Page 22 of Dawnlands

He laughed, knowing she would never lock him out. “Come on, then. I can’t be late now. I am to listen to a pleading in the law from one of the senior scholars, and at a crucial moment I have an important task: I am to hand him a pen.”

“That’s your only work for the day?”

“That’s my greatest moment,” he corrected her. “All eyes will be on me.”

They walked arm in arm upriver along the quay past their own ship, to where the Horsleydown Stairs ran from the quay to the lapping water below.

“But you are learning?” Alys confirmed.

“I am, but everyone says, it’s not what it was. Some scholars do nothing but dine there, never open a book. Some of the qualified men don’t even use their chambers but let them out to visitors to London like an inn. But some of us read in the library, and I am learning. I eat my dinners and I listen to the discourse, I’ll serve my terms and maybe catch someone’s eye and get a pupilage. I will come out of this a lawyer, Ma. I’ll be able to defend you, whatever you do.”

“I’m a hardened criminal,” Alys confessed. “We need a lawyerin the family.” She hugged him good-bye at the top of the stairs and stood on the quay as he went down the wet steps to signal to a passing wherry. The boatman pulled alongside and Matthew climbed aboard, settled himself in the stern, and raised his hand to her. She watched him go, the wherryman pulling against the ebbing tide, upstream to the wealth of the City where Johnnie worked, to the Inns of Court where Matthew studied, and beyond them, to the palace where his mother had lived for weeks and never sent for him.

Alys turned and went back to the warehouse. Her husband’s ship,Sweet Hope, was at the quayside, and she could see him on board, checking the loading. She waved to him, as she stepped over the stone sill which kept high-tide floodwater from the front door, and climbed the steep wooden stairs to her mother’s bedroom, which overlooked the quay at the front and the River Neckinger at the side. Alinor was seated at the round table, windows wide open, herbs and muslin purses spread around the table.

“Has he gone?” she asked, glancing up from her work as Alys came into the room.

Alys sniffed at the fresh smell of dried mint and another perfume, more exotic.

“Sassafras, mint, and scurvy grass,” Alinor told her. “Slavers’ tea.”

Alys took a handful of the mixture and buried her nose in it. “Delicious,” she said. She put down the herbs and sat opposite her mother, took up a purse, and tipped in a measure of the dried leaves as Alinor went on working, her thin hands deft from long practice. “He told me he’d be late Friday night as he’s dining with friends.”

“Cut his allowance,” Alinor joked with a warm smile at her daughter. “If he can treat his friends, you’re giving him too much.”

“I don’t want him to look poor beside them. If he’s to go among gentlemen scholars, I don’t want him behindhand.”

“Don’t you spoil him,” Alinor advised. “You and Rob didn’t turn out badly, and neither of you ever had more than a ha’penny in your pocket.”

Alys flushed. “We turned out all right in the end,” she emphasized. “There’s no comparison, Ma—not between the tidelands and the wharf: now that we’ve got the ship and my Abel in partnership withus—Johnnie trading in the East India Company and Sarah sending us such goods from Venice!”

“I’m grateful for our blessings.”

“Don’t forget what it was really like,” Alys reminded her. “We never ate meat unless I’d poached it from the Peachey lands. We ate fish when you caught it. We ate butter and cheese when you were given it instead of wages. White bread was a rare treat at harvesttime, cream was something you skimmed for others. It wasn’t that you chose not to spoil us—you could barely feed us! I’ve sworn that I’ll never be poor again, and we never will.” She rapped on the wooden table for luck. “It’s worse than ill-health,” she said. “It ruins everything.”

“It’s just—” Alinor broke off. “The sky over the harbor,” she said, her voice full of longing. “The seeping of the water over the shore at high tide. My own parents buried in the churchyard, their names over their resting place. The stile into the churchyard where the roses grow. The oak tree that bends over the mire and the green of the water under the green leaves.”

“It’d be all changed,” Alys pointed out. “The Peachey family have all died out and the manor gone to the crown. We don’t even know who’s got our ferry now. We’ll have been forgotten.”

Alinor smiled. “Someone will have made up stories about us,” she said. “As if we were never real at all. As if we just washed in and away again with the tide.”

“What d’you think they say?” Alys asked smiling.

“Oh—a woman who danced with fairies and ran away with a merman? A wise woman who paid her debt in faerie gold? A woman swam as a witch and could not drown?”

Alys shivered as if she was cold though the sunshine still shone through the window into the little room. “Let’s not think of it. When’s Uncle Ned coming back?” she turned the talk. “Has he really gone to join Argyll in Scotland?”

“Monmouth,” Alinor said shortly. “He’s gone to the duke.”

Alys looked down at her husband’s ship below. Lumpers were tossing hessian sacks of woolen cloth, one to another, across the quay for stowing in the deep hold. Alys could calculate to the nearest shilling the value of the boat, the value of the load, the likely profit from agood sale in Venice, the value of the artworks and luxury goods that her daughter, Sarah, would send on the return voyage. Her constant calculation of value was not driven by greed but the dread of ruin. “If Uncle Ned is taken for treason we would lose everything,” she said very quietly.

“He won’t name us,” Alinor said gently. “He’s promised.”

“He’d have done better to promise to have nothing to do with it at all!” Alys exclaimed.

“Aye. So you say. But all his life Ned has been a parliament man. Before you were even born, Alys. He’s always been for the Church of England and the people of England. He’s bound to fight against a king who’s lived in foreign parts for most of his life, is a declared papist, and has a foreign papist wife.”

“Still crowned King of England,” Alys said stubbornly.