“Betray your oath of loyalty to him?”

“Break it.”

Lady Avery took an embroidered handkerchief from her lace-trimmed sleeve and put it to her eyes. Her husband looked steadily at the down-turned face of his son.

“Does she even know your name?” he asked.

The young man looked up and for the first time his father saw his boyish smile. “No,” he said. “She knows me as Father James. I pass as a tutor called Mr. Summer. She has risked everything for me and she doesn’t even know my name.”

TIDELANDS, NOVEMBER 1648

Alinor knocked on the door of the Mill Farm dairy and entered on Mrs. Miller’s irritated shout. Richard Stoney was carrying in extra pails of milk, the maid ahead of him with the yoke on her shoulder.

“I’ve come for two pails of milk, if you’ve any for sale,” Alinor said.

“We’ve more than we can use today,” Mrs. Miller said. “Bessy’s calf fell into the ditch and broke her neck. Bessy’s still in milk.”

“Oh, poor thing,” Alinor said. Mrs. Miller looked at her askance.

“Poor me,” she said. “I’ve lost a good calf. I’ll have to have it butchered for veal.”

“Yes,” Alinor agreed, who had never tasted the luxury meat in her life. “I thought I’d make cheese for Chichester market.”

“I’ll carry the milk to Ferry-house for you, Mrs. Reekie,” Richard said politely.

Mrs. Miller scowled at him. “She’s not your mother-in-law yet,” she said coldly. “And you work for me.”

The young man flushed. “I beg pardon,” he said shortly.

“I can manage, if I may borrow the yoke,” Alinor said. “Will you take it off Alys’s wages?”

“You’re asking for credit?” Mrs. Miller said nastily.

“I can pay you now, if you prefer,” Alinor said steadily.

“No, no, you can keep your ha’pennies. I’ll take it off her wages at the end of the week.

“Thank you.” Alinor smiled, and put the well-worn wooden yoke on her shoulders, lifted the two brimming pails, and set her shoulders to find her balance. Richard opened the dairy door for her.

“You get yourself into the mill,” Mrs. Miller ordered Richard. “He’s milling this morning and the tide won’t wait, not even for such as you.”

Richard ducked his head and trotted across the yard. As Alinor walked slowly with the yoke across her shoulders, watching the milk slopping in the pails, she heard the miller shout to Richard to open the sluice. She stood for a moment at the yard gate to watch the lad lightly running along the pond wall to turn the great iron key to open the sluice. The water from the pond poured into the millrace, and slowly, the mill wheel started to turn. There was a roar of creaking wood as the rush of waters forced the wheel round and round, and then the tumble of water on the other side of the tide-mill quay as the millrace gushed like a waterfall out into the harbor, bursting like a tide of green foam into the muddy rife. Alinor walked towards the wadeway, her head turned from the raging water of the millrace as the miller engaged the grinding stones inside the mill and there was a deafening rumble of stone against stone. Alinor crossed on the wet cobbles of the wadeway, stepping around the puddles of icy water, to the ferry-house on the other side.