Raider's Tide

by Maggie Prince

  Chapter 18

  The wind is rising, taking the edge off the heat, and long shadows surround the cottage by the time Robert returns. I am sitting on a rock with my feet in the beck, eating part of a dry loaf from the day before. I watch his approach down the slope at the far side of the stream. Two rabbits hang from his hand. He is barefoot. He steps down the steep bank and wades through the water, curling his toes on the slippery stones. He reaches me and stops. “I’ll just put these in the meat safe,” he says, and touches my hair with his free hand.

  I think of all the little snares out in the woods, set to catch the unwary, the rabbits and birds who do not see the invisible noose, the hidden hinge, until the trap is sprung, and it is too late. How easy it is to be caught.

  Robert has constructed a tightly woven willow cage and hung it in the shade at the back of the cottage, for storing surplus food. He could live here, I think. He could live here for ever, if it were not for the increasing risk of discovery by others besides Germaine. I wonder how I am going to face her, plead with her to keep my secret. I dread to think what she has seen and heard while she has been spying on us.

  I get up and follow Robert round the back of the cottage. He is batting away flies from the outside of the meat safe, before putting the rabbits in. He looks over his shoulder at me. I feel as if he knows what I am going to say.

  “Robert, it’s time to go. There were people here earlier, the priest and a servant from the tower. It isn’t safe any more. The tides will be right for crossing by the end of the month.”

  He is silent, putting the rabbits away, then he says, “Aye, I daresay you’re right.”

  “I’ll smuggle you down to the shore under cover of darkness, but it’s too dangerous to cross the sands at night. You can hide in one of the caves until first light, then Cedric can take you over.”

  “Beatrice…”

  I put my hand over his lips. “Don’t.”

  He holds my hand there, in his, then removes it and keeps hold of it. “I could live here, you know. We manage, don’t we.”

  I look at him. Increasingly we echo one another’s thoughts. I press his hand to my own mouth, then let go of it. “They’d catch you. You can’t pretend to be dumb for ever.”

  We walk back to the beck, and take turns drinking from a flagon of elderflower cordial which I have brought. He says, “I suppose I’ve merely become dependent on you, Beatrice. That’s all it is. Ridiculous to think I cannae cope without you. Of course I bluidy can.” He kneels at the beck and lifts handfuls of water to wet his face and hair. I wish I could warn him about the march on Scotland, explain that this is why he must be well on his way as soon as possible. Talk is of little else at the tower. Aunt Juniper is prostrate with panic at the thought of Hugh and Gerald going to fight. She attempted briefly to organise a campaign against the edict of the border lords, until she was warned by Magistrate Chantry that defiance of this sort would be regarded as a breach of the peace, particularly since the queen herself is said to have given unspoken blessing to the raid.

  Father is to lead the march northwards, despite the general feeling that he might not remain vertical beyond the end of the valley. Perhaps his breath will be enough to fell Scottish castle walls. My mind is churning as Robert and I watch the sun go down between the trees in slivers of blood-red. The low light shines through the moss on the north sides of the tree trunks, and through the small hairs on his arms. There is a feeling of finality between us, and of the recklessness which finality brings. I ask, “Robert, are you angry with me?”

  “Aye.” He turns to look at me, then leans over and kisses me slowly on the mouth. My bones melt at the prospect of just going with it, letting it happen. He seems to sense my wavering, moves his lips to my throat and presses them to the place where my bodice is still unlaced. We have never done this before, never got this far. I know the countryside is full of people with their skirts up and their breeches down, but for Robert and me, until now, the mere existence of our relationship has been transgression enough. He raises his head and looks at me. I hold his face away. It’s no good. He has to go, and this would make it worse. I say, “We have to stop.”

  “No we don’t.” He kisses me again so that I fall back in the bracken and knock my head on a rock. He says, “Sorry, sorry, Beatrice. Bea. Look, please come with me. Truly. You must come with me. We’re not savages. Scotland is so lovely. You don’t want to marry Hugh, do you. You said so. Your family is a disaster. What’s to keep you here?”

