Dawnlands, page 22
“Her soul’s her own business,” Ned said gently. “But I’ve got to save her life.”
“I won’t be party to anything illegal,” Johnnie said.
“No,” Ned conceded. “But would you help me get a pardon, or get her released?”
“Can’t be done!” Johnnie said irritably. “What d’you think I’ve been doing here for all this time in this stinking town? I couldn’t buy a pardon for you. They’re not for workingmen.” He glanced round. “Guilty men,” he said accusingly.
“No, not for me, but she’s wrongly arrested. Even under a Stuart we can demand her release.”
Johnnie hesitated. “If someone would speak for her… but why should I do anything for her? Why should you? She robbed me and she hit you!”
“Aye, she’s bested us both, but I suppose that a blow doesn’t end love.”
“Of course I don’t stop loving her because she stole from me. But it’s against my better judgment. And you’ll think I’m a fool.”
“I don’t,” Ned assured him. “Will you at least go to the castle, and see what port they’ve taken her to?”
“I’ll do that,” Johnnie agreed reluctantly. “You wait here and keep out of sight. Wait in my room. And for the Lord’s sake, get a wash, change that bandage, and wear your hat.”
FOULMIRE, SUSSEX, AUTUMN 1685
James Avery’s carriage retraced the rutted track beside the harbor, the coachman driving with ill-concealed contempt for the poor road, the low hedges, and the overarching sky. The tide was coming in and the seagulls were swirling in white flocks, fishing in the incoming water. The Broad Rife was spilling over its muddy banks, like a mirror to the blueness above. The coachman halted the horses at the wadeway and the driver beside him climbed down to ring the bell for the ferryman.
James was in such a dream of the past he was half expecting to see Ned coming out of his door, wiping his hands on a cloth, and stepping down onto the flat-bottomed ferry, hauling it hand over hand on the overhead rope to the north side. But then he remembered those days were gone, Ned was gone, and there was a new ferryman in his place, and James would never again sit on his horse and look down the road to where Alinor, a young woman, her face bright with happiness at the sight of him, was waiting.
“It’s not too high, you can drive across,” the ferryman yelled at the coachman.
James let down the window and felt the soft salty air against his cheek. “What d’you think?”
The coachman tightened the reins. “There oughter be a proper ford. There oughter be a bridge.”
James closed the window and sat back. “It’s the tidelands,” he repeated. He closed his eyes and he could hear her voice: “The harbor moves in every storm. The sea breaks into the fields and takes back the land. The ditches make new lakes. These are the tidelands: half tide, half land, good for nothing, all the way west to the New Forest, all the way east to the white cliffs.”
He could hear her voice as if they were on the bank of the harbor, on the brink of love, then the coach turned left off the road, and right towards the Priory, and before he could compose himself into the important man he now was, he had arrived like a lovesick boy.
* * *
He did not know who to ask for, he did not even know how to announce himself. He stood hopelessly in the lamplit doorway while some servant—a footman? A steward? Surely, they did not have a chamberlain?—raised the lamp and said: “We were expecting you, Sir James,” and stepped back to admit him.
He recoiled from the hall. Where there had been a flight of stairs leading down to plain stone slabs, with a suit of armor at the bottom and an open fireplace billowing hot smoke, the hall was now floored with polished wood and the fireplace had been reduced in size and fitted with a neat grate. The old tapestries had been stripped from the walls, and there was painted wooden paneling in its place, with some blotchy landscapes of French gardens. The double doors to the chapel where he had served Mass as a secret priest were shrunk to a modern door frame, a single door, and the room was now a dining room with a good table and half a dozen chairs. The manservant led the way to what had been Sir William’s gun room overlooking the garden and opened the door, and James found himself suddenly in a pretty parlor, and at the fireside, there was the woman he had loved for so long.
Alinor rose as he entered and stood still, one hand on the mantelpiece, one on her heart.
Neither said a word.
“May I get you some refreshments, Sir James?” the man said into the silence.
James nodded, but found he could not speak at the sight of her, at her steady gray eyes on his face, at his sense that the years were falling away from them both and they were spinning back to their youth, both of them beautiful, both of them innocent, both of them so much in love. “Wine,” he said, without taking his eyes from her lined face. “A glass of wine.”
The servant crossed the polished floorboards and poured two glasses, set a bowl of dry biscuits on the table, put another log on the fire, and reluctantly retired. Neither of them spoke, until the door was closed behind him.
“To see you here!” James said.
Her mischievous smile was quite unchanged, her merriment shone through her old face. “I know! Who’d have dreamed it?”
“You are comfortable?”
She laughed at him. “You mean: do I feel out of place?”
“Do you?”
“No. Not at all! I feel at home.”
She seated herself and made a gesture that he should sit. He took the chair and thought it so odd that she, who had been little more than a beggar, born in the ferry-house a few miles from here, should reign in the parlor like a queen, while he, a gentleman from generations of gentry, should be as awkward as a schoolboy.
“You were kind to give us a lend of your carriage,” she said politely.
“You’re welcome… at any time… please let me send it for when you go home…” he started.
