Alinor almost staggered with the relief. “So, it’s done, and you got away with it.”

Alys beamed at her. “It’s done, and I got away with it.”

“And you’ll never do it again,” Alinor commanded. “Promise me, Alys. It’s too great a risk. Never take anything from her again. Not even borrowing. You shouldn’t have done it this time. Promise me, you’ll never do it again. Think of the danger!”

The girl laughed as though no danger could threaten her. “I’ll promise you that I’ll never be caught,” she said gleefully. “I’ll promise not to end up on the gallows. A fool like Mrs. Miller will never catch me, and soon I’ll have far more money than Jane Miller’s dowry. You wait till I’m Mrs. Stoney, of Stoney Farm, Birdham! I won’t keep my money in a chimney. I shall have my own box at the Chichester goldsmith’s! I shall be a woman of means!”

TIDELANDS, SEPTEMBER 1648

Alinor heard nothing from James all through the month of September, but she did not expect to hear from him, and she went through the dusty days at the end of summer with a languid sense of peace. She found that she trusted him, she believed that he would go to that place—that unimaginable and mysterious place—that he called his home, and the men he called his brothers would release him from his vows. Alinor, raised in a country where Roman Catholics had been banned for nearly a century, could not imagine what rituals and oaths James might endure to be free of his blasphemous past. She thought they might frighten him with threats of endless purgatory and drench him in wine like blood and force him to eat raw flesh. Tears came to her eyes when she thought of him facing the terrible mastery of Rome. But she trusted him to be brave and confident in that world that was such a mystery to her. He had said that he would do it, and she knew that he loved her and she believed that he would convince them that he must be freed.

She was more afraid of the influence of his family, especially his mother, as she could imagine only too easily what a noble lady might say to her adored only son when he told her that he was leaving the priesthood with no greater ambition than to marry a deserted wife, a herbalist, a fisherman’s widow who made a living clinging to a muddy harbor in the tidelands of England. If the Stoneys—yeoman farmers—looked down on Alys, what would the aristocratic Summers say to her drab of a mother?