“You found me,” he said.

“Were you lost?”

“I think that it is England that is lost,” he said seriously. “We cannot put our king from his throne, we cannot choose how we worship God. We cannot put parliament over everything. We cannot make war against the king appointed by God to rule us.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

He hesitated. “You said last night that your brother is for parliament?”

“He ran away to fight and he would have stayed with the New Model Army; but when my father died he had to come home again to keep his right to the ferry. Our family had the rights to the ferry for generations, and we are tenants of Ferry-house.”

“It’s the only way to cross to the mainland? Your brother’s wherry?”

“It’s not a wherry,” she corrected him. “It’s more like a raft on a rope across Broad Rife,” she said. “Broad Rife flows between Sealsea Island and the mainland. It’s not deep—you can wade across at low tide. The wadeway is cobbled, so you can’t get stuck in the mud. My brother keeps the wadeway, and ferries people who don’t want to get their feet wet, and women going to market carrying their spun yarn or their goods, and at high tide the wagoners, or Sir William, who loads his horses and carriage on the ferry when the water is too high.”

“He rows people across?”

She shook her head. “He pulls on a rope. It’s like a big raft, a floating bridge, big enough to take a wagon. At mid-tide the current’s very strong. The ferry is hooked fore and aft to an overhead rope so that he doesn’t get swept away by the tide and out into the mire, and then out to sea.”

He saw that she went pale at the thought of it. “Have you always been afraid of water?” he asked curiously. “Living here, on the shore?”

“The daughter of the ferryman and the wife of a fisherman.” She smiled. “I know full well that it’s foolish, but I have always had a terror of it.”

“Then how will you fish when you get your boat?” he asked.

She smiled and gave a little shrug, rising to her feet and picking up his bowl and his cup. “I’ll have to find the courage,” she said. “I can row and I can throw a net, and the children can help me. I won’t ever go out to sea on the deep waters. I’ll stay inside the harbor bar. And then, if your side gets your way, and the king comes to his own again and the church goes papist, I can sell fish in the market and at the doors on all the fast days.”

“I will send you money for a boat when I get home,” he promised her.

She smiled as if it was a pleasantry. “Where’s your home?”

He hesitated, but he wanted to trust her with the truth. “I live at my college in France,” he said. “My family sent me to the English college at Douai when I was a boy of twelve, and I stayed on and took my vows as a priest. When the war started, they were glad that I was safely out of the way. My father fought against parliament and was defeated, wounded at Naseby. Now, he and my mother are in exile, with the queen in Paris, and I am a seminary priest, sworn to come to England to bring people back to the true faith.”