“Every low tide?” he asked, watching the torrent beside them.
“He doesn’t mill every tide,” she said. “There’s not enough demand for flour. But he stores grain and sends it to London when the price is right.”
He heard the resentment in her voice. “You mean that he profiteers? He buys the corn cheap and sends it away to sell at London prices?”
“He’s no worse than anyone else,” she said. “But it’s hard to see the grain ship going out with her sails spread when you don’t have the money for a loaf yourself, and you can’t earn enough to buy flour.”
“Doesn’t his lordship set the price of the loaf? He should do.”
She shrugged. A good landlord would set the price and make sure that the miller took no more than a scoop of wheat as his fee. “Sir William’s not always here. He’s in London. He probably doesn’t know.”
The track she was following was invisible to him as it turned away from the mill stream, to the higher ground of a little island of shingle and then another, set amid a waste of soft mud. The harbor water was gurgling and receding all around them, all the time. Sometimes they were on the firm footing of a shingle spit, with a deep pool on the seaward side, where he saw shoals of tiny fish left by the receding water; sometimes they walked over sand ridged by the departing sea and he remembered the danger of quicksands and stepped in her footprints. Often, he thought she could not possibly know the way around deep creeks that ran through the featureless marsh. But she turned one way and then another, tracing her way through, sometimes on the seabed, sometimes through the reed banks, sometimes on the wavering shore where half-submerged stanchions and mud-buried groynes showed that someone had once built a dike and claimed land, but then lost it again to the indifferent sea.
When she turned inland after more than an hour of walking, they went into an overhung lane where quickthorn trees pressed close on each side. He made sure that he was so far back that he could drop out of sight the moment that he saw someone, or heard her exclaim a greeting, and yet close enough that he could follow her as she took the twisting path that led them towards the high roofs of the Priory, just visible above the thick trees. Brambles trailed across the path, tugging at his sleeves. This path was rarely trodden: the farm workers preferred the road, and when the king was on his throne and Sir William had his favor, all the grand visitors drove their carriages from the mainland over the wadeway at low tide and entered by the ornamental gates to draw up to the double front door where a row of liveried servants bowed as the carriage doors opened. But the liveried servants had run away to fight for the New Model Army, and there had been no grand visitors since the war started and Sir William had joined the losing side.
The trees gave way to a scrubby-hedged meadow of badly mown hay, and the two of them went quickly across the open ground to the shelter of the high wall of knapped flints banded with red brick. Alinor paused, her hand on the ring handle of the wooden door.
“Is this your safe house? Were you expected? Shall I tell the steward your name?”
“I did hope to come here,” James admitted. “Sir William said he would meet me here. But I don’t know how much he told his steward. I don’t know if you are safe going in there and speaking of me. Perhaps I should go in alone.”
“Safer if you stay here. I can say that I met you by chance, and I’ve brought you to him. You wait here.” She gestured to a stack of hay, carelessly built of poor grass in the seashore meadow. “Get behind that, and keep a lookout. If I don’t come back within the hour then something’s gone wrong and you’d better run away. Go back along the shoreline; stay on the bank. You can hide until the tide’s low again this evening, and wade over the causeway at dusk.”
“God keep you safe,” he said nervously. “I don’t like to send you into danger. His lordship assured me I would be safe here. I just don’t know if he will have told his steward.”
“If he sends me to trick you, to bring you in for arrest, I’ll take my apron off as a signal,” she said. “When I’m coming, if I’m carrying my apron in my hand, run away.”
She was pale with fear, her lips tightly compressed. She turned without another word and went through the door in the wall into the kitchen garden. She walked past the tidy beds of herbs and vegetables to the kitchen door of the Priory, stepped out of her wooden pattens, and tapped on the door.
The cook opened the top half of the door, smiled to see that it was Alinor, and said: “I need nothing today, Goodwife. His lordship isn’t home till tomorrow and I don’t make eel pie for anyone else.”
“I came to see Mr. Tudeley,” Alinor said. “It’s about my boy.”
“There’s no work,” the cook said bluntly, lifting the lid on a giant stewpot and stirring the contents. “Not with the world as it is, and nobody knowing what will happen next, and no good coming to anyone, with the king missing, and parliament up in arms, and our own lord up and down to London every day of the week, trying to talk some sense into them, and nobody listening to anyone but the devil himself.”
“I know,” Alinor said, following her into the hot kitchen. “But still, I have to speak with him.” She felt a pang of hunger bite in her belly at the waft of beef broth. She pursed her lips against the rush of water in her mouth. The cook raised her head from her work, mopped her sweating face with her apron, and shouted to someone inside the house to see if Mr. Tudeley would see Goodwife Reekie. Alinor waited by the door, and heard the servants ask if she was to be admitted, and then a footman put his head in the kitchen and said: “You’re to come in, Goodwife.”
Alinor followed the lad along the corridor past the storerooms to the paneled door of the steward’s room. The footman swung it open and Alinor went in. Mr. Tudeley was sitting at the rent table, papers spread before him. “Goodwife Reekie,” he said, barely glancing up. “You wanted to see me?”
Alinor bobbed a curtsey. “Good day, sir,” she said. “I did. I do.”
The boy went out, closing the door behind him, and the steward waited, expecting that she would ask to be excused her rent for a quarter. Everyone knew that the Reekie woman and her children were hand-to-mouth; nobody had much sympathy for the deserted wife of a drunkard.
“I was at church last night and I met a man who told me his name was James,” she said in a frightened rush. “Father James. I’ve brought him here. He’s waiting by the haystack in Seaward Meadow.”
“You brought him for me to arrest, a recusant priest?” Mr. Tudeley asked her coldly, looking over his steepled fingers.
Alinor swallowed, her mouth dry, her face frozen. “As you wish, sir. I don’t know the rights and wrongs of these things. He said he wanted to be brought here, and so I brought him, with no one the wiser. If he’s a friend of his lordship then I have to obey him; if he’s an enemy then I’m reporting him to you.”
Mr. Tudeley smiled at her white-faced anxiety. “You’re not acting on principle then? Not joined your brother’s party, Goody Reekie? Become one of these prophesying preaching women? D’you want to see him burned for heresy? D’you want to see him hanged and drawn for treason?”