“What’s that?” he demanded, starting up, hand to his precious pack.

“Just the mill,” she said calmly. “They’ve opened the millrace and now the millstones are grinding. It’s noisy on a calm day.”

He followed her out into the brightness of the morning. The mudbanks and the water pools gleamed like tarnished silver, stretching to the horizon, dazzling and strange. The grinding and the clanking noise went on, as if someone were rolling back the iron gates of hell on a stone pavement.

“So loud!” he said.

“You get used to it.” She led the way down the bank onto a little spit of shingle that went into the mud of the mire and then petered out at a shallow riverbed. He walked at her side, his pack on his back, the heels of his riding boots sinking into the cloying mud and coming free with a horrid little sucking sound. Suddenly the shallow ditch beside him rushed with a gout of water that made him jump.

She laughed. “That’s the millrace, the water from the tide mill.”

“Everything is so strange here,” he said, ashamed of flinching from the water, which was now pouring along beside them, in the landscape that was otherwise so still. “My home is in the North, high hills, moorland country, it’s very dry. . . . This is like a foreign land to me, like the Lowlands.”

“The miller opens the sluice gates on the millpond, so the water pours in to turn his wheel,” Alinor explained. “And then the water rushes out to sea.”

“Every low tide?” he asked, watching the torrent beside them.

“He doesn’t mill every tide,” she said. “There’s not enough demand for flour. But he stores grain and sends it to London when the price is right.”

He heard the resentment in her voice. “You mean that he profiteers? He buys the corn cheap and sends it away to sell at London prices?”

“He’s no worse than anyone else,” she said. “But it’s hard to see the grain ship going out with her sails spread when you don’t have the money for a loaf yourself, and you can’t earn enough to buy flour.”

“Doesn’t his lordship set the price of the loaf? He should do.”

She shrugged. A good landlord would set the price and make sure that the miller took no more than a scoop of wheat as his fee. “Sir William’s not always here. He’s in London. He probably doesn’t know.”

The track she was following was invisible to him as it turned away from the mill stream, to the higher ground of a little island of shingle and then another, set amid a waste of soft mud. The harbor water was gurgling and receding all around them, all the time. Sometimes they were on the firm footing of a shingle spit, with a deep pool on the seaward side, where he saw shoals of tiny fish left by the receding water; sometimes they walked over sand ridged by the departing sea and he remembered the danger of quicksands and stepped in her footprints. Often, he thought she could not possibly know the way around deep creeks that ran through the featureless marsh. But she turned one way and then another, tracing her way through, sometimes on the seabed, sometimes through the reed banks, sometimes on the wavering shore where half-submerged stanchions and mud-buried groynes showed that someone had once built a dike and claimed land, but then lost it again to the indifferent sea.