Dawnlands, page 25
“Gently! Careful! You’ll bowl her over!” Alys protested, as if calling off puppies. She steadied her mother as Alinor laughed. “You’ll never be English ladies if you fling yourselves on your friends like that.”
“Let them!” Alinor held the fresh rounded bodies to her. “We’ve got so much time to make up.” She led them into the parlor, but the girls could not sit still; they roamed the room, admiring the paintings on the panels and the little grate.
“Fancy that we never met you before, but I feel I know you, Mama talks about you all the time. About you and Grandmama… and now we are here? And was this your home when you were a young woman?”
Alinor laughed at the babble of the two girls. “No, this wasn’t my home. We weren’t wealthy like this, we had a little house near here.”
“Oh! A cottage!” Mia said. “The little country houses are so pretty!”
“Not quite like that.” Alinor met Alys’s amused gaze over the heads of the two girls.
“And what shall we call you?” Gabrielle asked. “We could call you Great-Grandmother? In Italian it is Bisnonna.”
“I’d like to be Bisnonna.” Alinor smiled.
Mia clapped her hands. “Bisnonna dearest! Can we look around?”
“Of course. You can go anywhere you like. Would you like to see your bedrooms? Would you like a rest?”
“They never rest,” Alys said grimly as the girls dashed out into the hall and ran up the stairs to see their bedrooms. “I swear, Ma, I feel about eighty. And they never stop talking.”
“Do they think we’re the Peachey family? The lords?” Alinor asked.
Alys smiled. “I don’t know what they think! They can’t imagine a past further back than yesterday, and I am so old in their eyes that they must think you came out of Eden.”
“So I did,” Alinor said with a gleam of a smile. “In a way, I did.”
“I’ve seen Ned,” Alys told her mother, pulling a note out of the pocket of her cape.
“I thank God,” Alinor said fervently. “And his girl?”
“Trouble, as I thought. It’s all about her in the note.”
“Ah.” Alinor put a hand to her heart. “Thank God Ned is safe at least. And bless Johnnie. And forgive me, Alys, for sending your son after my brother.”
“This is even worse,” Alys told her grimly. “Rowan has got herself arrested in Ned’s place and is to be transported as a rebel, and the two of them—Ned and Johnnie—are running all around London trying to raise money to buy her out. I said to Ned, you can look at the books yourself, you can look in the chest. We’ve got nothing to spare until we’ve sold the Venice cargo, and then we have to lay out on the next voyage. I can lend you a pound or two, but how’re you going to pay it back?”
“I’ve got some money,” Alinor offered.
“Not enough. He’s going to need much more than the twenty pounds she’d get on the quayside at Barbados. We don’t even know how much yet: it could be a hundred. He’ll have to let her go, and comfort himself that she was going to be transported when Ned found her, anyway.”
“She can’t be transported, a girl like her. And if she’s in prison in Ned’s place, then we have to free her, if we can.”
“Well, we can’t,” Alys snapped. “And my guess is that she’ll fall on her feet like a cat.”
Alinor smiled at her daughter. “You’re angry because Johnnie disobeyed you and chased after her, and he’s not going to marry an heiress, or some rich City widow,” she said accurately.
“He’d be mad to marry her, and mad to buy her out, and mad to do anything but forget her,” Alys said roundly. “And he’s not mad usually, he’s the only level-headed one of the whole family. So I expect him to come to his senses. And you can tell your brother to come to his senses too.”
BERRY STREET, LONDON, AUTUMN 1685
Ned was waiting in Johnnie’s house for him to come home from his work at the East India Company, when he heard the front door open. He went into the hall.
“Any luck?” he asked.
“And good evening to you,” Johnnie said irritably.
“So: no?” Ned said, not in the least apologetic, as Johnnie put his hat on the hall table and took off his thick coat.
