“I didn’t know,” James said quietly, realizing how much he did not know about Alinor and her life. “Perhaps she could go and live inland, where people don’t know her, where she could pass as a widow?”

“Why can’t he come home, and make everything right?” The cry came from the boy as if it were wrested from him.

James could not meet his eyes. “These are troubles between a man and a wife,” he said lamely. “I am sorry for you and for your mother. But if your father will not do his duty, I cannot make him. Neither can you, Robert. It’s not your fault.”

“The church wardens would make him!”

“They would, but he won’t come back to face them.”

“She will be shamed,” the boy said bleakly. “And they will call me a bastard.”

They rode to Cowes, Walter in buoyant spirits but Rob was very quiet. Then they spent the night at an inn on the quayside, and took a ship across the Solent. It was a calm crossing and when they landed in Portsmouth they hired horses and took the coast road, riding east, through fields and little villages with pretty waterside churches. They stayed overnight at Langstone in an old fishing inn. James woke to the smell of the sea and the cry of seagulls, and thought that for the rest of his life he would hear that mournful calling as the sound of defeat. Then they rode on, east through the marshy tidelands of Hampshire and across the county border to Sussex. When they came down the road that led south to her brother’s ferry and the wadeway, James narrowed his eyes against the low sun, looking for Alinor, where he had seen her before.

The tide was on the ebb, the water was dazzling in the rife. He almost thought that she would be waiting for him, her pale face bright with joy at seeing him. The light on the water was so bright, and he was so certain that she would come to meet him, that he saw her, her hood pushed back from her white cap, looking over the mire towards him. But it was a mirage, a false seeing in the haze of the waters, a chimera. It was her brother who came from the ferry-house, his dog at his heels, and he pulled the ferry over to them, and helped to load the hired horses.

“You can go along the bank and see your mother if you like,” James said quietly to Rob as Ned hauled the ferry, hand over hand on the rope. “Walter and I will go on to the Priory. I can lead your horse.”

Rob nodded.

“Why, what’s the matter with you?” Ned demanded, hearing the dullness in James’s voice and seeing Rob’s drooping head. “Are you sick, Rob? Is there something wrong, Mr. Summer?”

“Just weary,” James said. He had not known that the despair he felt in his belly was showing in his face. “I think we’re all weary.”