“It’s been weeks,” Alys pointed out. “Surely it’d be over by now if it was rancid cream or spoiled meat.”
“Don’t,” Alinor said, the back of her hand to her mouth. “Don’t even speak of them.”
Ned laughed shortly. “She was always sickish,” he said unsympathetically. “You should’ve seen her when she was breeding you.” He bent his head and cracked one of the claws. “Here, Rob,” he said. “Try this.”
The young man and his uncle picked at the meat. “It’s good,” Rob said. “The claw’s always the best.”
“D’you get lobster at the Priory?”
“No,” said Rob.
“Folk look down their noses at it, as poor man’s meat, but I like it better than beef,” Ned said, his speech muffled by a mouthful.
Alinor heard them as if they were far away. Her brother’s careless words echoed again and again in her head. She heard a noise in her head like the rush of the waters in the millrace as she looked up and saw Alys’s dark blue eyes on her, and heard a distant voice say: “Ma?” as she went down into the darkness.
She woke on the bed in the cottage, Alys at her side. She raised herself on her elbow and Alys held a glass of small ale to her lips. “Where’s Rob?”
“Uncle Ned’s walking back to the Priory with him. I said that you’d be fine. I said that you’d send to tell him tomorrow. I said it was women’s troubles.” Alys scrutinized her mother’s face. “It is, isn’t it?”
Dumbly, Alinor nodded.
“The worst kind? You’re with child?”
Alinor swallowed. “I think so.”
“You think so?” Alys was pale and furious in a moment. “You must know if you laid with a man or no. Or are you going to tell me you were forced by a faerie lord? God save us, have you been dancing with the faerie lords again?”
A deep shamed flush rose from Alinor’s belly to her hot cheeks. “Of course I know. What I don’t know is if I’m with child. I hadn’t thought of it till Ned said . . . what he said.”
“And you tell me to beware of the gallows!”
“I’ve done very wrong,” Alinor confessed to this new, authoritative daughter. “Very wrong.”
Alys rose from the bedside and stepped towards the door, flinging it open as if she would summon the icy sea breeze to blow the words from the little cottage. “You must be mad,” she said bitterly. “After all you’ve said to me!”
Alinor bowed her head in shame.
“How could you?”
“I know, Alys. Don’t scold me.”
“And you dare to let my uncle tell me that I must wait for months to be married? When you’ve not even waited a year since our da left?”
“It’s a year. It’s nearly a year.”
“Who is it? Mr. Miller?”
“No!” Alinor exclaimed.
“That horrible man who has the physic stall at Chichester market?”
“No, of course not.”
“Mr. Tudeley, who’s getting Rob his apprenticeship? Is that why Rob gets his chance?”
“No! No! Alys, I won’t be questioned like this!”
“You will be!” The girl rounded on her mother. “This is nothing! Don’t you think the parish will question you like this as soon as your belly starts to show? Don’t you think you’ll have to name the father and then stand before the congregation in your shift, in your shame? Don’t you think Mr. Miller will ask you, all the churchmen will ask you, they’ll demand that you say, and they’ll bring in a midwife from Chichester to put her dirty hands all over your belly, and peer at your privates like you were a whore suspected of the pox?”
Alinor shook her head, her golden hair falling around her white face. “No, no.”
“They’ll go on and on and on at you until you give them his name and then they’ll find him and make him pay his fine to the parish. And you’ll go to the workhouse, and when the bastard is born they’ll take him off you and send you back here as a named whore.”
“No,” Alinor said. “No, Alys, don’t say such things.”
“Back here!” Alys gestured wildly at the interior of the little cottage and the vast desolate mire outside. “Back here, as a named whore. Who’s going to give Rob an apprenticeship then? Who’s going to marry me? Who’s going to buy anything from you but magic and love potions?”
“I’m going to be sick,” Alinor announced. She stumbled to her feet and got to the open front door. She vomited on her own doorstep, sobbing at the pain of her empty belly heaving on nothing.
Like a blessing, she felt a cold cloth scented with lavender oil laid gently on the back of her neck. “Thank you,” she said, and wiped her face and hands. She stepped back and sat on the bed, looking up at Alys as if her daughter were her judge.
“Were you forced, Ma?” the young woman asked more gently. “Is that what happened?”
Alinor turned from the temptation of a lie. “No.”
“They won’t stop asking. You’ll have to tell. Did you not think of this?”
“I didn’t think . . . till this very moment . . . that I was with child. I hadn’t thought—” She broke off. There was no way to explain to this new challenging Alys that she had thought her sickness was heartache, that her inability to eat was pining for the man she loved, that she had embraced it, like a penance, as he too might be fasting as punishment for his love for her. She had thought the two of them were working their way to be together, he fasting in Douai, and she here, on the edge of the mire, aching for him too, eating only bread and small ale, sick for love.
“Well, think it now!” Alys flung at her. “Think now that you’re ruined. And I’m ruined too. You’ve ruined me. For Richard can’t marry me if my mother is a named whore. They won’t want our money, if they think you earned it on your back behind a haystack. They won’t stand for a missing father and a mother of shame. A deserted wife was a long stretch for them; a pregnant whore will be too much. You are ruined and I am ruined, too.”
“Alys, I would never do anything to hurt you,” Alinor said.
“You have destroyed me! You could have done nothing worse.”
“I won’t let this happen.”
“It’s happened already.”
“Alys, all my life I have lived for you.” Alinor stumbled over her words. “I tried to keep Zachary from you and Rob. I took blows so that he wouldn’t raise his hand to you. I wanted nothing but a good life for the two of you. I’ve done everything I could do to raise you up from this life. I’d never bring you down.”
“Well, you’ve brought me down.” The girl slumped on the foot of the bed, facing her mother, panting and desperate. “It’s even worse than you know. For I am with child, too. Unlike you, I can name my lover, and we are betrothed to marry. We did not lie together until we were handclasped. But that’s why I’m determined that we marry in January before the baby comes in May.”
“In May?” Alinor asked, shocked.
“Yes. There’s no shame in being with child at the altar. We were betrothed. We were going to tell his parents and the minister next month. But if you’re proved as a whore then Richard won’t be allowed to marry me, and his family will never accept me! Then I’ll be ruined, too.”
“Alys!” Alinor reached out to her beloved daughter, but Alys slapped her hand away and threw herself down on the bed, turned towards the wooden wall, and would not speak.
Alys cried herself to sleep as Alinor lay sleepless, the cottage door wide open to the clear night sky, the stars sparkling like ice. The tide was coming in with an east wind behind it, the coldest wind of all. The sound of the lapping water filled the cottage as if the tide would climb the bank, wash them both away, and make the whole world into tidelands.
At midnight Alinor got up, wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, ignored the protesting cluck of the drowsy hens, and went outside to sit on the rough bench against the cottage wall, closing the door on her sleeping daughter. She watched the moon high in the sky, shining a silver path on the water of the harbor, until she thought it was an invitation to her, a message from the old gods of the Saxon shore, who did not fear death but embraced it as their last voyage. She thought that perhaps the best thing she could do for her daughter, for her son, for herself, and for the man she loved was to walk down to the shore and fill her pockets with stones and follow that gleaming path, colder and colder, wetter and wetter, until the icy waters closed over her head and the sound of rushing water in her ears muffled the cry of the sleepless seagulls.