“I am a bachelor,” Johnnie said dampeningly. “I live alone for good reason. I like to come in, light the fire, light the candles, take a glass of Madeira, and then go out for dinner later. Without anyone chattering in my ear.”
“Quicker we raise the money, quicker I’m gone,” Ned said. “Don’t be precious, Nephew.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Johnnie snapped. He pushed open the door to the little parlor and saw that the fire was already lit in the grate, and a glass of Madeira stood on the side table beside his chair. “Oh,” he said. “That’s different.”
“Changed your mind about being a bachelor?” Ned asked, pouring himself a glass of wine and sitting in the opposite chair. “See what a comfortable pair we are together! Now, did you raise any money today?”
“I’ve got the promise of ten pounds,” Johnnie said. “That’s an advance on my salary and a loan on some trades that I’m doing. But that’s all I’ve got so far. This place is rented, so I can’t get a loan against it. If I took all my cutlery and tableware to pawn, I would probably get another four pounds or so—but how would I ever get it back?”
“We’ll have to borrow from the warehouse,” Ned ruled.
“It’s all very well to say, but how are you going to pay it back?” Johnnie argued. “You know my ma can’t stand debt.”
“She’s my niece…”
“You’re a bad uncle to her, if you take her money. It’s hard-earned, and there’s never any guarantee of more…”
Ned exclaimed and strode to the window, twitched back the curtain, and looked out. “You live well,” he said. “These curtains alone…”
“Rented,” said Johnnie.
“Can you not forward sell some of your goods from the Company? You bring in your own silk and jewels, don’t you?”
“I do,” Johnnie said. “But what if that ship sinks or is hit by pirates, or just meets contrary winds and comes in late?”
“Then what?”
“Then I’m ruined,” Johnnie told him.
“But what are we going to do?” Ned demanded simply. “We have to have a small fortune by next week. Sir James says it could be as much as two hundred pounds!”
“Inconvenient, isn’t it?” Johnnie asked nastily. “You despise the whole idea of making a fortune, and you loathe the rich. Now, you rather need a fortune, and you have no rich friends.”
“She is innocent, that should save her. If your world is as well ordered as you say, then an innocent woman would be freed.”
“It is well ordered,” Johnnie said stubbornly. “It puts a market price on freedom. Our trouble is we can’t afford it. That’s our fault, not the marketplace.”
“You’ll have to get a reduction,” Ned decided. “We’ll separate, and go about our work in our two worlds. I’ll go to Bristol, and find a magistrate who will listen, tell him that we’ve got an innocent lad imprisoned. You go back to Sir James and get a reduction on the pardon. Bring it to Bristol, as soon as you can.”
“I’ll try and get a reduction,” Johnnie agreed. “It’s the only way.”
“Wait—how much of this wine have you got in your cellar?” Ned demanded, holding up his glass. “And what else do you have down there?”
“A couple of casks.”
“What are they worth?”
“Now, Uncle!”
“What are they worth?”
“About four pounds,” Johnnie said sulkily.
“Well, you can sell them tomorrow, for a start.”
Johnnie was about to argue and then, suddenly, he laughed. “Lord, what a Cromwell you are!” he said. “I’ll sell them back to my wine merchant on the way to St. James’s, and we’ll see what price the queen has put on Rowan’s freedom.”
Ned took a gulp from his glass.
“For Christ’s sake, make it last,” Johnnie said. “This is our last bottle.”
BRISTOL JAIL, AUTUMN 1685
Rowan, locked in a stone-walled room with twenty other prisoners, had no idea that Ned was ceaselessly trying to find a way out for her, did not think of the outer world at all.
When they had been led into the cold church, she had flinched from the high walls and the vaulted ceiling, but she thought that it would be a hard place to guard and there would be a chance for her to slip away. They were still chained one to another, like slaves, but her eyes darted around the shadowy corners, taking in the great nave, the wooden pews, the stained glass windows, and the many doors leading to vestry and chapel and cloisters.