  I roll away from him. The crushed bracken releases a wave of raw, green perfume like an exhalation of sadness. I tell him, “You’re the enemy, Robert. What if your people or mine ever invaded each other again?”

  He pulls me back, and leans over me, propped on his hands. Water from his hair drips on to my face. He says, “I think I fell in love with you that first day, when I saw you standing guard on the Pike. You heard us, didn’t you, even though we were a fair way off down the slope, hiding amongst the trees and barely making a sound. You made us move sharpish that day, Beatrice, I can tell you, coming striding round the edge of the woods like that, with your knife and your fierce look.”

  “So you were there. Oh dear God, Robert. What would you have done if I’d found you? Killed me?”

  There is a moment of horror between us, a silence which cannot be filled. Then I wrap my arms round his head and pull him close.

  I stay until the sun has gone, lying in Robert’s arms, stroking his hair, touching the jagged red scar that disfigures his healed arm. We kiss and hold each other, not speaking much, until the bats come from their high crevices and scoop the air round our heads with their wings. Then I walk home in darkness, just another shadow amongst the foxes and badgers.

  Early in the morning I walk down to the shore to look for the Cockleshell Man. Rabbits and sheep are feeding below the cliffs. They scatter as I walk down the stony path and head out into the bay, jumping some of the low-tide pools. I can see Cedric far out beyond the grassline, planting clumps of eelgrass in the sand’s wrinkled surface, to mark the safe way across the bay. Breaks in the line mean that the quicksand has shifted, and that the eelgrass has gone where you will go if you step there.

  The calling of the sheep becomes fainter as I walk further out, following Cedric’s earlier footsteps in the sand. I look back and see the rabbits I disturbed foraging again under the cliffs. Could I leave all this? I look at the possibility seriously for the first time.

  Cedric has been scraping cockles out of the sand. Watery sunlight reflects off the piles of shellfish, and off his shiny leather back. He straightens up from his planting, stretching with his hands in the small of his back. “Beatrice, have you come to be my pupil?”

  I grimace. “Sorry, Cedric. I don’t think I’m ready for maggots yet.”

  He laughs. “You will be. I have high hopes of you. How is your Scot?”

  “Much better, thank you. Ready to go.”

  “Aye well, the tides will be right in three days.” He gazes across the bay. “Pity he can’t go today, being Sunday, when the holy are likely to have their minds on higher things.”

  “I thought I’d bring him down to the shore during the night and hide him in one of the caves until there’s enough light to cross by. Can we find him a horse?”

  “I’ll get him one at Cartmel. He’ll be better crossing the sands on foot. A missing horse would raise the alarm.” He is threading and knotting his nets now. Each hempen net has loose ropes at all four corners, which he will tie in twos to black wooden stakes driven deep into the sand. When the tide comes in, fish are washed into the nets. When it flows out again, they are trapped. They make the same mistake that I have made.

  Cedric stops knotting and looks at me. “It’s hard for you, isn’t it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Best get back. Tide’s coming.”

  “Yes.”

  A whisper of wind dulls the sand and there is the taste of salt on my tongue. We talk some more, planni
ng the fine details of Robert’s escape, then I walk back, leaving the Cockleshell Man to tie the last of his nets and beat the tide. He will not be caught. He knows the bay and its timing too well. At the top of the cliff path I look back, and see a distant glint of water at the mouth of the bay, and a small figure making his way inland with sacks of cockles over his back. Ahead of me in the woods the rowan and blackthorn are changing colour early this year, and the bracken is edged blood-brown.

  Now I have to deal with Germaine. She could ruin everything. She and Kate are spending much of their time making preparations for a feast we are to hold for the men marching on Scotland, and just a casual word of gossip between them could be Robert’s death sentence. Later that Sunday morning she and I emerge from church together. We walk along the sun-cracked path to the trough on Wraithwaite Green where our horses are tethered. I glance at her and say, “He’s going. Please don’t say anything. He’s going very soon.”

