Page 69 of Dawnlands

“Four found in arms but wounded, and one of them taken up for dead on the battlefield,” the clerk said.

“Why didn’t they hang him on the battlefield?” the judge complained. “No need to bring him before me.”

“They thought he was dead, your honor.”

“Why bring him in then?”

The clerk had no reply.

“Better for him if he had been dead.” The judge glared at the prisoners. Ned kept his head down.

“Any exaggerated treason?” Jeffreys asked.

“Ten of them supplying food and mustering recruits,” the clerk said.

The judge waved away the papers with the names and straightened his black cap on his head. “All guilty. All sentenced to hang. His Majesty will determine how many of you die, how many to be transported out of the kingdom and sold.”

FOULMIRE PRIORY, SUSSEX, AUTUMN 1685

In the steward’s room that overlooked the drive at the front of the house, conveniently close to the garden door where the tenants came to pay their rents every quarter day, Alys was going over the books. At her side she had a dozen sheets of paper scribbled with the black ink of her notes and calculations. Before her on the well-worn round table was a pen and inkwell, all around her the books that showed purchases, sales, gifts of goods, tithes, loans, tenancy agreements, leases, and rents. On the wall behind her was an old survey of the lordship of Foulmire, showing the border of the estate—cutting deep through the forest of Sealsea Island, stretching five miles across the harbor. Alys noted with a wry smile that the tenants of the tide mill and Mill Farm had bought themselves out of the lordship. She would not be able to walk into the tide mill yard with the lord of the manor, where she had been the most despised of the maids, her mother named as a coiner of faerie gold.

Alinor put her head around the door and came into the room. “I knew you’d be here! D’you know it is the most beautiful day outside? Matthew and I walked to the shore, and there were seals hauled up on the beach, sitting around together like old men in an alehouse.”

“Aren’t you tired?” Alys scrutinized her mother’s flushed face.

“No. Not at all! I feel like I could walk forever. The air’s so sweet, the wind from the sea blows right through me.” Alinor looked at the ledger. “Rent books? How far back do they go? Have you found our name?” She pulled out one of the drawers of the table, each one labeled with a letter so that the steward could turn the table round and around and have the correct drawer in front of him. “I remember standing in front of this very table and asking for time to pay.”

“You weren’t the only one,” Alys said dourly. “And they’re still at it. Half of them are years behind.”

“It’s a hard land to make pay,” Alinor replied. “Dry in summer and wet in winter. But should you be looking at the books?”

“Matthew said I could,” Alys replied. “And it’s as well I did. It needs someone to get the place straight. The steward has been selling off timber from the forest and the crops in the fields. Matthew said I can dismiss him. And guess who bought Mill Farm?”

“Who?” Alinor spun the table one way and another, watching it turn.

“The Stoneys!”

At once, Alinor froze. “Your husb—?”

Alys laughed. “Aye! Who’d have thought it? The husband who left me between wedding and feast. He must have had me declared dead and married that girl—what was her name?—at the mill.”

“Jane Miller,” Alinor said. They both knew that Alys remembered the girl perfectly well. Jane, who had been jealous of Alys’s fair prettiness. Jane, who had wanted Richard Stoney for herself. Jane, who had finally netted him with the bribe of her dowry of Mill Farm, the tide mill, the granary, and the quay, and promised him a steady ordinariness that his runaway first bride would have despised. “However did they buy the lease?”

“They made money in that place, and they paid us a pittance. That’s how.”

“They must think themselves halfway to gentry!”

“We’ve got a wharf,” Alys said, instantly competitive, making her mother laugh.

“Alys, our foster son is lord of the manor! We can’t begrudge them their rise!”

“Nay, I don’t. But, Lord! Richard Stoney’s old cat of a mother must’ve been glad to see me go!”

“They never knew where we went, and they’ll never know we’ve returned,” Alinor reminded her. “They think we’re dead and that’s how we’ll leave it.”

“There’ll be stories about us,” Alys predicted. “They’ll say that we disappeared in a puff of smoke.”

“Or washed away,” Alinor smiled. “Like most of my little house. Washed away and forgotten.”