He had been promised to the Church since boyhood, and his teachers had trained him and inspired him, and then sent him out into the world to travel in secret, meeting with royalists and sharing their plans, going from one besieged palace to another, carrying funds from the exiled queen, plans from the imprisoned king, promises from the prince. He had been in some dangerous and frightening places—slept in priest’s holes, hidden in cellars, served the Mass in attics and stables—but he had never before spent the day with no refuge, alone on an unmapped shore, or followed the footsteps of a common woman who held his safety in her roughened hands.

He felt for the gold crucifix that he wore under his fine lawn shirt and gripped its awkward outline. Superstitiously he glanced at the mud beneath her feet to be sure that she was making footprints like a mortal. Even though he could see the sharp tracks of the wooden pattens, he crossed himself, thinking that she was an unearthly guide to an ungodly land, and if it were not for the power of his faith he would think himself lost indeed, walking through a world of ancient elements: water, air, and earth.

They walked on, for perhaps an hour in silence, and then she turned sharply left and scrambled up the harbor bank and he saw, dark against the dark sky, a ramshackle hovel, walls of driftwood infilled with dried mud, thatched with reeds from the marsh. It looked like sea wrack thrown up by a high tide. She leaned against the ill-fitting door that creaked as it opened.

“The net shed,” she announced.

It was pitch-dark inside, the only light from the moon coming in glimmers through the cracks in the walls.

“Do you have a candle?”

“Only in the house. You can’t show a light here. It’d be seen from the mill on the other side of the mire. You’ll have to sit in darkness, but it’ll be dawn soon and I’ll bring you breakfast and some ale.”

“Is your house nearby?” He was apprehensive at being left here alone in the dark.

“Just along the bank. And it’ll soon be light,” she reassured him. “I’ll come back when I can. I have to set the fire and fetch the water. I have to wake my children and give them breakfast. Then, when they’re gone for the day, I’ll come back. You can sit here on the nets; you can sleep.”

She took his hand—he felt the roughness of her scarred palm—tugged at it so that he bent down, and she pushed his hand against the rough twine of a heap of nets. “There,” she said. “The old nets. It’s not good enough for you but I don’t know where else you can go.”

“Of course it’s good enough for me,” he assured her, his voice eager and unconvincing. “I don’t know what I would have done if I had not met you. I would have slept in the woods and been washed away by the hissing waters.” He tried to laugh; she did not.