Tidelands

by Philippa Gregory

  “It might be worse. They may be thinking of a trial,” James warned.

  His father turned on him. “A trial? What d’you mean?”

  “When I was in Sussex I met a man, a veteran from Cromwell’s army, who said that the radicals among them, levelers and men of that sort, believed that the king should answer to them for making war.”

  “It can’t be done!” his father said, frowning. “How would men like that ever bring a charge against a king?”

  “Who was this man?” his mother demanded acutely. “One of her friends?”

  James flushed with shame.

  “Will you return to England and report for us?” Dr. Sean asked bluntly. He gestured to the paper in his hand. “The young man who sent this is already on his way back here. He was in hiding with one of the members of parliament who has been barred from his seat. He’s left London already, this came from”—he broke off—“another port. He’ll come back to us as soon as he can get a passage.”

  James felt a deep sense of dread. He looked from his mother and father to his tutor. “You know I have lost my faith,” he said. “I can’t go.”

  “This is a matter of the king, not of God,” his father said bluntly. “You can do your duty to the king. These are—Lord knows—earthly troubles. We have to know what they plan. If you’re right—if there’s any possibility of a trial—then we have to get him away.”

  “I couldn’t make him come last time,” James reminded them. “I failed. He refused me.”

  “He’ll come now,” Dr. Sean predicted. “He knows he must not fall into the power of the army. Besides, all you have to do is to take our young man’s place: deliver some money, a letter, and report back.”

  “Is it safe for him to go back to England?” Lady Avery turned to her son. “What if that woman betrays you?”

  “She doesn’t come to London. She never leaves Sussex.”

  “You’re only to go to London, deliver the money and the orders, find out what is happening, and report to The Hague,” Dr. Sean said.

  “Don’t go to her,” his mother added. “Not when you’re on the king’s business, not when you’re in danger. I don’t trust her.”

  “I’ll get you the letters, the address of the safe house in London, and the gold.” Dr. Sean hurried to his private room. “I’ll have it all ready within the hour.”

  “You can take my horse,” James’s father said. He stepped towards his son and hugged him tightly. “Leave him at the inn at Dunkirk. Here, take my cloak as well. It’s a cold day, and it will be worse at sea. Go, my son, I am proud of you. Do your duty to the king and then we’ll see what is ahead of us. You’re a young man, and these are times that change with every tide. Don’t promise anything to anyone. We don’t know where we will be next year! Come back safely.”

  James felt his father’s heavy cloak swung around his shoulders like an extra burden to carry, saw his mother’s anguished face.

  “Come back,” was all she said. “Don’t go to her.”

  TIDELANDS, DECEMBER 1648

  Alinor and Alys walked in silence to the ferry-house, their shawled heads bowed against the icy wind that blew down the mire. They looked like two hooded beasts, crawling across a wet desert. They were each bent over a large basket filled with little bottles of oils, and twists of waxed paper filled with dried herbs. At the ferry-house Alinor opened the side door, went into the storeroom, and loaded another basket with jars of bottled plums, dried apples, dried black currants, red currants, and blackberries.

  Ned appeared in the doorway, Red at his heels. “I’ll come with you,” he said abruptly. “I’ll carry this stuff for you. I’m on my way to London.”

  “What?” Alinor asked. Her first thought was that he must somehow know that she was with child, and he was leaving them forever. “What? Ned? What d’you mean? You can’t leave?”

  “Colonel Pride has taken the House of Commons,” he said, stammering with excitement. “God bless him, he’s one of the commander’s best men, so this must be on his orders. It must be. It’s war on parliament, as it was war on the king.”

  “Whose orders?”

  “Cromwell’s himself! Noll Cromwell himself!”

  “What’s he done now?” Alys appeared beside her mother, pushing back the scarf from her cold face.

