Alinor nodded. She found she could not speak.

“Then it can be done and no one the wiser. I’ll go to work at the mill now. I’ll come home this afternoon early, saying I’m ill. You can take whatever you need to take at noon, and I’ll care for you. I’ll do whatever you need. I’ll look after you, Ma, I promise. You shall tell me what you need to eat and drink, and I’ll not leave you till it’s over. I’ll change your linen and care for you as it happens.”

Alinor said nothing.

“You have to be rid of this,” Alys pressed. “Richard can’t marry me if you are shamed, and that would break my heart and his, and our child would be born out of wedlock. You’ll have a bastard child, and a bastard grandchild. We can’t survive that. Your child is the ruin of us all: you, me, and Rob. You have to end it. I’ve never asked you for anything, Ma, but I am asking you for this.”

Her mother sat silent, her face white.

“Your shame is my shame,” the girl repeated. “When the Stoneys hear you’re with child they’ll throw me off. I’ll never see Richard again. Then we’ll both be stuck here, both of us, with our bastards, without husbands. Don’t you think they’ll turn us out, with our big bellies on us? Don’t you think Mrs. Miller, and all the goodwives like her, will have us out of the parish before we can make a charge on it? And every husband shouting that we should go, to show that it wasn’t him?”

“Two babies,” was all that Alinor could say.

“Two bastards,” her daughter corrected her. “Pauper bastards. They’ll die in the poorhouse together. No one will let us raise them.”

“I’ll think about it.” Alinor drew a breath. “I will think about it today and tell you tonight.”

“You should have thought before,” her daughter said crudely.

Alinor flinched as if she had been struck. “I know,” she said, her voice very low. “I know how grave this is.”

“If you don’t finish it here, today, then my life is ruined. Rob’s, too,” Alys loaded her mother’s guilt. “Nobody will take him as an apprentice if his mother is a bawd who keeps a bawdy house on the mire. Nobody’ll ever marry me with a bastard child and my mother with hers. We’ll be ruined whores. My uncle Ned won’t even let us on his ferry. We’ll never get off the island at high tide. And when they come to drive us out, nobody will save us. Rob will have to watch them throw stones and mud and fish guts at our backs.”

Alinor nodded. She could imagine the reflection of torches in the water as the good people of Sealsea Island gathered at dusk to rid themselves of two friendless sluts. “I know.”

“Get the herbs ready,” Alys ordered. “I’ll come home early and we’ll do it this evening.”