  “Is he indeed.”

  “Please tell me… do you intend giving us away, Germaine?”

  She slots her tiny foot into the stirrup and mounts her pony, hooking her right knee over the leather support and arranging her skirts in a leisurely way. “Beatrice, I don’t know what you propose to do. I don’t want to know. I shall not be sorry to see you go north, if you do go. Others have gone, they say. You are too arrogant for my taste. But no, I shall not speak to anyone. I’ll say this to you though, if you’ve done dallying with the Scotsman, you’d be better off taking the priest.” She jerks her chin in the direction of the church’s sunlit porch where John is having what looks like a hostile discussion with my father. “He’s arrogant and self-righteous too. You’d suit each other. What is there – ten years between you? It’s nothing.” She clicks her tongue and taps her pony across the neck with a loop of rein, and adds, “I wish you well, Beatrice. Don’t ask me to help you, but I’ll not harm you.”

  I watch her go, then sit down abruptly on the edge of the stone trough. Verity and James, who left church early to avoid my father, have now re-emerged from the parsonage and are coming over to join me. I watch them walking and laughing, easy with each other.

  I wave and they wave back. At the church John is now talking to Master Spearing. He looks in my direction and smiles. I remember the faces of the crowd at the burning. I wonder, am I arrogant? Am I perhaps so dislikeable, so disliked here, that I might be better off elsewhere, having a fresh start? I nod and smile at some of my neighbours from the valley who are beginning the long walk home, and I try not to appear gracious or patronising, but have no means of knowing whether I succeed. Perhaps I do need to talk to Germaine more, though her remarks about John are clearly ridiculous. Somehow she must have realised that I used to daydream about him when I was younger, before I knew that someone like Robert could undermine all commonsense and reason.

  The sun goes behind a cloud and a cold wind blows, a first hint of autumn. I feel raw and unpredictable, like the weather. I want to be honest in my telling of events, to portray us all with truth and fairness, yet today I’m not sure that I see even myself clearly enough to be able to comment on anyone else. I pull Saint Hilda towards me and hook my arm under her big warm face, and rest my cheek against it.

  Chapter 19

  The valley is full of strangers these days. Men are gathering from surrounding areas for the march on Scotland. A long table and benches stand outside the gatehouse, and Kate hands out bread, cheese and ale there, as new people arrive. In less than a week they will leave for Newcastle, and a fortnight from now men from all over the northern counties will march out of Newcastle to repay old debts.

  My father is trying to stay off the drink. He looks grey and sick. Everywhere people are unusually irritable, with a tendency to weep unexpectedly. Anti-Scottish feeling is running high. Robert must go quickly now.

  On the day of the leaving feast I go to the cottage just before dawn, to remind Robert that I will take him down to the shore some time around midnight, when everyone is too drunk to notice, though I doubt he needs reminding, since nothing else is on our minds at the moment. He is not there. I feel angry with him, and sad. How much time does he think we still have, that he can go jaunting off into the forest without me? I wait a while, then leave the food I brought and return to the tower. Today, with hectic preparations for the feast, my absence would certainly be noticed.

  Kate and a group of valley women have been working for two days preparing food. The long table in the living hall has been moved over and the one from outside brought up the east stairs to join it. Another, smaller table has been borrowed from the women’s common room to place across the top, as high table for the family. People start arriving outside from midday onwards, and in the late afternoon we open the door and let them in.

  Despite the heat, fires have been lit at both ends of the living hall. Homesteaders, farmers and villagers settle themselves elbow to elbow, back to back, knee to knee, along the benches at the two long tables, those nearest the fires sweating into their ale as soon as they sit down. Verity and James arrive with John Becker. Aunt and Uncle Juniper arrive with Hugh and Gerald. At six o’clock I accompany the rest of the family up the east stairs and into the living hall. We have dressed in our best, to honour the fighters. I am wearing a padded russet kirtle over my red silk gown, now miraculously restored by Germaine, who gave it an impressed stare and muttered something about some people really knowing how to enjoy themselves.

