Dawnlands, page 18
“I’ll get out,” Matthew said. He opened the carriage door and, without waiting for the steps, jumped the few feet down to the ground. The footmen swung down from the back of the carriage as soon as they saw him, and then paused, uncertain what to do in what was, to them, the middle of nowhere.
It was the middle of nowhere to Matthew too. The sweating coach horses had halted before a track that sloped gradually down to disappear into a riverbed of oozing mud and puddles of briny water. Thick cobblestones marked the route, green with weed and half-covered with flotsam of stalks and straw. On both his right and his left, the water ran away into a sea of shoals, reed beds, lagoons, and waterways, busy with little ducks and wading birds. A heron stood motionless, looking at its own reflection in a deep pool. A constant babble of sound from the birds was overlaid with the loud crying of wheeling seagulls.
On the far side of the causeway was an old house with a lopsided roof and an ancient plum tree bowed over the wall. The bee skep and the vegetable patch showed that someone was still living in the house, and a hanging bell showed that the ferry, nothing more than a raft with an overhead rope on a pulley, could be summoned when the tide was too high to splash across the wadeway. As Matthew stood, smelling the rich smell of warm mud, rotting seaweed, and brine, feeling the heat of the setting sun on his cheek, the door to the ferry-house opened and a man came out, pulling a hat off his head.
“Your honor!” he said on sight of Matthew. “Welcome to—er—your lands, sir. You’re very welcome.” He spoke with the strong accent of Sussex, a low, slow, country drawl that Matthew—accustomed to the rapid patter of London speech—could hardly make out.
“Thank you,” said Matthew, painfully alive to the absurdity of being one side of a river of mud and his tenant bowing on the other.
“You’re safe to cross, your honor. Just tell your driver to stay on the cobbles and he’ll be over in no time. The horses’ll come to no harm. They’ll get used to it. I can lead them if he wants. We haven’t had a coach cross for months, not for all this year. Not since the royal inspection when the king was crowned and they came all the way from London to see that we were here and not floated away—”
He broke off with a laugh at the folly of Londoners, and then turned it into a cough when the London servants and the London-bred Matthew looked at him, uncomprehendingly. “The wagons go over every Saturday to Chichester market and back again, sir, never fear. I’ll come across to lead the horses if you like. We were glad to hear you were coming, sir.”
Matthew nodded. He glanced up at the driver. “Did you hear that?”
“Just about,” said the coach driver, disdainfully.
“Do you want him to lead them over?”
“No, sir. I reckon I can drive my horses up and down a ditch, sir.”
“Drive on then,” Matthew said and clambered back into the coach. The footmen closed the door and swung back into their places.
Alinor and Alys were silent as the coach eased forward, the iron-rimmed wheels sliding on the mud, the horses leaning back against the traces to keep the carriage steady on the downward slope, and then straining forward, their hooves slipping and grinding on the cobblestones, to mount the other side.
Matthew leaned forward and dropped the window as the ferryman came closer, his hat in his hand.
“All’s well then, sir,” he said. He stared into the carriage and bowed when he saw the two women, who looked blankly back at him. There was no recognition on either side.
“And you are?” Matthew asked.
The man bowed. “Tom Drydale, your honor. Tenant at Ferry-house. Your tenant, sir. And I work the ferry for you, sir.”
Matthew found he had nothing to say to the first tenant he had met. He reached into his pocket for a coin and stopped when he saw his foster mother’s tiny shake of her head. “Thank you, Drydale,” he said. He pulled the cord to tell the driver to go onwards, and the coach lurched forward, and the bowing tenant stepped back from the window.
“The lord doesn’t pay a fee to cross,” Alys told him. “It’s your ferry. It’s your wadeway. He pays you. Start as you mean to go on.”
“Leave the glass down,” Alinor said dreamily. “I like the smell.”
“Mud?” Matthew asked.
“Why d’you think it’s called Foulmire?” Alys asked.
