James’s parents were sure to forbid him to return to her. They would disinherit him rather than let him throw himself away on a woman that they would accuse of being little more than a hedge witch: little better than a pauper. But then she remembered that they too were landless, they too were clinging to all they had left after six years of civil war, far from their beautiful home, in exile with a defeated queen. They were papists and cavaliers and utterly damned. They could not return to England: both their religious faith and their political loyalty were criminal. They had been far above her when their king was on the throne and their faith accepted, but now they were not. The unimaginable gulf between her and their son had been destroyed forever with the smashing of the altars, with the breaking of the contract between king and people, with the end of deference. While the king could be captured by a mere cornet of the army and end up in an ordinary house in Newport on the Isle of Wight, then Alinor and James were no longer at opposite ends of society with a gulf between them unbridgeable as the mire. His parents must know, as everyone now knew, that the world was changed, that the humble people of England had risen up and that the rulers were no longer in their palaces. If a working farmer like Oliver Cromwell could rule England, why should a fisherman’s widow not rise in the world and hope for better?

“The prince has been defeated at sea and driven back to Holland. Have you heard?” Ned asked her one evening, as he sat before the cottage door and smoked his pipe to keep the biting flies from his face. His dog lay down in the shade of the bench and panted in the heat.

Alinor brought him a cup of small ale and sat beside him to sip her own. She had the pole of her distaff pushed into her belt so that the hank of wool was as high as her head and, as she sat beside him, she plucked and twisted the thread with her free hand, keeping the spindle on the end of the thread in constant motion with little taps from her foot. The hank of wool was hot in her hand and greasy with lanolin.

“I hadn’t heard. But I’ve seen no one since Chichester market. I’ve not been out of the brewhouse, or the stillroom or the kitchen. What’s happened?”

“You and Alys are working all hours. Did you get a good price for that barrel of salted fish?”

“Twenty shillings! From the grain trader ship. But what about the prince?”

“I only just heard it myself. We never hear anything here. It’s as if we were under the waters of the harbor, not just beside it. But Farmer Gaston’s wife has a cousin come to visit from London, and he told me as I ferried him across the rife. You knew that the Prince of Wales had command of a fleet?”