  We make our way to the carved oak chairs at the high table, and encounter the full blast of heat thrown out by the fires and the crowd. My father is on my right and John Becker on my left. Hugh is at the far side of my parents, and appears not to be speaking to me. The atmosphere between John and my father is also strained. It’s going to be a long evening. I find I don’t care. I don’t care about any of this, the festivities or the undercurrents. I shall see Robert at midnight, and it will be for the last time.

  After prayers have been said for everyone’s safe return, my father shouts, “Eat, eat!” Kate and Tilly Turner serve at the top table, but everyone else helps themselves from the wooden platters piled high with mutton, beef, fish, shellfish, buttered turnips, beans in cinnamon honey and great manchets of bread. The heat is almost intolerable. I loosen my collar. Father keeps mopping his brow with his napkin. A few people have already fainted. It seems an oddly fitting part of this farewell feast that bodies should be carried out, tested beyond endurance by the fires and by their fears for those who will, with this same clumsy, stumbling awkwardness, be carried home.

  “Best enjoy the heat whilst ye can,” says Kate darkly as she bends over Father’s shoulder to serve him peach sauce. “It may be colder where you’re going.”

  Next to me, John keeps passing me appetising items of food, and I do the same for him. We seem to be ending up feeding each other, our fingers dripping with grease. I start to relax, and laugh a little. In view of Germaine’s daft ideas about him, I feel strange sitting so close, but he clearly thinks nothing of it. I lean back and look round the hall. All along the benches strong young men with bright, healthy faces are exchanging views on their weaponry, in some cases admiring one another’s swords and axes which regrettably have been brought to table. Couples are gazing into each other’s eyes, facing the prospect of months apart.

  I watch Germaine going round lighting the torches in the wall sconces, as the light outside fades. Her face is puffy. She has been crying. Kate lights candles along the tables, and the heat increases even further. A lot of ale, mead and wine is being drunk. The noise of talk and laughter is very loud, and people are losing their inhibitions. Germaine finishes lighting the torches, then comes and sits next to Gerald at the high table. My father rises unsteadily to his feet, stares at her for a moment, then pulls her up to join him in his own chair. Mother, who has been sitting on Father’s right, rises to her feet, walks down the hall smiling graciously at those she passes, and squeezes on to the bench next to the Cockleshell Man.

  I l
ean forward and look past Mother’s empty place to the end of the table, where Verity, seated between Hugh and James, is working her way systematically through a pile of shellfish. She spits a fragment of shell from her round pink lips and makes a throat-cutting gesture in Cedric’s direction. I grin. Suddenly, the past weeks of separation vanish. I feel close to her again, normal. Next to her James murmurs something in her ear, and she laughs. There is a new air of confidence about him these days. I wonder if she will have such a pliant husband as she thinks, if she does eventually marry him. I turn to John. Half way down one of the tables people have started singing. I have to shout in his ear to make him hear. “Verity seems good for James. Is he good for her, do you think?”

  John hesitates a moment, holding a piece of bread dipped in peach sauce half way to his lips. He puts it down, and in a lull in the din, says, “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. Times are changing. Verity’s attitude is… I don’t know… part of something exciting that’s going on in the country. We don’t see it so much here, but in the cities there’s new music, new writing, new attitudes. Headstrong people like Verity are leading it. I think she’ll have her way whether or not it’s good for her, and she’ll handle the consequences and make it work. She has an overriding desire to own land, and farm it unencumbered by other people’s expectations. James won’t get in her way, so in that sense he’s good for her.” He has to raise his voice again as singing breaks out once more. “If it causes a permanent rift with your father, well, that could be bad. They’re fond of each other, despite everything.”

  “If Verity were to marry James, it would change everything that’s been planned for the future of Mere Point and here.”