“This isn’t your fault.” She felt that she could wail with pain that anyone should turn from Rob, that his own father should run from him. “This is the fault of the man that Zachary is, not the boy that you are. He can’t live with me: p’raps that’s my fault. But it’s nothing that can be blamed on you. You’ve been a son that anyone would be proud of, and Alys a daughter that anyone would love. Zachary cannot live with me, nor I with him. But that’s our fault. It doesn’t fall on the two of you.”

“Did you ever think he’d come back?”

“I didn’t know,” she confessed. “As the months went on, I thought it less and less likely, but I didn’t know. Just this Midsummer Eve I went to the graveyard in case his ghost was walking, so that I’d know for sure that he was dead. God forgive me, Rob, I was hoping he was dead so that we wouldn’t have to think of him anymore. When I didn’t see his ghost, I knew he must be alive, and was choosing not to come home to us. But it’s still not your fault, Rob.”

She felt a pulse of shame that she had met the priest in the graveyard when she should have been undertaking a vigil for the ghost of her husband, and now he had met Zachary, and they had spoken together of her. She could not imagine what Zachary might have said. If he had repeated the wild accusations he used to make—of her taking faerie gold for whoring in the other world, of her witchcraft and unmanning him—she would be shamed before James Summer forever. If he had convinced James that Ned’s wife had died because Alinor was negligent or worse: murderous; then she might face questioning. She closed her eyes at the shame and the danger that Zachary could still bring her. They sat side by side, both blinded with distress for a moment.

“It’s not your fault, Rob,” she repeated steadily. “And much of it’s not my fault either.”

“What’ll we do?” Rob asked anxiously. “If he doesn’t come back? You’ve got the boat now, but you can’t sell fish to fishermen, and when Walter goes to university I’ll have to find other work, and nothing’ll pay as well. And Alys can’t marry without a dowry.”

“I don’t rightly know what we’ll do,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. “But I have the herbs and the babies. I’ve been paid by Farmer Johnson. Everyone will go on having babies, God bless them. And if peace comes, and the bishop comes back to his palace, then I’ll get my license from him, and I’ll be able to charge more and I’ll be called out to more homes.”

“Not when they know that Da’s left us,” Rob contradicted her. “Not when they know you’re not a widow nor a wife. You’ll never get your license then. Even if the bishop comes back. You won’t be a woman of good repute. They won’t even let you into church; you’ll have to stand in the porch. They won’t let you in for communion.”