Matthew shook his head. “I thought it meant bird marsh. Fowl Mere?”
“It means stinking,” she told him. “Foul Mire: Foul Mud.” She turned to her mother: “You ever heard of the Drydales?”
Alinor dragged her eyes from the watery waste on the left of the carriage. “Never,” she said to her daughter. “Perhaps it’s all new people under new names. And here we are, under a new name too. Here we are, anew.”
The carriage lurched past the ferry-house.
“That was our house,” Alinor told Matthew. “That was your uncle Ned’s ferry, and our father’s ferry before him. Our family were ferrymen here when the monks built the Priory. And we were ferrymen here when the monks were driven out.” She pointed to a ruined shanty on the bank of the harbor a little beyond the ferry-house. “And that was my—”
“That was our fishing hut,” Alys interrupted her mother. “We had a fishing boat, and we used to keep the nets and the lobster pots there. My father was a fisherman.”
Alinor regarded her daughter silently but did not contradict her, as the carriage jolted on, rocking in the ruts of the mud track. Both women were quiet, watching for the familiar landmarks that they had not seen for decades.
To the right of the carriage was a low flat plain intersected with draining ditches where the standing water shone in the setting sun, which was sinking low on the rim of the flat land. To their left was a formless sea of unending mud, intersected with rivers and pools of water and reed beds, and now and then a shingle beach, thrown up by underwater currents. The sea, too far away even to be heard, seemed as if it would never return and the mud and shingle and scrub and the great broad rivers of still water would stretch to the horizon forever.
Suddenly, there was a roar like that of an enormous waterfall and a grinding noise of machinery and the coach lurched as the horses shied in fright and the coachman shouted at them and hauled on the reins.
“God’s sake, what’s that?” cried Matthew, hanging on to the strap as the carriage bounded forward.
Alinor and Alys had tightened their grip on each other, but leaned back against the jolt of the carriage as the coachman hauled on the horses and the pace steadied.
Matthew turned to his mother: “What in God’s name was that?” He looked back the way they had come, and saw a gout of water spring from the bank behind them to gush, frothing and brown, into a deep channel in the middle of the harbor.
Alinor’s face was as white as a drowned woman’s.
“It’s safe!” Matthew said to her. “It’s all right. The horses are steady. But the noise! What is that? What on earth was that?”
“That was the tide mill,” Alys answered him, leaning slightly towards her mother so their shoulders rested together, as if to hold each other up. “They open the sluice gates of the millpond and the water pours into the millrace and turns the mill wheel. The noise—that’s the water rushing through the mill and turning the mill wheel for grinding and then the water pouring out into the harbor.” For the first time since the thunderous noise, she looked at her mother. “Are you all right, Ma?”
“I’m all right.” The thread of her voice was almost drowned by the noise of the mill wheel and the tide race.
“It’s a fearsome row!” Matthew exclaimed. “I thought my end had come!”
His mother smiled thinly. “It takes some getting used to.”
The carriage rocked down the rutted road, going south through thick woodland, away from the harbor and the rushing water. Matthew could see occasional clearings and the heaped pile of wood of a charcoal burner.
“Now this is Sealsea Island,” Alys told Matthew. “And everything on either side of this road is yours.”
There was a low stone wall to the left of the road, beautifully built of knapped flints, which gleamed a dull gray in the dying light of the day. Matthew looked backwards down the road at the receding countryside and saw a deer, poised on the track looking towards him, and then flirting its white tail and disappearing into the trees.
“A deer!” he exclaimed.
“Your deer,” his mother confirmed. “All the game belongs to the manor too.”
“I own deer!” he laughed.
The coach turned through a high stone entrance, rattled down a long drive, and then made a sweeping turn. The wheels crunched on shingle and the carriage stopped before a great wooden door.
“And here we are,” Alys said, glancing nervously at her mother. “Here we are again.”
