She turned and looked at him and once again she surprised him, this time by her gravity. “I wish to God that I could,” she said. “But I would not leave my children. And besides, I have a terror of deep water.”
She walked on ahead of him, scrunching on the shingle beach that wound between the bank and mud where the water was seeping inwards. A roosting seagull whirled up ahead of them with an unearthly call, and he followed her shadow over shingle and mud and the driftwood, hearing the steady hiss, as the sea, somewhere out in the darkness to his right, came constantly closer, flooding mudbanks, drowning the reeds, always coming unstoppably on.
She scrambled up another bank to a path that ran higher, above the tidemark, and he followed her between gorse bushes where the nighttime flowers were drained of their color and glowed silver rather than gold, but he could still smell their honey scent on the air. An owl hooted near him and made him start as he saw it, dark in the darkness, wheeling away on wide silent wings.
They walked for a long time, until the pack on his back became heavy and he felt as if he were in a dream, following the wooden heels of her pattens, the dirty hem of her skirt, through a world that had lost meaning as well as color, on a winding track through desolation. He pulled himself up, and whispered an “Ave Maria,” reminding himself that he was honored to carry the word of God, the precious objects for the Mass, and a ransom for a king; he was glad to have to struggle on a muddy path through an unmapped shore.
The sea seeped farther inland as if it knew no boundary. He could see the water creeping through the driftwood and straw on the shingle below them, and on the other side of the bank the ditches and ponds were swelling and flowing back inland as if it were, as she had said, a place that was neither sea nor shore but the land itself that ebbed and flowed with the tide. He realized that for some time he had heard a strange hissing noise overlaying the sound of the lapping water, like the seething of a giant stewpot, like the bubble of a kettle.
“What is that? What is that noise?” he whispered, stopping her with one hand on her shoulder. “Do you hear it? A terrible noise! Strange, like the water is boiling.”
She halted, quite unafraid, and pointed out into the middle of the moving water. “Oh, that. Look, there, out there, in the mire, can you see the bubbles?”
“I can see nothing but waves. God save us! What is it? It sounds like a fountain?”
“It’s the hushing well,” she said.
He was absurdly frightened. “What is it? What is that?”
“Nobody knows,” she said indifferently. “A place in the center of the mire where the sea boils as it comes in. Every high tide, so we pay no attention. Sometimes a stranger takes an interest in it. A man told my brother it was probably a cave, underneath the mire, and the bubbles pour from it when the sea fills it. But nobody knows. Nobody’s ever seen it.”
“It sounds like a seething pot!” He was horrified by the strangeness of the sound. “As if it were hell boiling over!”
“Yes, I s’pose it’s fearful.” She had no interest in it.
“What does it look like when the sea goes out?” he asked curiously. “Is the ground hot?”
“Nobody’s seen it when the tide is out,” she repeated patiently. “You can’t walk to it. You’d sink and the mire would hold you till you drowned on the next tide. P’raps it’s a cave—and you’d fall into it. Who knows? P’raps there really is a cave that holds all the sea, the waters that ebb and flow underneath all the world. P’raps it’s the end of the world, hidden away here in Foulmire, and we’ve been living on the doorstep of hell for all these years.”
“But the noise?”
“You can take a boat over it,” she offered. “It bubbles like a cauldron and it hisses loudly. Sometimes it’s so loud that you can hear it in the churchyard on a still night.”
“You can sail out to see it?”
“Well, I wouldn’t,” she specified. “But it can be done, if you’ve nothing else to do.”
He guessed that there was never a day in her life when she had nothing else to do.
She turned and walked on again. She had no interest in the threatening hiss that grew louder as the bank curved towards the harbor, and fainter as they moved away.
“Were you ever at school?” he asked, trying to imagine her life, living here in this desolate landscape, as ignorant as a flower. He lengthened his stride and walked beside her as the path widened.
“For a few years. I can read and I can write. My mother taught me her recipe book, and the herbs, and her skills.”
“She was a cook?”
“A herbalist. A healer. I do her work now.”
“Did anyone ever speak to you of the old faith? Did anyone teach you the prayers?”
She shrugged. “My grandam preferred the old ways. When I was a girl sometimes a traveling priest would come to the village and hear confessions in secret. Some of the older people say the old prayers.”
“When we get to the net shed, I should like to pray with you.”
He saw the ghost of her smile. “You’d do better to pray for your breakfast,” she said. “We don’t eat well.”
The path narrowed and they went single file again, the thorns pressing on either side of them. Somewhere in the woods away to his left he could hear the piercing song of a nightingale, singing to the pale sky.
He thought he had never traveled through so strange a landscape with so alien a companion. He had followed his vocation throughout England, going from one wealthy house to another, hearing confessions and celebrating the Mass, usually in hiding, but always in comfort. His dark good looks had served him well. He had been petted by the richest ladies of the kingdom, and respected by their fathers and brothers for risking his life for his faith. More than one beautiful girl had sunk to her knees and confessed to disturbing dreams of him. Their desire had never touched him. He was sworn to God and never distracted. He was a young man of only twenty-two years old; he reveled in the chance to test his fervent convictions, and in the sense of his own righteousness.
He had been promised to the Church since boyhood, and his teachers had trained him and inspired him, and then sent him out into the world to travel in secret, meeting with royalists and sharing their plans, going from one besieged palace to another, carrying funds from the exiled queen, plans from the imprisoned king, promises from the prince. He had been in some dangerous and frightening places—slept in priest’s holes, hidden in cellars, served the Mass in attics and stables—but he had never before spent the day with no refuge, alone on an unmapped shore, or followed the footsteps of a common woman who held his safety in her roughened hands.
He felt for the gold crucifix that he wore under his fine lawn shirt and gripped its awkward outline. Superstitiously he glanced at the mud beneath her feet to be sure that she was making footprints like a mortal. Even though he could see the sharp tracks of the wooden pattens, he crossed himself, thinking that she was an unearthly guide to an ungodly land, and if it were not for the power of his faith he would think himself lost indeed, walking through a world of ancient elements: water, air, and earth.
They walked on, for perhaps an hour in silence, and then she turned sharply left and scrambled up the harbor bank and he saw, dark against the dark sky, a ramshackle hovel, walls of driftwood infilled with dried mud, thatched with reeds from the marsh. It looked like sea wrack thrown up by a high tide. She leaned against the ill-fitting door that creaked as it opened.