Dawnlands, page 3
“I sleep under them every night,” the Captain said. “Coziest bedding I’ve ever had. Much needed this winter gone. We’re grateful. And who’s this?”
“My lad. This is my serving boy: Rowan.”
“Well, come in, both of you,” Captain Shore said. “Have you dined?”
“There’s enough for us all,” Alys assured him. “The maid can run out to the bakehouse and get a chicken pie. Uncle Ned, I must take you upstairs to Ma at once. You know, she was speaking of you only last night. She dreamed of you, at sea on dark tides.”
“Aye, I wondered if she’d know I was on deep waters,” he said. “But you’d better prepare her.”
“We’ll wait for you down here,” Captain Shore said, waving Rowan back to the kitchen. “You get warm in the kitchen, lad. And, Uncle Ned, if Mrs. Reekie wants you to dine upstairs with her, sir, you just say the word. Sometimes she comes down for dinner, sometimes she don’t. It’s always her wish, just as she wants.”
Ned followed his niece up the wooden stairs to the next floor. To his right was the door to his sister’s room, and to his left the bedroom that Alys shared with her husband, and another door to the smaller spare room. The narrow stairs for the servants’ rooms went up into the eaves of the roof.
Alys tapped on the door and went in, leaving it half-open. “Ma,” Ned heard her say. “Be steady, Ma. I have some news.”
“I can tell it’s good news from your face,” he heard his sister reply.
At the sound of her voice he could not make himself wait any longer. He pushed open the door. “It’s me, Alinor. I’m come home.”
Alinor rose up from the sofa, her pale face flushed with joy, her hands outstretched to him. “Ah, Ned! You’ve come home at last.” And in a moment, she was folded in his arms.
* * *
Later that night, after a bustle of preparation and dinner and drinking of healths and exchanging news, Ned went to Alinor’s room to say good night and sat on the end of the sofa. “I daren’t keep you late,” he said. “Alys gave me such a scowl. Are you tired?”
She put her hand to her chest where her breath came short. “I’m too happy to be tired. I always thought I’d see you in this life again, Ned. But I never dreamed you’d come home like a merman out of water, without a word of warning.”
“I never thought I’d sit at a table with my family again. I’ve been solitary for so long.”
“But now you’ve got Rowan for company?”
“He’s just with me for the voyage,” he said. “I can’t bear to keep a servant, Sister. You know my feelings. I paid for his passage over, but he’s free.”
She slid a sideways look at him. “Rowan? Named for a tree? Neither girl nor boy but a being from the forest?”
He smiled ruefully. “Of course, you saw her at once. Aye, she’s a lass. The granddaughter of a woman who was kind to me when I was first in New England. They call themselves the Pokanoket, the People of the Dawnlands.” He corrected himself. “No. Not anymore. They did. They were the ones killed in the wars, and now their name is forbidden.”
“Have you escaped one war to wage another?” she asked him acutely.
He glanced to her closed bedroom door, as if even in her own house, he was wary of eavesdroppers. “Aye, I got a message,” he said shortly. “Old comrades tell me that the new king is a papist and a French spy. They say that no one will stand for it, the people will rise again and put the Duke of Monmouth in as a new Lord Protector. Another Cromwell. So I came at once. Like an old horse at the sound of the trumpets! To see it happen—the freeing of the people. Once again.”
She nodded. “It’s true,” she said. “Captain Shore keeps his own counsel, and we’re far away from St. James’s Palace, but even the merchants’ coffeehouses say that the new king prays like a papist in a foreign tongue, kneels for Mass with his foreign wife, and the court is bought and sold by France. There’s not an honest man among them. And the young Duke of Monmouth is said to be in the Low Countries, building a fleet. They say he’ll come to save us and the Church of England. The country’ll be divided again into royalist against roundhead.”
“There’ll be a war?” he confirmed. “Another civil war?”
“Not for you,” she urged. “Not for you, who left England rather than be subject to a king. You’ve done enough, Brother. Come to watch if you must. But don’t you risk a beating. You can’t bear that grief again.”