  “Taken the houses of parliament, as if they were a royal palace—which they were! They were! The members of parliament will never again throw away an army victory. The army has barred the door to the king’s placemen, thrown out the traitor members. They’re not going to allow a deal with the king over our heads! They’re not going to put him back on the throne with some kind of cobbled oath that he’ll break as soon as he can. Us army men saw through his lies from the very beginning, we who were there, we who were there at Marston Moor, we who were there at Naseby.”

  Alinor put down her basket and took her brother’s cold hands in her own, trying to hold him still. “Hush, Ned. I don’t understand you. You can’t go to London. Who’ll keep the ferry?”

  “You must,” he said bluntly. “Look, I beg you. I’m sorry, but I have to go. I can’t miss this. Colonel Pride has taken the houses of parliament, praise God. The army will put in its own men, and they’ll vote down all these empty agreements with the king! I’ve got to be there. If they need an old soldier, I’ve got to stand with them. I have to see this. I can’t be down here, on the edge of the mire, getting news three weeks late, and wondering all the time what’s happening. I can’t be stuck in Foulmire like a frozen sheep in mud for the last days of my war. Alinor! This is the last battle. These were the greatest days of my life. These are the last days of the kingdom. I’ve got to be there. I was there at the beginning, I must see the end.”

  Alinor closed her eyes to block out his flushed face. “I can’t keep the ferry,” she said. “I can’t. You know I can’t.”

  “Nobody will want the ferry in the days before Christmas,” he lied. “After the Chichester Christmas market nobody’ll go off Sealsea Island. God knows, nobody’ll come here. They’ll all stay home for the season.”

  “They will! They will!” Alinor was more and more distressed. “Nobody wants to go through the wadeway in winter. They’ll all want to go on the ferry, even at low tide, and at high tide they’ll load horses. I can’t do it, Brother. Not on cold water. Not on the winter tides. Don’t make me! I can’t—I swear that I can’t.”

  “But I can,” Alys said suddenly from behind her. “I’ll keep the ferry for you, Uncle Ned.”

  “You?”

  “Yes, but you have to pay me. You know I don’t have all my dowry yet. I’ll keep the ferry for you for five shillings. I mean five shillings on top of the money you’ve promised me as a gift. Five shillings and I keep all the ferry fees.”

  “You can’t,” Alinor turned to her daughter. “You can’t be on the water. I couldn’t bear it. You’re not strong enough, when the tide’s high . . .”

  “Yes, she can,” Ned said. “What harm’ll come to her? And Rob can come back from the Priory and help.”

  Alinor closed her eyes at the thought of her children on the dark waters of the winter mire. “Please,” she said quietly. “Please don’t do this. You know I can’t spare them.”

  “Five shillings for my wedding,” Alys bargained. “And I keep all the fees.”

  Ned held out his hand. “Done.” To his sister he said: “I’m sorry; I have to go. I know that the army’ll bring the king to London. I pray that they’ll charge him with treason against us, the people. He’s guilty as sin, and I want to see him answer for his crimes. He’s destroyed the peace of England and been the death of thousands of good men—it’s all been for nothing unless we gain our freedom from him. And I want to see him punished as I’d want to see a witch drowned. This is the end of tyrants in England, this is the start of our new country. I must be there to see him humbled. Sister, I have to be there.”

  Alys, her face bright and uncaring, handed over the basket of oils to her
uncle. “You can carry those for Ma,” she said, “as you go together to Chichester. And I’ll stay here. I’ll start today.”

  He grinned like a lad. “Pull us over then,” he said.

  “A halfpenny for the two of you,” she said, putting out her hand and slipping the coin that he gave her into the pocket of her gown. Ned took Alinor’s arm and helped her onto the ferry; she clamped her scarred hands on the wooden rail.

  “Don’t fear,” he said to her. “No harm will come to her on the water. How should it? There’s nothing to fear except your dreams of drowning. And I’ll come back soon.”

  “When?” she demanded.

  “When it’s over,” he said, his face bright. “When the king has begged pardon of the people of England.”

