“I would not!” Alinor cried out. “I’ve spent my life trying to keep you safe and now you’ve lain with a man before marriage, and stolen—” She cut off her cry and dropped into a whisper though they were alone under the wide sky, and the empty track stretched north ahead of them.

“I haven’t stolen. I’ve borrowed. He loves me. And she won’t catch me. It is worth the risk.”

“You think that now . . . you’ll think differently later.”

“I do think this now. So I acted now.”

“You’ll change. You’ll look back and this’ll seem like madness to you. And you’ll think I was mad not to stop you. I was wrong not to stop you. I should’ve taken the purse off you, the moment you brought it out.” Alinor choked on the rising bile in her mouth. “I thought it was my purse! My red leather purse filled with nothing but my little coins! I thought I was going mad.”

“Then I would have lost him. You heard them.”

“Even so. Better to lose him than—”

“I knew you wouldn’t go against me, Ma. I knew you’d never let me down.”

“I shouldn’t have gone along with you. This is a hanging matter, Alys. If you’re caught with that purse on you, they’ll hang you for a thief.”

“They won’t catch me. I’ll put it back. But I swear to you, that if I can’t marry him, I will die. If you forbid me, I’ll run away. If he were to leave me, I’d drown myself in the millpond.”

Alinor thought that she was the last woman in Sussex to argue against a desire that was more than life itself. How could she blame her daughter for doing nothing worse than she had done? Alinor had risked her life, going into the locked room above the stables with James, and since then she had lied to everyone.

“We’d better go back now to the tide mill, and put it back at once. If I call her into the yard, and you hurry into the house—”

“No. I know how to do it, really I do. I know when. She always goes out at dusk, every evening, to shut up the hens. She likes to shut them up herself. She’s afraid that I’ll steal the daytime eggs. She’s so mean. She goes out at dusk, and there’s never anyone in the kitchen then. I can put it back then.”

“How d’you know her hiding place?”

“I was in the yard when the corn merchants came, and she sold them corn that should have gone to the poor of the parish. They paid twice the price and the poor went hungry. It’s dirty money, Ma. Every time she does a deal that she knows Mr. Miller wouldn’t like, she keeps the money from him, and puts it into Jane’s dowry purse. Now and then, she sneaks it out to buy herself something special, or something for Jane’s bottom drawer. Once, she asked me to buy some gilt chains from the pedlar at the gate and the coins were hot and she had sooty fingers. I didn’t know where she kept the purse, but I knew it must be in the chimney. I just jiggled the bricks till I found the loose one.”