His slow smile told her that he regretted nothing. “Nay,” he said. “All my life I’ve thought that God made man and woman, not kings and servants. I was proud to serve under Cromwell to set the men of England free. I was glad we won our freedom. I was sorry we gave it away again. I’d be proud to fight for the men of England once again.”
“We can’t,” she told him. “The family can’t. We’ve taken years to build the warehouse trade, and now we have our own ship: Captain Shore’s ship. We’ve bought the wharf next door, we trade in fine things from Sarah in Venice. Johnnie is a writer at the East India Company and Rob is a doctor, he’s put up his door knocker in the City—our Rob! A proper doctor! We can’t throw that away for the king’s bastard. We can’t do it, Ned. You can’t ask it of us—not of the young ones when they’re doing so well. Not of Captain Shore and Alys now they’re settled.”
“No, no,” Ned said quickly, clasping her hand. “Not any one of you. I’ll go to Monmouth as a single man, without ties, without family. This is my battle—not theirs. If the Duke of Monmouth takes me into his service, I’ll be Ned Ferryman come from New England to serve my countrymen—and nothing to link the Reekie wharf to me.”
“You’ll think me chickenhearted,” she said ruefully.
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have you lose your home again. Once was enough.”
“It’s not home,” she said quietly, thinking of their house beside their ferry on the tidelands. “But it’s a good living.”
“Course,” he agreed. “And maybe I’ll come out of this so well that I’ll buy you a house at Foulmire, and you and I will end our days there, watching the waters rise and fall in the harbor, with no lord ruling over us and no king over England, and it’ll be a new dawn.”
ST. JAMES’S PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1685
The newly crowned queen was sick: bleached by the pain in her chest, in her back, cold despite the heaped lambswool covers on her bed. No doctor had been able to cure the cough which came and went with the seasons; the hard-hearted courtiers said it was a weakness of her family, and that she would die before she was thirty. She would see no one but Livia, who lay with her in the bed, as close as a lover, warming her with the heat of her body.
Mary Beatrice could not rest. She spoke feverishly of the conversion of England, of the winning of all the souls to the true faith, with fire if need be. She coughed and said that she must have a son, a son baptized into the Roman Catholic church to cement the conversion, that her life would be wasted if she died of this cough, of weakness, before giving the Holy Father a papist prince of Wales, an heir of the true faith for England.
Livia, too much of a courtier to argue, thought the country had been Protestant for too long to change back again, the church lands sucked into private estates, the abbeys rebuilt as private houses, the nuns married off, the priests vanished. Not even the stones stood where the monks had set them, the relicts of the saints were missing from honored tombs, the pilgrim ways growing grass. The lands dedicated to holiness were growing wheat at a profit. English lords had exchanged God for great wealth, and it would be hard to change them back again.
“My son will be crowned by the Pope,” the queen predicted. “Not like us, in secret.”
“You were crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury in Westminster Abbey, before everyone?” Livia corrected her gently, thinking she must be delirious.
“Of course, we had to go to Westminster Abbey, as the Protestants wanted, but it was an empty show. We were first crowned and anointed in secret, in the Roman Catholic chapel at Whitehall, by the king’s confessor.”
Livia was aghast. “My dear, you must never repeat that! People would go mad if they found out. They would tear down the palace.”
“Of course, it is secret,” the queen said more calmly. “But think of the glory! I am the first queen crowned in the true church since England turned heretic. Think of that! I am the first queen crowned by a priest since the sainted Catherine of Aragon, since Queen Mary.”
“Because the church changed! England has changed.”
“I will change it back…” Her voice trailed off as she fell asleep, but Livia did not close her eyes. She gazed up at the rich canopy, half dreaming, half planning, as if she could see the future in the golden embroidered sunburst, the circling stars of silver thread, trying to imagine if this queen and king could dominate the country, could remake England. Mary Beatrice stirred in her sleep, and Livia turned to her like a lover and kissed the line of her neck from her ear to her collarbone, pressing herself gently, tightening her hold.
