And he never pays me a penny because the ferry is his, and I am his tenant, and he probably thinks the water of the mire is his too, the mud beneath it, and the sea beyond it.”
“You had to come home.” She wanted to comfort him, her only brother and only neighbor. “And we’d have lost the ferry if you hadn’t, and the house and our livelihood with it. There were plenty who would have been glad to take Father’s place. In Sealsea alone were dozens. They would have been queuing at the Priory gates begging for the right to it. You kept it for us, and you kept our house too. And—as it’s turned out with Zachary gone—I’d be a beggar without it. We eat out of your kitchen, and we drink out of your brewhouse.”
“Ah, it’s your home, not just mine. I don’t even want it. My troop is marching north against the Scots and I’m not there. I feel like a coward.”
“You’re no coward,” she said fiercely. “It takes courage to do the right thing. And it was the right thing to come home and keep Ferry-house and the ferry in the family. Where would we be now, if we had lost it?”