Page 30 of Dawnlands

He nodded. “Is that all right with you, Ma?”

Alys’s face was shut and resentful. “She comes to us whenever she wants something and then she goes again. Sir James is just the same. They just turn up when they want something, and they break our hearts and go…”

Alinor’s smile at her daughter was filled with compassion. “Yes,”she said. “They have to come to us, because they have so little of their own. They have to come to us, they are so poor themselves.”

“I think she’s very rich…” Matthew said tentatively.

Alinor smiled at him. “They are poor in heart.”

TEXEL ISLAND, HOLLAND, SPRING 1685

Monmouth was on the bridge of his ship, checking that men and stores were aboard before the gangplank was run in and the lines cast off from the shore. Extra barges surrounded the ship, lines attached, preparing to tow theHelderenbergout of the harbor into an onshore wind that was wheeling at last to the east, the stocky bargees spitting into their work-worn palms and predicting that it would be a hard pull. The little ships were readying themselves to follow. The Dutch pilot was beside the steersman, pointing a route through the sandbars and mudbanks, warning of the wrecks in the shallows. Tentatively, the ship rocked and then started to glide away from the dark shore studded with flickering lights from lanterns. The waves slapped loudly against the keel as the wind blew them back onshore and the barges, with their crews straining to keep the pace, fought to tow the ship out of the harbor. Ned had a familiar feeling in the pit of his belly, a mixture of excitement and dread, and knew that he was headed into battle again, surely the last battle of his life, for the freedoms of the men and women of England.

He turned to Rowan, at his side as always. “When we land, I’ll give you money and you must make your way to London, to my sister’s warehouse. She’ll give you a bed and your keep until this is over.”

He could not see her expression, her face was hidden by her hat, but her voice was clear. “I’ll stay with you.”

“I’ll be going into battle if the king’s army comes against us,” Ned said. “And if it doesn’t, I’ll be training men. I don’t even know where we’ll land, but we’ve got to take the capital. If we land up north, up the east coast, it could be many days’ march, south to London.”

“Then you’ll be going to London as you say I must,” she pointed out. “I’ll go with you.”

“Not with an army of raw recruits!” he exclaimed.

“Don’t you want me with you?”

He checked his sudden denial and measured his words, conscious of her trusting gaze on his face. “Rowan, this is my mistake. I never thought we’d sail at once. I should’ve left you in London.”

She stepped a little closer. “But as your servant…”

“We both know that you’re not my servant. I bought you out of slavery to set you free.”

“Then as a free woman, I will stay with you until the danger is past,” she said.

“There’s danger now,” he said, looking out into the darkness where the wind was whipping up the dark sea into rolling waves with whitecaps.

“I’m not afraid of the sea,” she said—a woman of the ocean who had shot the breakers of the Atlantic shore in her own canoe since childhood.

He had to stop himself reaching out to cup her defiant face in his rough palms. He wanted to draw her closer, hold her, wrap her in his old cape, keep her safe. He wondered at himself that he should have become so fond of a stranger young enough to be his granddaughter.

“I should order you to safety.”

“After we land,” she bargained with him. “When we see what danger there is. Order me then.” She nearly trapped him into agreement.

“And you’ll obey me then?”

She laughed like the Pokanoket child he remembered. “Yes! If I think you’re right!”

“Very well,” he said, hiding his tenderness. “You can stay with me as we march on London, unless it looks like there’s danger, and then you’ll go to Alinor.”

“Agreed,” she said cheerfully.

ST. JAMES’S PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1685

To Lady James Avery,

Madam,

I have been commanded to muster the militia and prepare for an invasion by Argyll and Monmouth. I doubt that local forces will be able to hold the rebels from marching on London.