REEKIE WHARF, LONDON, SPRING 1685
Ned, flushed and awkward, waiting for his nephew, Rob, and the family’s foster son, Matthew, to arrive for dinner, felt too big for the parlor at the front of the warehouse, ungainly at the window overlooking the river, awkward at the dining table. In the kitchen, Rowan, equally out of place, was clumsily loading a tray with a bottle of wine and glasses and an earthenware pitcher of small ale.
“Take it! Take it!” Tabs commanded, sweating over the stove. “You’re his serving lad, ain’t you? Serve it!”
Rowan abandoned the attempt to claim that she was a serving lad who did not serve, and carried the heavy tray into the parlor.
“Here, lad! Put it down before you drop it,” Ned said, helping her with the heavy tray as the glasses clinked dangerously together. “Neither of us is at ease here.”
Alinor, seated at the fireside, smiled at Rowan. “I hope you’ll feel at home soon.”
There was a knock at the front door.
“That’ll be Matthew, home from college,” Alys said, emerging from the countinghouse at the back of the hall, her husband, Captain Shore, behind her. “Or maybe my brother, Rob, come early.”
Ned nodded to Rowan. “Answer it, lad.”
“How?” she said, very low.
“Just open the door and stand back and bow. Don’t be a gowk.”
Rowan threw him an exasperated look, but went to the door and opened it to a tall, slim man aged about fifty years. He handed her his fringed hat and cape without remark and went past her into the parlor. Rowan went to shut the front door when she heard a shout from the quayside—“Hold up!”
She hesitated, as a long-legged youth of about fifteen came bounding towards the open door, light-footed over the cobbles.
“Here—you’re new!” he exclaimed. “Did you come with my great-uncle Ned? From America?”
She nodded as he slipped past her and into the parlor of his home. The door closed on them, and she scowled at her pang of self-pity. It was strange to think that a man who had always appeared so solitary, in his lonely house, beside a cold river in the Dawnlands, should have had all this behind him: family, house, business, on the side of the great river of London; and that she—a girl embedded in her family, born of ancestors from the dawn of time, whose seat was the cliffs of Montaup—should find herself all alone in a strange flat land that faced north.
In the parlor, Ned was greeting Rob after a gap of twenty-five years. “A doctor’s knocker on your door, half of London coming to you for physic, and a wife and child! I’m so glad for you. It’s more than we dreamed of, that first day when we sent you to be apprenticed at Chichester. And your ma in tears at losing her little boy!”
“I remember you giving me money for dinner, in case they underfed me! You got me started, Uncle Ned, and then I was lucky in Padua at my university and then in my practice in Venice,” Rob told his uncle.
“Thank God you got out of there safely.”
“Ah, it was a long time ago, and we don’t speak of it.” Rob glanced towards the fostered boy, Matthew. “Better for the lad that we don’t.”
“Secrets?” Ned’s grizzled brows twitched together in a frown.
“Some things are better left unsaid,” Rob said firmly.
“A lad should know his father’s name.”
“Only his mother knows that!” Rob said low, with a half smile. “Livia Avery left us far behind when she married Sir James. She left her son for my ma and sister to raise as their own, without a backward glance. We don’t speak of her, and he never asks. But I should say—my wife, Julia, sends her apologies. She hopes to visit tomorrow.”
“For sure,” Ned said easily. He glanced back at Matthew, who was watching the two of them. “But what name does the lad go by? Not yours?”
“Not mine! Before she married for name and a title, Livia called herself Picci, sometimes da Picci, and Matthew uses that.” He glanced over at Matthew. “I’m telling my uncle Ned you’re doing well in your studies.”
“I’m working hard, whatever Ma Alys suspects!” the youth assured them. “I’m lucky to have a place at Lincoln’s Inn.”
Alys offered him a glass of wine and water. “He had to do a speech in Latin! Can you imagine?”
“Good for you, lad.” Ned offered a callused hand. “Think of us having a lawyer in the family!”
Susie the maid put her head in the room. “Am I to serve dinner now?”
“Yes,” Captain Shore told her. “We won’t wait for Johnnie.”
Everyone drew up their chairs to the table as the cook, Tabs; the maid, Susie; and Rowan brought dish after dish, some of them bought from the bakehouse, some of them cooked at the stove, the butter cold from the larder, the small ale brewed in the malthouse across the yard.