  Alinor and Ned parted at the Market Cross in the center of Chichester where the stone cross marked the roads that ran north and south, east and west. Ned was going to walk north to London, confident that someone would offer him a lift on the way, the wagons rolling easily on the frozen roads.

  “There’ll be many old soldiers going to London for news,” he said confidently. “Many of us have waited for this for years.”

  “But you’ll come back when it’s all over?” Alinor asked, putting her hand on his sleeve. “You won’t enlist again? Not even if the Irish rise against us, or the Scots invade again? You won’t go with Cromwell’s army?”

  “That’s finished,” he said certainly. “There’ll be no more wars, there’ll be no more uprisings. The king will have to swear on his life to live in peace, and all the poor men who marched on one side or the other will be able to go home, and the brave women who kept the houses against their enemies will be able to live in peace at last.”

  “I ask you, because I have troubles that I haven’t told you,” Alinor said choosing her words with care. “I’m going to need you at home, Brother. I’m going to need your help.”

  At once, he was alert. “Has Zachary come back? Have you heard from him?”

  “No, God be praised, no,” she said quickly. “But I have to get Alys married and Rob into his work and I have a difficulty, a difficulty of my own. I’ll need your help.”

  He put his broad rough hand over hers. “Alys is earning her dowry even now,” he reassured her. “No need to fear for her. And Rob has his place promised to him and the Peacheys are paying his entrance fee. I’ll come back, but you’ve nothing to fear. Are you ill? Is that it?”

  She made herself smile at him. “I’ll tell you when you come back,” she said. “It’ll keep.”

  Only his excitement would have made him overlook her pallor. “You’d better stay at Ferry-house while Alys is keeping the ferry.”

  “Yes, we will.”

  “Look after the dog. He’s getting old now. He feels the cold.”

  “I’ll let him sleep by the fire.”

  “And when I come home, you can stay on. There’s no point going back to your cottage alone when Alys is wed and Rob away. We’ll tell everyone that Zachary is never coming home, and you can keep house for me. You can come back to your old home.”

  Like a vision, Alinor imagined her childhood home as her own home once again, and the man she loved riding down the road to the ferry, just as he had done before. She thought that he would see her, standing at the garden gate of the ferry-house, with the deep water before her, and know that she was a free woman, waiting for him. She thought that when he crossed on the ferry and took her hands she would tell him that she was carrying his child.

  Ned was dazzled by her smile, as bright as the winter sun.

  “Yes,” she said. “Very well.”

  LONDON, DECEMBER 1648

  James took ship from France on a cold December morning with a westerly wind filling the sails of the Thames barge that took him into the pool of London. He disembarked with papers that showed him to be a wine merchant, coming to trade with the Vintners’ Company of London. He was waved ashore by an exciseman whose main concern was to check the hold of the ship, and had no time for anyone who did not have gossip to tell from the extraordinary royal courts in exile in France and the Low Countries.

  “No, I heard nothing,” James spoke with a slight French accent. “What matter, eh? Can you direct me to the Vintners’ Hall?”

  “Behind the watergate, and Three Cranes Wharf.” The man waved his hand.

  “And how may I know Three Cranes Wharf?”

  “Because there are three cranes on it,” the man said with exaggerated patience.

  James, satisfied the exciseman would remember the French wine merchant, hefted his bag over his shoulder and climbed the damp steps set into the quay wall of Queenhithe. The quayside was crowded with vendors of little goods, porters, hawkers, and pedlars. James disappeared among the people trying to sell him things that he did not want, and took Trinity Lane up the hill, and then a roundabout route to his destination: a small counting house off Bread Street. When he reached the door with the curiously wrought door knocker he tapped twice and let himself inside.

  In the gloom he could see a middle-aged woman rise up from the table where she was weighing small coins in the dim light from the barred window. “Good day, sir. Can I help you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I am Simon de Porte.”

