The women, who had sat with Campion on the women’s side of the church, clucked sympathetically. The preacher shook his head sadly. “I shall pray for her in evening worship, Captain Gunn.”

Afterward, eating a cold meal in the tavern, Campion hissed furiously at Toby, “You called me simple-minded!”

He grinned. “Sh! Dribble your food.”

“Toby!”

“And for God’s sake stop looking as if you’re enjoying yourself. They’ll know we’re impostors if we look happy.”

She cut him some cheese. “I don’t know why I love you, Toby Lazender.”

“Because you’re simple-minded, my love.” He smiled at her.

They rode early the next day, crossing a land that was fertile and well watered. The sails of the mills still turned from harvest time. Many of the cottages were pargetted, their plaster outside walls molded to show sheaves of wheat or garlands of fruit. The wind blew from their backs, carrying high clouds to the east, and rippling the surfaces of the wide streams that flowed to the North Sea. Tonight, Campion thought, she would see the sea for the first time, she would be carried on a large ship and go abroad. She felt nervous of the unknown to which the seals drew her.

This was their last day. The land flattened. By afternoon they seemed to be riding their horses beneath a sky vaster than any Campion had seen. The horizon was utterly level, broken only by a few, bent trees and the shape of a farmhouse or barn. There was a tang of salt in the air, a promise of the coast, and the first, lone screeching of gulls told them that their journey would soon be over.

The houses were poorer now and fewer. The cottages, built almost as low as the salt-marshes’ tallest grasses, seemed battered by wind and rain. Tarred weatherboards clad the hovels. High overhead Campion saw geese flying in their tight pattern, their wings carrying them toward the sea and strangeness.

They stopped in the late afternoon and bought bread and cheese from a dirty, bent woman who looked at them suspiciously. “Where be you headed?”

“Bradwell,” Toby said.

The woman shrugged. “Nothing at Bradwell.” She peered at the coin Toby had given her, then gave an abrupt nod. It was none of her business if outlanders wanted to pay good money for old cheese.

They stopped to eat where the track was embanked against a marsh. A hundred yards away the rotting timbers of a boat stood like black ribs against the muddy bank of a creek. The water of the marsh was salt, the plants new to Campion. There was glasswort and sea-spurrey growing among the eelgrass, but to her they were as strange as this journey itself; reminders that she rode into the unknown.

She saw the sea for the first time in her life beyond the small village of Bradwell. It disappointed her. She had not known what to expect, but from the poets she had taken a picture of vast waters, of tons of liquid dashing itself against black rocks. From the Old Testament she had a similar expectation; of Leviathan, of the deep, of something massive, moving and treacherous.