“Where’s Alys?” he asked.

“She’s having her dinner at Stoney Farm with the Stoney family, and staying the night there. She’s fine. But what is it with you?”

“I . . . It is . . . We met . . .”

Inwardly, she cursed the priest who had taken her boy from his home, over the seas, and brought him back speechless with distress. “Are you hungry?” she asked him, to give them both time.

“No!” he exclaimed, thinking that she could not waste her bread on him, that it would be hard for her to earn it when everyone knew that she was an abandoned wife.

“Have a cup of ale, then,” she said gently, and went to the jug and poured them each a cup. Then she sat beside him, and clasped her hands in her lap to keep herself still. “Tell me, Rob. It’s probably not that bad. It’s never as bad—”

“It is bad,” he insisted. “You don’t know.”

“Tell me then,” she said steadily. “So that I do know.”

“I saw my da,” he said quietly, his face downcast. “At Newport, on the island. He had a ship, he’s master of a coastal trader. It’s called the Jessie.” He snatched a quick look at her face. “Did you know?”

“No, of course not, I’d have told you.”

“He could’ve come home to us months ago,” he said. “But he didn’t.”

She gave a little sigh. “This doesn’t shock me,” she promised him. “Nor hurt me, neither.”

“I saw him, and I called his name, and he saw me and he ran,” Rob said, his voice quavering a little. “I didn’t think it at the time, but now I think that he knew me at once, and ran from me. But I went after him like a fool, and Walter and Mr. Summer after me.”

Now she flushed, a deep humiliated blush that rose from her neck to her forehead. “Master Walter and Mr. Summer were there, too?”

“Course they were! They met him.”

“Oh, no!”

“Yes.” He nodded. “Awful. We all went with him into an inn, a small dirty place where he had a slate. I think Mr. Summer paid for everything. And he said he’d been pressed by the navy, the parliament navy, and escaped from them when they went over to the prince, and then he got a passage on a coastal trader. He said he’d come to breakfast with us the next morning, but he didn’t. He went on an errand for Mr. Summer and never came back. We thought we might see him in Cowes, but though I went down to the quayside he wasn’t there, and they hadn’t seen his boat. Mr. Summer says that he won’t come back here.”

With one hand shading his eyes so he did not see her face, he stretched out his other hand and she gripped it tightly.

“I don’t even know there was an errand,” he said, his palm clamped over his eyes. “It may be that they lied to me, thinking I was a child, thinking I am a fool. Maybe he just ran away, and Mr. Summer lied for him.”