As James rode back to the Priory in the early winter dusk he could see a narrow bar of firelight through the closed shutters of Ferry-house, and he stopped his horse, tied the reins to the gate, and tapped on the kitchen door. Alys answered it, a horn lantern in her hand.
“You,” she said shortly.
“How is your mother?”
“She has stopped vomiting water but, of course, she could drown later, when it flows into her dreams. She might die of poisoning from the foul water, or she may miscarry her baby and bleed to death.”
“Alys, I am so sorry that . . .”
The look of hatred that she shot at him would have silenced any man. He said nothing, then: “Please give her my good wishes for her recovery. I will come tomorrow and—”
“You will not. You will give me a purse of gold for her,” she said quietly. “She is going to leave here. I am going with her. We are going to London and we’re going to set up a carting business. You are going to buy us a storehouse with a place to live. I’ve taken the cart and the horse from my husband’s family. We’ll leave tomorrow at dawn, and we’ll set up a business and keep ourselves.”
He was astounded by the authority of the young woman. “You’re leaving your husband?”
“That’s between him and me. I don’t have to explain to you. We’ll never come back. You’ll never see her again.”
“You know that the child is mine.”
She shook her head. “You lost any rights when you let them strap your child’s mother on the mill wheel and put her under the water.”
“I have to tell her—”
“Nothing. You have nothing to tell her. You watched your lover accused of whoring and you let them swim her for a witch. You have nothing to do but to give me the money I demand, or I will tell the world that you are the man who forced her. I will name you as a rapist and you will be shamed as she has been shamed. I will name you as a papist spy and I will see you burned to death in front of Chichester Cathedral.”
“It was better that she be swum for a witch than hanged for a thief!”
“It was me that should have been hanged for a thief!” she flared at him. “I owe her my life, just as you owe her your honor. She kept my secret and yours, and it has nearly killed her.”
He took a breath as he thought of the secrets that she had kept for him.
“For love of us,” Alys said through her teeth. “Because she loves you and me so much she faced her worst fear for us, and she nearly died for us. I will repay her with my love. And you will pay too. You will pay for the child that she carries for love of you, you will pay for your betrayal, and you will pay for our silence. That’s worth a purse of gold. And you will go now, and bring it here at once.”
“I must see her again,” he said desperately.
The girl was like a Fury. “I would gouge your eyes out of your head and blind you for life rather than you saw her again,” she promised. “Go and get the money. Leave it on the doorstep, and go.”
“I don’t have that sort of money.”
“Steal it,” she spat at him. “It’s what I did.”
It was a cold dawn on the harbor, the tide coming in fast over snowy reeds and icy puddles, the seagulls crying white against the gray light. The barn owl, quartering the hedge line along the harbor, was bright against the dark hedge and then invisible against the frozen bank. A few flakes of snow filtered from the pewter clouds as Alys helped her mother to the seat of the wagon and climbed up beside her.
Alinor was shuddering with cold, and she constantly coughed into the hem of her cloak. Tenderly Alys took up the reins, putting her other arm around Alinor, who rested her head on her daughter’s shoulder. Alys clicked to the horse to start up the road to London.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A few years ago I realized that, though I still loved my fictionalized biographies of well-known and lesser-known women, I wanted to write a different sort of historical fiction: actually a series of books tracing the rise of a family from obscurity to prosperity. I reread the Forsyte Saga and discovered that my favorite scenes were the few and rather minor moments when the principal character went back to explore his ancestral home. As a reader, I wanted to know more about the story before the saga; as a writer, I understood that I wanted to write a historical fiction series of many generations of an ordinary family.
So many of us are exploring our family histories these days because we want to know who our ancestors were and what they did. Some of us take that very deep, exploring epigenetics. Some of us want to trace our connections with peoples and landscapes that are now strange to us. Some of us find remarkable echoes of our own modern lives in the historical past, as if we have inherited gifts or skills or preferences. Most families are like my family: with the earliest documents showing a family as humble and poor and, by little ordinary acts of courage and years of perseverance, largely unrecorded, rising and prospering—and sometimes, of course, declining.
What is interesting to me as a historian is how the fortunes of every family reflect in their small way the fortunes of the nation. We are all the products of both national and family history. What is interesting to me as a feminist is how these fortunes are so often invisibly guided by women. What is interesting to me as a novelist is whether it is possible to tell a fictional story which tells a historical truth: what the world and the nation were like at the time, what the individuals were thinking, doing, and feeling, and how change comes about for them all.
This is a big ambition, and it’s going to be, I hope, a big series, starting with this novel set in an obscure and isolated area of England during the English Civil War, tracing the family through the Restoration, through enlightenment, and empire. I don’t know how far my family will travel nor do I know when their story will end. I don’t know how many books I will write nor in how many countries they will make a home. But I do know that when I write about ordinary people rather than royals, the story at once becomes more surprising; and when I write about women, I am engaging with a history which is almost always untold.
Between writing the novels for this series I am working on a history of women in England. My interest has moved from the individual women of the court to the millions of women of town and country. I am finding women written off by previous historians as “ordinary,” whose experiences are obscured by time and lost to history—widely regarded as not worth recording in the first place. But these are our foremothers—interesting to us for that reason alone. These are women making the nation, just as much as their more visible better-recorded fathers, brothers, and sons. Thinking like this about women’s history has led me inevitably to want to write a different sort of historical fiction—the fiction of an unwritten history.
Many fine writers have taken the leap into the unknown to fictionalize little-known history. Ann Baer’s Down the Common is a particularly interesting example: a fictional account of a working woman who would usually not make the archive, and so not enter history, and so leave no trace for the novelist to animate. Very helpful for the Isle of Wight section of this story was Jan Toms’s To Serve Two Masters: Colonel Robert Hammond, the King’s Gaoler, which is a splendid example of local detailed history that adds so much to the national story. I drew my account of Charles and his trial mostly from two great biographies: D. R. Watson’s The Life and Times of Charles I and Charles Carlton’s Charles I: The Personal Monarch, as well as his poignant Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651. For general history I consulted, among many others, Robert Ashton’s The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution, 1603–1649. Lucy Moore’s Lady Fanshawe’s Receipt Book: The Life and Times of a Civil War Heroine was inspiring both for the recipes and for the history of a woman, like James’s mother, who went into exile with the royal family. Of course, I read many more books than these titles; and I am grateful to the very many fine historians, and to the staff of West Sussex Records office for their welcome and for the care they take of their local maps and documents. Among these was some fine research from local history groups, a reminder of the importance of libraries and local adult education.