Then she saw they were being driven and dragged to a great metal enclosure at the side of the church and inside that was a narrow stone stair, winding down into darkness. She hesitated, peering into the cold shadows below her, but the man ahead of her in the line jerked on the cuffs on her wrists and the man behind her pushed her on. There was nothing that she could do but go down, her chains clanking on the stone, her way lit by the flickering of a torch held high by one of the guards.
The flaring light showed a huge square room, hollowed from the reddish rock beneath the church, the walls perforated by dark doorways, and inside them, stone slabs holding rows of coffins. It was the crypt of the church, where the nobility of Bristol had their family tombs.
“God save us,” one of the men said to the guard. “You’ll never leave us down here with the dead!”
“You’ll be fed,” the young guard said.
“For pity’s sake!”
Rowan looked around: there was only a single source of light, a grating high up in the wall, the early morning light shining through in a narrow beam. She kept her eye on it as she seated herself, her back against the cold stone, and let it dazzle her, so that she could forget where she was.
The stone of the walls, the stone on the floor, the roughly carved ceiling above them was a dull red color, the only sound was a booming echo of the shouted orders in the hall. They were not chained, as black slaves would have been chained, waiting for a voyage. And they were not beaten, as black slaves would have been beaten. And there were no children, dying of hunger, crying for pain, or calling for their mothers. Rowan told herself that it could have been worse.
She let her eyes get accustomed to the shadowy light as if she would never see daylight again. She taught herself not to listen for anything, but to let her ears fill with the sound of defeated men in a hollowed-out stone cave. She could not rid her mouth of the bland taste of oats and water, and she never thought of spicy hot meat, or the piercing sweetness of fresh-picked berries. Her sense of touch—when her fingers only found cold stone walls—her strength that had let her run all day, her joy that made her laugh at nothing, her optimism that turned her to the sun every morning, slowly drained away and Rowan let herself quieten, like an animal in captivity goes as weak as death, when it cannot bear its life. Rowan surrendered one sense and then another; and the men around her knew her only as the lad who never spoke, never listened, and never looked up.
FOULMIRE, SUSSEX, AUTUMN 1685
Mia and Gabrielle, determined to explore all of Sealsea Island, persuaded their grandmother to hire two steady horses with pillion saddles and went behind two grooms down the road to Sealsea village, across to the fishermen’s hovels at East Beach, deep into Sealsea Forest, and north across the wadeway to visit Tide Mill Farm.
Everywhere they went, they were greeted with smiles and courtesies, as the foreign cousins of the landlord’s family. Nobody had known before that the Peacheys had Italian cousins, but with a foreign queen on the throne and a papist school opening in Chichester, it was impossible to be sure of anything, anymore. And the girls were smiling and pretty and spoke English as well as any Londoner—which was to say fancy, and without the Sussex drawl—but they could be understood and they said “hello” and “please,” waved at the tenants’ children, and paid for crossing the wadeway or for cups of ale, which by rights they need not have done.
The girls rode behind the grooms along one of the logging tracks through Sealsea Forest, looking at the boughs overhead interlaced, and the yellowing leaves sifting silently down through the quiet afternoon air. It was still, as only an autumn afternoon in England can be still, the air cool but unmoving, the leaves the only movement in the vaulted wood, the flicker of their fall the only sound. The regular scrunch of the horses’ hooves on the track, and the occasional cry of a seagull from the nearby shore sounded strangely loud: as if the whole world—trees, birds, and little animals—were settling themselves down for the sleep of winter.
They pulled up the horses in a clearing and stood for a moment, taking in the tall trunks, the silence, the glimpses of the unending sky through the gold and yellow leaves that still clung to the tops of the trees.
Mia lifted her head. “What’s that smell?” she asked the stable boy.
“Woodsmoke,” he said. “Charcoal burning.”
“Oh! Can we see?” Mia asked.