“Nay, I won’t go back to London until winter comes.”
“Really? You like it so much here?”
“It’s my home.”
“And nobody…” He did not know how to ask if she was notorious.
Her face, as open as he remembered, turned to him and her smile was as sweet. “Nobody remembers,” she said. “It’s probably a legend now, like the hushing well in the harbor. Long gone and forgotten.”
“The hushing well has stopped?”
“The harbor’s changed many times since you and I were last here. There’s no memory of the hushing well, it’s fallen silent.”
“The people at the mill…” He could not remember their names, only their avid faces as they clamored for her guilt.
“The daughter Jane—you won’t remember her—has bought out the lease.” Her smile invited him to wonder at the changes since they were last here. “She and her husband would be the last people in the world to speak of us. Their marriage would be overset if Alys reappeared. There’s a new family at the ferry and no one thinks of the old Ferrymans. No one would link that family, that lowly family, to the Peacheys.”
“You pass off as Peachey?” he asked her, shocked that she should take a gentry name.
She shrugged. “Not I! It was your own wife, the Nobildonna, who chose the name for herself and so gave it to Matthew. Called herself da Picci, as luck would have it—and now everyone assumes we’re distant cousins of the old Peachey family.”
“And this place was Matteo’s choice?” he asked incredulously.
“We call him Matthew,” she corrected him gently. “Aye, he chose it, God bless him, as a gift for me: him that owes me nothing. But it’ll prove good. His ma can advise him about the land, Alys knows every yard of every hedge.”
“I didn’t think you would receive me,” he said, hoping they could speak of themselves.
“Your wife got Matthew the house,” she pointed out. “Does she know you’ve come?”
He flushed at her directness. “I am not obliged to tell her anything. But I did tell her I was coming.”
“She didn’t mind?”
“She made no complaint.”
Again, the light of laughter came into her eyes. “Not quite the same thing!”
“No. But this is important to me.”
She folded her hands in her lap and turned her gray gaze on him. “What is it, James? That you have come to me, after all this time?”
Now that he had her attention, he found that he did not dare to speak. “It is…” he began. “It is about myself. Forgive me. My physician tells me that I have a problem in my heart,” he said. “The beat is irregular. It does not go as it should.”
She said nothing.
“He tells me that, one day, it may just stop.”
“Stop?”
“Yes. Just stop beating.”
She frowned, looking at the fire as if she might see his future in the embers. “And that is fatal?”
“Yes,” he said. “Fatal.”
She nodded, saying nothing.
“In a way I’m glad,” he said hastily. “For so many years I thought of your suffering, the water in your lungs, your struggle to breathe. Now I feel that I am a little like you. I too am under a sentence of death. I’m not surprised. My heart broke that day, when you were half drowned. I truly believe that it has never beat in time since that day. My doctor cannot tell me how long I might live.”
She waited.
“Months rather than years, he thinks.”
The log shifted in the grate and sent a shower of sparks up the chimney. He thought that if he had not been a fool and a coward, this might have been their parlor, and the wood in the grate might have been logged from his forest and dried in his wood store, and they might be facing his death after a long life together. They would have had their own children to inherit his fortune, and she would have held his hand as the light went to darkness.
“I am sorry,” she said levelly.
He wanted to kneel at her feet and put his face in her lap. He wanted to feel her cool hand on the nape of his neck. “If I were to kneel at your feet, I wouldn’t be able to get up again,” he said, trying to make a joke of the pain in his heart.
“Did you come here to kneel at my feet?”
He flushed, feeling the heat rise in his face as if he were still a young man with a strong heart. “Yes. I suppose I did. I came to beg your forgiveness—”
“You did that, and I forgave you.”
“And to ask if I might spend the rest of my life with you? Here with you? In the house as a friend? If I might live my last months with you?”
He saw her eyes warm at the thought of it. “Ah, James—I don’t know—”
“You’re thinking of Alys,” he said suddenly. “But she can have no objection. She’s not your keeper. And Livia won’t care. We don’t live as husband and wife, she thinks of nothing but her place at court. I am free, Alinor. I have been freed by this promise of my death. Let me come to you.”
Still she said nothing, her gray eyes on his pleading face.
“I love you,” he admitted, very low. “I have never stopped loving you.”
She was as quiet as a deer in the woods, watching silently falling snow.
“Do you love me?” he demanded. “Have you loved me for all these years?”
She blinked as if he had pulled her from an inner vision. “Oh yes,” she said, as if it were unimportant. “I never stopped loving you. But as for your living here, I should have to think about it.”
“Of course!” he said hastily. “Of course.” He had expected her to turn to him, that he would reach for her, that he would hold her in his arms once again, that he would feel her body against him and smell the perfume of her hair. He had thought she might cry at this happy ending of their story. But she was far away, seated in her chair, dreamily watching the fire.
After a while she gave a little sigh and rang a small bell that stood on the table beside her. “I have to go to bed,” she said, as if they were not in the middle of a conversation—the most important conversation of his life. “Ask them for anything that you want. They will serve you a supper. Please excuse me.”
