“I didn’t know you felt like this.”

“I’ve always hated being poor.”

“Rob, too?”

“Rob doesn’t matter!” Alys exploded. “This is not about your precious son, for once.”

Alys’s jealousy and her resentment stretched before Alinor for the first time, as if she was seeing the waste of Foulmire for the first time, in its vast emptiness, and smelling its mud.

“I can’t afford to offend anyone,” Alinor said quietly, the words forced from her. “If I want to earn enough to put food on the table for the two of you, I can’t afford pride.”

“I know,” Alys said.

“And Rob is not more precious than you.” She choked on her words. “Nothing in my world is more precious than you.”

“I know,” Alys repeated. She put her arm round her mother’s shoulder and held her closely. “I know what you’ve done for us. I don’t know half of what you’ve suffered—for us. You’ve been mother and father to us, I know. And it was too much for any woman to do on her own. I’m grateful, I am—really. But I’m only saying that I can’t be like you. I can’t do what you do. I can’t bend under the wheel. I can’t stand it. I’d rather risk everything than settle for a poor life, like you have.”

“You think I’ve settled for poverty?”

“Yes,” said Alys with the blunt cruelty of the young.

“I understand,” her mother said quietly. “I do understand wanting to be proud, being in love, being reckless.”

“Do you?”

She nodded, pressing her lips closed on her secret. Only last night she had been proud of her desire, entranced by lovemaking, and reckless. “I do know,” she repeated.

They stood for a moment, holding each other close, then they turned and walked side by side up the road to Chichester.

“I’m sorry,” Alys said quietly. “You know I love you. I didn’t mean to say all that.”

“I know.”

They walked a few minutes in silence then Alinor spoke: “This life isn’t what I intended for myself. It isn’t what my mother wanted for me. She thought Zachary was a man with his own boat, who’d do well. She thought we’d be neighbors, and she and I would work together, and he’d make a better life for me. She thought Ned would inherit the ferry, and have a good wife and a child of his own, and I’d have money coming in from Zachary and we’d live next door to my brother in our home. She couldn’t foresee that Mary would die, and that your father’d turn out bad.”

They walked in silence for a while until they heard a shout from behind and turned to see a farmer with a wagon piled high with fleeces, his wife sitting up beside him with baskets of cheeses.

“Going to market?” he asked as they paused on the side of the road and turned to him. “Ah, Mrs. Reekie, I didn’t recognize you, out of your way, on the Birdham road. Are you going to Chichester market?”