The two grooms shrugged and turned the horses down a little track, following the gray smoke which lay between the trees like mist. The horses snorted as they came into a clearing and the sound alerted the charcoal burners who turned to see two big horses, and the two girls on pillion saddles behind their grooms.
“Good day,” an old woman said as she straightened up from a mound of dry turves and earth and came to the horses’ heads. Her lined face was deeply blackened with soot, her clothes and her hair dusted with dark powder. “Good day to you. Are you lost?”
“No,” Gabrielle said. “We’re riding home, to the Priory, when we smelled the smoke. Are you burning wood for charcoal?”
“Aye, that’s what we’re doing, and we have a license from the manor, and all. Are you the new landlords? Sisters to the new lord. Mr. Peachey, isn’t it?”
“We’re his cousins,” Mia said. “Can we see?”
The old woman laughed. “Not much to see here.”
Mia tapped the groom on the shoulder, and he got down from the saddle and turned and lifted her down, and then helped Gabrielle to the ground. The grooms stood, holding the horses as the girls went closer to the pyre.
“Hot work,” Gabrielle remarked, looking at the woman and her family, who carried on working as if the visitors were of little interest to them. They all had blackened hands and faces from the soot, and their clothes would never be clean.
“Hot and dirty,” the woman said. “And ill paid. But it keeps us fed. That, and brush gathering, and nutting, and mushroom picking, and berry picking. We have a license for the rights.”
“I thought it was free,” Mia said. “Aren’t berries free?”
“Nothing is free.”
“And you live here?” Gabrielle asked, looking doubtfully at the little hovels built from branches and the leather sheets.
“In summer it’s easier to keep the fires in. But in winter we live in a house at the edge of the woods and come out to the fires. Would you like a glass of small ale?”
Gabrielle was sure that they should not stay, but Mia said: “Yes, please,” and in a moment they were served with earthenware cups of small ale.
“I can tell fortunes,” the woman offered quietly. “Or I can tell stories for a penny?”
“I think we should…” Gabrielle began.
Mia reached into the pocket of her jacket and produced a penny. “Tell me a story. D’you know one of long ago? About the monks in the Priory?”
“Ah, a long-ago story,” the woman said. She took her seat on a fireside log, and the girls sat beside her and looked at the smoke escaping in wisps.
“There was a mermaid here once,” the woman said. “Came out of the sea.”
The girls nodded; daughters of Venice, they had heard many stories of mermaids and strange creatures from the deep sea; there was no reason to disbelieve mermaids on an island named for seals.
“Came out of the sea on Midsummer Eve, years ago, looking for a lover. Came out of the sea where it laps up against the churchyard wall. St. Wilfrid’s Church, you know it?”
“Yes,” Mia said. “Just across the field from the Priory.”
“The mermaid was longing for love, she was lonely in the sea, she wanted a man to love her, one that could hold her and take her, not some cold fish-man. She wanted to be loved so much that she grew feet where her tail should be, and she came out of her world and she walked—oh! Her feet were that sore! She hobbled through the lich-gate to the churchyard and she took a seat on the stone bench in the porch. Still there now. You’ve seen it?”
The two girls nodded.
“She knew that if she waited there and faced the moon and turned her head to look over her shoulder at midnight, she would see her lover coming to her, with no shadow behind him.”
Both girls were completely silent, listening.
“The bell in the tower struck twelve notes, she counted them, it was midnight. She came out of the porch and faced the moon. She turned her head to look over her shoulder, away from the moon, and there she saw him.”
“Who was he?” Mia whispered.
“To her, he was the man she had dreamed of all her life under the water longing for a man. But—he was not a dream but a man in real life, a priest from the Priory, and he’d never seen a woman before, so he didn’t know from her gray eyes, and the streaming golden hair all wet on her shoulders, and the shimmer of her gown like scales, that she was no real woman but a mermaid, one of the faerie folk, that no man should touch. He didn’t know that he shouldn’t even look at her. Not even for a moment. He fell in love with her like that!”
