“Were you lost?”
“I think that it is England that is lost,” he said seriously. “We cannot put our king from his throne, we cannot choose how we worship God. We cannot put parliament over everything. We cannot make war against the king appointed by God to rule us.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
He hesitated. “You said last night that your brother is for parliament?”
“He ran away to fight and he would have stayed with the New Model Army; but when my father died he had to come home again to keep his right to the ferry. Our family had the rights to the ferry for generations, and we are tenants of Ferry-house.”
“It’s the only way to cross to the mainland? Your brother’s wherry?”
“It’s not a wherry,” she corrected him. “It’s more like a raft on a rope across Broad Rife,” she said. “Broad Rife flows between Sealsea Island and the mainland. It’s not deep—you can wade across at low tide. The wadeway is cobbled, so you can’t get stuck in the mud. My brother keeps the wadeway, and ferries people who don’t want to get their feet wet, and women going to market carrying their spun yarn or their goods, and at high tide the wagoners, or Sir William, who loads his horses and carriage on the ferry when the water is too high.”
“He rows people across?”
She shook her head. “He pulls on a rope. It’s like a big raft, a floating bridge, big enough to take a wagon. At mid-tide the current’s very strong. The ferry is hooked fore and aft to an overhead rope so that he doesn’t get swept away by the tide and out into the mire, and then out to sea.”
He saw that she went pale at the thought of it. “Have you always been afraid of water?” he asked curiously. “Living here, on the shore?”
“The daughter of the ferryman and the wife of a fisherman.” She smiled. “I know full well that it’s foolish, but I have always had a terror of it.”
“Then how will you fish when you get your boat?” he asked.
She smiled and gave a little shrug, rising to her feet and picking up his bowl and his cup. “I’ll have to find the courage,” she said. “I can row and I can throw a net, and the children can help me. I won’t ever go out to sea on the deep waters. I’ll stay inside the harbor bar. And then, if your side gets your way, and the king comes to his own again and the church goes papist, I can sell fish in the market and at the doors on all the fast days.”
“I will send you money for a boat when I get home,” he promised her.
She smiled as if it was a pleasantry. “Where’s your home?”
He hesitated, but he wanted to trust her with the truth. “I live at my college in France,” he said. “My family sent me to the English college at Douai when I was a boy of twelve, and I stayed on and took my vows as a priest. When the war started, they were glad that I was safely out of the way. My father fought against parliament and was defeated, wounded at Naseby. Now, he and my mother are in exile, with the queen in Paris, and I am a seminary priest, sworn to come to England to bring people back to the true faith.”
“Isn’t it very dangerous to come to England?”
He hesitated. There was a death sentence for spying, and a death sentence for heresy. His college were proud of their history of martyrs, and kept candles burning before a wall of their carved names. When he was young he had longed to be one of the sainted dead. “My college has sent many martyrs to England, ever since King Henry turned from the true Church. The Church was changed, despite people’s wishes, more than a hundred years ago; but we never changed. I am following where many saints have trod.” He smiled at her wondering gaze. “Truly, I choose this. And there are many safe houses and many friends to help me. I can cross the country and never leave Roman Catholic lands. I can pray in a hidden sacred chapel every night. Now, the parliament has gone too far against the king, the army even more so. Now is our chance. All over the country, towns and villages are declaring for the king and saying that they want him back on the throne. People want peace, and they want to be free to worship.”
“Won’t you go back to your college till then?” she asked doubtfully, thinking that the day would never come.
“No. There is one thing, a great thing, I have to do before I can go home.” He resisted the temptation to tell her more.
She guessed at once. “You’re never going to the Isle of Wight?” she whispered. “Not to the king?”
His silence told her that she was right.
“So you see why you should not be seen with me,” he said. “And I will never admit that I met you, that you hid me. Whatever happens, whatever befalls me, I will never betray you.”
Gravely she nodded. “If you want to go to the Priory, we should go through the mire while it’s low tide. We can see the steward as he has his breakfast, and if he won’t have you in the house, there’ll still be time to walk back through the mire before the tide gets too high.”
He got up from his seat on the nets, brushed down his jacket, and swung his cloak around his shoulders. “We go through the mire?”
She nodded again. “We shouldn’t meet anyone. Hardly anyone comes here. As we get to the Priory we’ll be in the hollow lane of bushes. If you meet anyone there you can just drop over the bank into the ditch and hide. If you have to run, follow the line of the ditch and it will take you inland. You can hide in the woods.”
“And what will you do?”
“I’ll say that I never saw you following me. That I was going out to the beach for tern eggs.” She turned and opened the door. “Wait here.”
Suddenly, like a cannonade on the still air, there was an explosion of noise, a cascade of water, and then a terrible rumbling sound.
“What’s that?” he demanded, starting up, hand to his precious pack.
“Just the mill,” she said calmly. “They’ve opened the millrace and now the millstones are grinding. It’s noisy on a calm day.”
He followed her out into the brightness of the morning. The mudbanks and the water pools gleamed like tarnished silver, stretching to the horizon, dazzling and strange. The grinding and the clanking noise went on, as if someone were rolling back the iron gates of hell on a stone pavement.
“So loud!” he said.
“You get used to it.” She led the way down the bank onto a little spit of shingle that went into the mud of the mire and then petered out at a shallow riverbed. He walked at her side, his pack on his back, the heels of his riding boots sinking into the cloying mud and coming free with a horrid little sucking sound. Suddenly the shallow ditch beside him rushed with a gout of water that made him jump.
She laughed. “That’s the millrace, the water from the tide mill.”
“Everything is so strange here,” he said, ashamed of flinching from the water, which was now pouring along beside them, in the landscape that was otherwise so still. “My home is in the North, high hills, moorland country, it’s very dry. . . . This is like a foreign land to me, like the Lowlands.”
“The miller opens the sluice gates on the millpond, so the water pours in to turn his wheel,” Alinor explained. “And then the water rushes out to sea.”