  “You are welcome,” she said. “Are you sure that no one followed you from the docks?”

  “I am sure,” he said. “I turned several corners and I stopped and doubled back twice. There was no one.”

  She hesitated as if she was afraid to trust him. “Have you done this before?” she asked, and then she saw how weary he looked. His handsome young face was grooved with lines of fatigue. Clearly, he had done this before; clearly, he had done it too many times.

  “Yes,” he said shortly.

  “You can put your bag in the cellar,” she said, gesturing to a hatch in the floor under her chair. Together, they pushed her table to one side and she gave him a candle to light his way down the wooden ladder. At the foot was a small bed, a table, and another candle.

  “If there’s a raid, bolt the hatch from the inside. There is a secret way into the cellar next door, behind that rack of wine,” she said. “And from there, in the opposite wall, there is a low delivery door out to the next lane. If someone comes, and you need to escape, then go that way quickly and quietly and you might get away.”

  “Thank you,” he said looking up into her worn face framed with gray hair pinned back under her cap. “Is Master Clare at home?”

  “I’ll fetch him,” she said. “He’s in his workshop.”

  James climbed back up the stairs, she dropped the hatch, and together they pulled back the table. James saw that she was dressed very plainly in a gray gown with a rough apron, not at all like the wealthy cavalier supporters who had hidden him in the past.

  “A cup of ale?” she offered him.

  “I’d be glad of one.”

  She poured the ale from a jug on the sideboard and then put her shawl around her head. “I’ll fetch the master,” she said. “You wait here.”

  James sat at the table, feeling the odd sensation of the floor moving under his feet, as if he were still riding the horse to the coast, still rising and falling on the waves of the sea. It was only travel sickness, but he thought that it would last forever: never again would the ground be firm beneath his feet. Then the door opened and a slight man came in, dressed in the neat modest clothes of a London tradesman. He shook James’s hand with a steady grip.

  “You won’t be staying long.” It was a statement rather than a question.

  “I won’t,” James promised him. “I’m grateful to you for the refuge.”

  The man nodded.

  “You’re not of the old faith?” James asked tentatively.

  “No,” the man said. “I’m a Presbyterian, though I think, as Cromwell does, that a man should be free to worship in his own way. But unlike the radicals, I think the country is best ruled by a king and lords. I can’t see that a man can be a
plowman by day and a lawmaker by night. We each have our trade, we should stick to it.”

  “Was the king a good brother in the guild of monarchy?” James asked him, smiling slightly.

  “Not the best,” the man said frankly. “But if my goldsmith does faulty work I make a complaint and ask him to do it again. I don’t put my baker in his place.”

  “Are there many who think like you in London?”

  “A few,” the man said. “Not enough for your purposes.”

  “My purpose is to get information for the queen and prince and a letter to their friends,” James said cautiously. “That’s all.”

  “That’s only half the job. Your purpose should be to get him back to his throne and you back to your own home, wherever that is. All of us in the place we were born to. All of us doing the trade we were brought up to.”

  James nodded. “In the end, of course.” Briefly he thought of his home and his mother’s herb garden, and of his dream of Alinor standing at the gate. “I have hopes,” he admitted. “But for now, I have to know what is happening.”

  “I’ll take you to Westminster,” his host said. “You can see for yourself. A wonder I never thought I’d see. The army holding the gate of the houses of parliament and the king commanded to answer to them.”

  TIDELANDS, DECEMBER 1648

  In the cold dark days of December Alys kept the ferry, pulling it over to the north side as soon as she heard the clang of the iron bar against the horseshoe, and answering every knock on the door or holler from the road. She was polite and cheerful with every traveler, and more than one wagoner paid her a penny tip as well as his threepenny fee for her pretty smile. The two women moved into the ferry-house at once. It was the only way that Alys could mind the ferry in the hours of darkness, and they were both glad to be in the bigger warmer house when the east wind brought frost across the harbor and the rain turned to sleet.