Alinor was leaning back against the silk squabs of the seats, her hand at her throat as if to steady the heaving of her lungs. The footmen jumped down, let down the steps, and opened the carriage door. The double door of the house was flung open, and a man came out, a woman behind him, and behind them two maids and four house servants in a dark green livery, looking towards the carriage, waiting to meet their new masters.
Matthew got out first and tried to smile confidently at his servants, as if he were accustomed to this life, to the grand house, to the open door, to the rows of white-capped curtseys. He turned to help Alys and Alinor from the carriage and saw Alys supporting his grandmother and realized that she could barely stand. He stepped back to the carriage again and helped her down.
“Was the journey too much for her?” he asked Alys fearfully.
“It’s not the journey; it’s the returning.”
Alinor, her feet on the doorstep of the Priory, steadied herself to meet the steward. She had a sudden fear that he would be the same man who had forgiven her rent forty years ago, the man who knew of her terrible shame and public disgrace, the man who had seen her go into the stable loft to nurse a man with the plague and come down radiant, pregnant with his child.
But of course, it was not him. Mr. Tudeley had been an old man then, he had died years ago, and the cook behind him was not her old friend. Alinor did not recognize any of the housemaids nor the stable boys nor the garden lads. She held tightly to Matthew’s arm as he led her into the house and she heard the murmur of names as each servant ducked a bow or bobbed a curtsey, and all of them were unknown.
“The parlor,” the steward said, and Alinor forced herself to follow him, as if she had never before set foot on the polished wooden floor of the hall.
It was so much changed that she felt like the stranger she pretended to be. Wherever she turned was both familiar and hauntingly different. The stairs, where her son Rob had paused to show her his borrowed clothes, were just the same; but they descended into a hall that had been made over, and the little boy with the bright face that she remembered was a grown man with a child of his own. The private chapel which had faced east, opposite the grand staircase, had been transformed into a dining room, its illegal vocation wiped clean; and where the altar had stood, there was now a tall cabinet for showy silverware. Sir William’s gun room overlooking the garden was now the parlor. Alinor smelled rose petals, and missed the scent of cigars and gun oil. Sir William had been dead for years and the parlor had been cleaned and paneled, with matting on the floor and a rich Turkey carpet on the elegant oak gate-leg table with chairs set around a pretty fireplace. The steward led them in and offered them tea, wine, or small ale.
Matthew, looking at Alinor’s white face, ordered mulled wine and water for them all.
“Should you go to your bedroom, Mother Alinor?” he asked her. “Should you lie down and rest?”
She shook her head. “In a moment. I can’t bear to go up yet. Everything is so different, it’s like a homecoming, and yet all strange…”
“I can hardly believe it’s mine,” Matthew said, looking out of the window over the new rose garden and the herb garden beyond. Beyond the herb garden was a high wall set with an inviting door. “I’ll go out and look around. I should see the coach into the stable, and the horses,” Matthew said. “There might be our own carriage here. The lease said farm and stable equipment.”
“Then we could send the Avery carriage back to him at once,” Alys said. “We wouldn’t need it.”
“Nobody will know his name, if you’re afraid of that,” Alinor reminded her. “Nobody will see the crest and think of him. He went under another name then, and nobody will recognize us. It’s like a dream, as if we are ghosts at our old life.”
“This is our life,” Alys said stubbornly. “It is the old life that is forgotten, that is like a dream. It’s him that’s a ghost with no name.”
“What name?” Matthew asked. “What ghost? Who went by another name then?”
“Sir James Avery,” Alys answered when her mother nodded that she might speak. “He came here, years ago, under another name. He lied to us all. He was a spy.”
“Why?”
“It was the war,” Alinor told him. “He had to hide who he was, and it ended badly.”
“He was a liar,” Alys said sharply.
Alinor smiled at her daughter. “There were many lies,” she said gently. “And most of them for love. And all of them either forgotten or forgiven. They are nothing to Matthew.” She turned to him. “You go and explore your new country! There are no pasts or ghosts for you!”
