“It’s faerie gold, I know it!” he burst out. “I’m glad you were pleased with my service, your ladyship. I’ll go now, if you will release me.” He looked ready to run.

“What did you call me? Boy—Jem—you know that I’m nothing but the widow of the fisherman Zachary Reekie,” Alinor said. “You know I work as a midwife. I don’t do anything else. I have no faerie gold. There’s no call to name me ladyship!”

He was walking backwards, without taking his fearful eyes off her, his face ghastly in the lantern light, hurrying to get away from her. “They told me,” he whispered, “that you know things that no mortal woman knows. That your boy lives like a lord at the Priory, and your daughter is to marry the richest farmer in Sussex.”

“Well, no—” Alinor started.

“Missis, did you whistle up a storm that blew your husband away?”

Alinor tried to laugh, but his fear was infectious. “This is nonsense,” she said, her voice unsteady. “And Mrs. Grace knows it’s nonsense, for she sent you for a good honest midwife and I came.”

“No,” he shook his head. “Not her. They were afraid to send for anyone else in case you ill-wished us. So I fetched you with my fingers crossed, and then you came to her on horseback like a queen, and you sent Sir William’s own son to do your bidding. Good night, Mrs. Reekie, your honor. Good night.”

Alinor let him go, too shaken to press the coin on him, too frightened by his wide-eyed fear to laugh him into common sense. When Zachary had accused her of being in league with powers beyond this earth, she had taken it as the exaggerated language of courtship when he first saw her, and part of his hatred, as the marriage soured. That he should sow such dangerous slander to his drinking companions and that it should flower into these envious fantasies was something she had never dreamed.

Of course, people would wonder at Rob’s good fortune and Alys’s betrothal, but she had not thought that people would weave Zachary’s superstitious hatred and her survival together into a faerie story of Zachary’s doom and her revenge. It was a dark note at the end of a day that had started with thoughts of drowning and dark water. She trudged along the bank, the mud crunching with frost beneath her worn boots, opened the door, and went in.

The cottage was in darkness, the fire under the cover, the candles snuffed out. Alys was asleep on her side of the bed and Alinor felt nothing but relief that she need not speak another word until the morning.

DOUAI, FRANCE, OCTOBER 1648

James spent a week in penitent silence, sleepless with the conflicting sense of guilt and desire. Every day he met with his confessor and step-by-step they went through his first encounter with Alinor, that she had saved him and without her he would have been lost on the unmapped tidelands. She had been a savior to him.