They heard the front door, and Alys’s son, Johnnie, came into the parlor, his hat in his hand, his brown hair ruffled by the wind from crossing the river from the City. “Grandmother Alinor, Ma, I’m sorry I’m late. I had a ship come in with mail, and I couldn’t leave before I read it.” His brown gaze fell on his great-uncle. “And you must be my uncle Ned! Sir! Welcome home!”
Ned stood and hugged the handsome young man. “Look at you! I left a lad of eleven years, and now you’re a man of business.”
Johnnie thrust his thumbs in his waistcoat and spun around to show his great-uncle his fine embroidered jacket and his deep crimson breeches. He had his mother’s golden brown hair and square, honest face. Ned laughed at his vanity and clapped him on the shoulder as he sat down at the dinner table.
“He always wanted to work for the East India Company,” Alys said proudly, passing her son, Johnnie, a plate. “And he trades on his own account.”
“Do you?” asked Ned. “What sort of goods?”
“Mostly silk and dry goods,” Johnnie said, helping himself to a slice of pie. “I get opium for Uncle Rob, spices for Ma to sell to grocers. And I send silk from India: overland—to my sister, Sarah, in Venice—and by sea—to here.” He looked up, as Rowan awkwardly held a dish. “Hello, who’s this?”
She did not bow and lower her eyes as a trained servant would have done. She did not wait for her owner to answer for her like a slave. She met his gaze like an equal. “I am Rowan. I came with your uncle Ned.”
“A slave?” He turned to Ned.
“Certainly not.”
“I choose to serve him,” Rowan told Johnnie.
“You make it sound like he’s honored!” He smiled at her.
“He is not honored,” Rowan corrected gravely. “And I am no slave. We have an agreement.”
“A native Leveller,” Rob observed quietly to his mother, Alinor. “I think Uncle Ned has met his match.”
“And are we equals?” Johnnie asked Rowan, smiling. “All equals? My great-uncle Ned, whom you agree to serve; my uncle Rob, a physician; and my ma and grandmother, who own this wharf; and Captain Shore, who owns the ship at the quay outside? Do you have no betters?”
Rowan glanced at Alinor to see if she might answer, and at her nod, she quietly replied: “Sir, I am very sure you are a great family. But I was born one of the People. And we are the first to see the sun in the morning.”
“How very Copernican!” Rob was amused by this exchange.
“D’you even know where the sun rises?” Rowan challenged Johnnie.
He hesitated. “There, isn’t it?” Johnnie pointed to his right.
“Isn’t that north?” Rob asked.
“It’s downriver,” Alys told her son. “Fancy you not knowing!”
Captain Shore laughed. “Just as well for you all that I know!”
Alinor pointed due east.
“It is that way,” Rowan agreed.
“But it doesn’t matter to us,” Johnnie pointed out. “We go by addresses in London, the names of streets, we don’t navigate by the sky.”
“I don’t know your streets,” she admitted. “But I know where I am under the sky. And if your streets tumble down…”
“Some of them were burned to nothing,” Alinor pointed out.
“Then there is only the sky. And you will not know where you are. But I always will.” She took the empty dish from Johnnie and went back to the kitchen as Ned gave a little crow of laughter.
“You think you’re having an ordinary talk, and suddenly you’re on to the stars, or the words of the wind.”
“What’re you going to do with him, though?” Rob asked, as Susie followed Rowan out of the room. “Clearly, he can’t serve.”
Alinor and Ned, brother and sister, exchanged a hidden smile at her son. “Ah, Rob, how can you be such a great physician and yet blind?” Alinor asked him. “D’you not see that’s a girl?”
“A girl? A native girl?” Alys exclaimed. “I didn’t know!”
“Bless me!” Captain Shore said.
“But why’s she dressed like that?” Johnnie demanded.
“It was easier that she pass as a boy while we were traveling,” Ned said. “And now I have to find somewhere that she can be safe as a girl, and work that she can do as a maid. I can’t take a girl where I am going.”