He beamed at her and strode to the door. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe our luck.”
The two women exchanged a look, as if they thought that luck had once been against them.
“You’re a lucky boy,” Alinor told him, as if to defy chance itself. “And now that we are here again, I begin to think that we are lucky too.”
WINDSOR CASTLE, AUTUMN 1685
Livia was walking behind the queen and her ladies on the sloping paths of scythed grass that ran down to the river in the North Garden of Windsor Castle. The trees were changing color, the dusty green leaves growing gold and yellow, the gardeners raking up heaps as bright as amber, the lads barrowing them away. The castle, beautiful as a fairy tale, rose behind them one terrace above another. The queen, who dreaded cold weather, was wearing a stole of the finest velvet thrown around her shoulders. Everyone was happy: the execution of Monmouth had confirmed the coronation, the country had backed the royals against a more beloved rival, the people had risen up—only to be crushed down.
Livia elbowed her way closer to the queen.
“The king is to give me some prisoners from the rebellion,” Mary Beatrice announced. “And I shall give some to you.”
At once the ladies clustered around her. “Oh please!” said one. “I have to get money to pay my gambling debts, or my husband will send me home to the country!”
Livia laughed with the others and clapped her hands girlishly, but she knew the queen would reward her without asking.
“They’re calling them the maids of Taunton,” the queen said. “The king has promised them to me—maids for my ladies. A school of girls who went running after Monmouth, and embroidered him a banner!”
“Fools,” Livia said shortly. “Won’t they be executed?”
“Oh no! Girls still in school! Their teacher should have been burned for treason—but she died in prison: smallpox.”
“God moves in mysterious ways,” Livia said soulfully.
“By chance, the girls survived, and the king is to give them to me!”
“And will you give half a dozen of them to me?” the lady-in-waiting with gambling debts begged prettily.
“I will give you all one or two. My secretary Mr. Nipho will see that they are transported and sold for us abroad—I think Barbados. He is managing it all.”
“And me! I want one!”
“And me!” the other ladies cried.
“How many young ladies are there to be transported?” Livia asked.
“About twenty, I think,” the queen said carelessly.
“And how much does each one make, when she is sold on the quayside?”
“There’s a great demand for upper servants,” the queen said. “Mr. Nipho said we might get as much as twenty pounds each.”
“Oh! But how sad for them!” one of the ladies remarked. “And how dreadful to be taken from your home.”
“And sold like a slave on the dock!”
“They’ll come home within ten years,” Mary Beatrice pointed out. “It’s not really slavery.”
One of the ladies managed an exaggerated shudder. “I would rather die than be treacherous to my king.”
Livia gave her a hard look. “I shouldn’t think there will be many traitors ever again,” she said. “Not now they have felt the king’s mercy.”
Livia took the queen’s arm and they walked on. “He’s giving me hundreds of prisoners,” the queen told her friend. “Not just the Taunton maids, but ordinary men who served Monmouth. A small fortune in men. I will see you have some too.”
Livia pressed the queen’s arm. “My greatest reward is saving you when no one else could.”
TAUNTON, SOMERSET, AUTUMN 1685
The judge, the clerks and servants and hangers-on, guarded on all sides by mounted cavalry, as if advancing into a hostile country, swept into town, scattering claimants and mourners into the gutters, and took up their lodgings in the castle and every available room. Johnnie heard the uproar of their arrival as he was waiting for the broker in the common room of the inn. He could not reserve a parlor for his private use; every room in the house was serving as a bedroom, shared by two or even three or four strangers. Johnnie had managed to get a small bedroom cramped under the eaves, and he was already paying for two guests, saying that his servant would join him as soon as he could be found.
The two men found a corner of the parlor, and the broker outlined the business. “You buy each man—or it might be a woman or child, I can’t guarantee what you get, they’re sold by the head and you only discover who you have when you’ve paid.”