“But I thought—” He jumped to his feet and took a hasty step towards her. She put out her hand and he stopped at once, as the door opened and a maid came in.
“Lizzie, I need to go to bed.” Alinor smiled at the girl. “And when you come down again, please serve Sir James his supper and show him to his room.” She turned to him with quiet confidence, as if she had been giving orders as the lady of the manor for all her life. “Shall we take breakfast together at ten?”
With the maid in the room he could do nothing but bow. “Good night,” he said formally, though he had hoped she would be in his arms and he would spend the night in her bed.
“Good night,” she said; she had no such thought.
REEKIE WHARF, LONDON, AUTUMN 1685
Captain Shore’s ship, Sweet Hope, nosed towards her home wharf, the Captain on the bridge in his best coat and hat, bellowing orders to his crew to get the lines on the quay capstans, and loose them from the barge which had towed them in.
Alys stood on the quay, proudly watching her husband’s ship come in. She waved to his stocky figure on the bridge, and then gave a little gasp as she saw two girls beside him.
“Captain Shore, are those my granddaughters?” she shouted at him.
He waved his hat like a boy and yelled: “Ahoy there! Two precious cargos from Venice, Miss Gabrielle and Miss Mia! Safely delivered and undamaged by salt water.”
She had to wait until they had the gangplank run ashore, and as soon as it was extended from the ship she ran up it, and onto the deck, to draw the two girls into her arms. “Welcome! Welcome to your home! Welcome to London! Welcome to England!” she cried, then she turned to her husband and beamed at him. “And welcome home to you, Captain Shore.”
He brushed the two girls aside and kissed her on the mouth. “Glad to be home,” he said shortly and then he went for’ard to check the lines and that the rope fenders were out to protect the ship from the wall of the quay.
Alys looked at the two girls, the granddaughters she had never met. Gabrielle was the older, a girl of thirteen, with the dark brown hair, strong mouth, and straight gaze of her mother. Her sister, Mia, only a year younger, took after the Italian side of the family with caramel skin, black hair and eyes, and a sidelong smile.
“What a pair of beauties you are!” Alys exclaimed. “I can’t believe this is the first time we’ve met! I’ve thought of you so often, and prayed this day would come…” She drew them to the head of the gangplank and then hesitated. “Your ma will have told you what to expect? We don’t have a great London house, this is a working wharf and we live beside the warehouse.”
“Ah, we know, we know!” Gabrielle assured her. She spoke with a slight Italian accent that made Alys shiver for a moment, thinking of the calculated charm of the Nobildonna, also from Venice, who had come to the warehouse saying that it was her sanctuary, and then nearly destroyed it in her determination to rise higher.
“Ma told us all about her childhood here,” Mia chimed in. “And at home, though it’s a great house, we have the stonemasons working in the rooms below, and the studio is next door. We both work there, we’re not idle. In Venice, everyone works. Ma says it’s only in London that people like to pretend their money fell down with rain.”
“It’s true,” Alys agreed, leading them down the gangplank. “But your ma says you want to study here?”
“She said English girls are allowed?” Gabrielle asked her.
“You can start at your uncle Rob’s house with his daughter’s governess, and then go to school, and nobody knows more about herbs than your great-grandmother. She’s not at home right now, she’s in the country… And so here is your new home.”
She opened the front door. “Mind the ledge—that keeps the floodwater out.”
The girls stepped over the threshold into the hall.
“Here’s the parlor.” Alys gestured to the room on the left of the front door. “That’s where we eat. To the right here, that’s the warehouse. At the back is the kitchen, and beyond that the yard and the stables. Upstairs: your bedrooms.” She led the way up the tightly turned wooden stairs.
The girls exchanged a glance; this was very unlike their home in Venice, where the floors were marble and the ceilings high and the walls paneled or painted with frescoes.
“You’re both in the spare bedroom next to me,” Alys said, showing them their room. “It’s your mother’s old room when she was a girl, and while my ma is in the country you can have her room as your sitting room.” She opened the door to the room with the glazed balcony that looked out over the two aspects: the Neckinger drain and the River Thames.
“Pretty,” Mia said, admiring the lightness of the room and the view of the river. “When will our great-grandmother come home?”
“She’ll want to see you at once, so perhaps we’ll go down to Sussex in a few days’ time and bring her home with us. Gracious! I’ve been waiting for you for so long that now you’re here I can’t believe it. You’ll be hungry, I’ll get Cook to serve an early dinner. Captain Shore always has roast beef on his first night home.”
Alys left them in their room and went downstairs where the lumpers were unloading the girls’ luggage into the hall and the cargo into the warehouse. “There’s a jug and bowl for you to wash your face and hands,” she called back up to them.
The two girls drifted into Alinor’s room, which overlooked the quay, and watched the men throwing the sacks of silk from hand to hand, rolling the casks of fine wines, and heaving crates of statues and paintings on barrows to take them into the warehouse.
Captain Shore stood at the entrance to the warehouse double doors checking everything off his cargo list with a custom officer agreeing the tally. As the girls watched from the upper window, they saw Alys come to the warehouse doors and direct where things should be stored.
