Page 53 of Dawnlands

Alys nodded and took up her mug of small ale.

“And beauty.”

“You think she’s beautiful?”

“Oh, very.”

Alys hunched a shoulder.

“Clever,” her mother pointed out. “She speaks better than some country folk, and she had to learn it. And she knows herbs, and Ned says she can hunt and cook her own food.”

“What good is that to me in a daughter-in-law? She can’t sew or cook or keep house,” Alys said. “When my son, Johnnie, marries, he’ll need a woman who can run a good house, and the business as well. Johnnie wants a woman who can rise with him.”

“If he wanted a woman like that, he would be married already,” Alinor said mildly. “You’ve put enough in his way, God knows.”

“I want to see him happily married to a young woman of property—” Alys broke off as she heard a footstep on the stair and Matthew tapped on the door.

“Come in!” Alinor called, and Matthew stepped into the room, knelt before Alinor for her blessing, and then bowed his head for his mother to kiss him.

“What a surprise! Have a cup of small ale!” Alinor said, getting up from her place and fetching an extra cup from the sideboard.

“Is everything all right?” his mother asked. “Is there news?”

Matthew shook his head. “I know nothing from court, I haven’t seen my mother since I took her to the wherry. She’s disappeared behind the palace walls as she always does. But in the coffeehouse they said that the Somerset militia dropped their weapons and tore off their uniforms rather than face the duke outside Chard. But I don’t know where they are now.” He looked at the woman who had been a mother to him, and to her mother, who had been his grandmother. “I didn’t come about Uncle Ned. I’ve got news for you about myself.”

He unrolled the Foulmire deeds on the breakfast table, clearing a little space and moving the plates. The two women looked at the vellum, the sealing wax, and the wide ribbons.

“What’s this?” Alys asked.

Alinor put a hand out and touched the document. “Deeds?” she asked. “For land?”

Matthew turned the document towards her and unfolded it so that she could see the twirling gothic writing:Deeds of the Manor and Parish of Foulmire in the Manhood of Sealsea Island, county of Sussex.

“The queen gave it to my mother for me.”

Alys rose up from the table as if the document were a venomous snake that might lunge towards her. “What d’you have to do for it?”

He smiled. “No more than I’ve done already. I was loyal to the queen when she needed someone. I brought her here. You would have given her passage to Rome. This is our reward.”

“From the queen, perhaps,” Alys said, her hands on the back of the chair, staring at the document. “But Livia’ll want something more for it. This is not a gift but a bribe.”

“I’m not bribed!” Matthew said indignantly. “This is a reward. We could’ve been the saving of the queen’s life! She has rewarded us. And of course, my mother’s prosperity is mine.”

“Her debts too, her crimes too,” Alys insisted.

“Ma Alinor!” he appealed to the older woman. “I thought you would be pleased? I thought I’d take you to your home?”

Alinor was silent for a moment, her hand resting on the pages, then she drew them towards her and, carefully, her finger tracing under the long words, read the list of the property: the manor house and stables, barns and outbuildings, the equipment tools and beasts, the field near the seashore, the seashore itself. The settlement at East Beach, the ferryboat at the wadeway, the harbor known as Wandering Haven, and the quay at Sidlesham. The woods, the shore, the fields, and the summer pastures. The fishing rights and the church tithes, the living, and the seawall, the game birds in the air and on the ground, salvage rights from the sea, the samphire on the beach, and the minerals under the earth.

“It’s all here,” she said wonderingly, as if she could see the landscape laid out before her, the old Priory house nestling in the meadows, the shingle beach beyond it, the church beside it, and in the graveyard her own mother’s stone, and beyond that the ferry-house where her brother and father and grandfather had worked the ferry between Sealsea Island and the mainland.

“It’s all mine,” Matthew said simply. “I’ve won it for you. For you both. Will you come and live there, Ma Alinor? Shall I take you home?”

BRIDGWATER, SOMERSET, SUMMER 1685

Monmouth called a meeting of his senior officers and trusted sergeants in St. Mary’s Church. Ned leaned against a pillar at the back of the church listening, as the duke, looking years older than the arrogant aristocrat of Amsterdam, outlined an audacious plan. “My lords,my comrades, this very day I have learned that the king’s army is camped not three miles from here, all unprepared in the marshlands.”

There was a murmur of excitement. Monmouth threw up his hand. “I know!” he said gladly. “It’s a chance, given to us by God. We outnumber them, and He is on our side. They outgun us; but they are sleeping tonight, with no idea that we are so close.”