There was little chance, James thought, that his mother, Lady Avery, would join such a court, to serve an uncrowned king. His father would never compete for office or duties with corrupt adventurers, and if they were not appointed by the king in exile, why would they stay in exile? They would come home, James thought. They must come home to Northallerton in Yorkshire and James would be able to return with them to his own fields, to his childhood home, and feel the cold winds blow off the moors again, and hear the cry of the peewit as it tumbled, spade-winged, in the clear sky.

He would present Alinor to his parents as the woman that he loved and intended to marry, and surely they would allow him to live with her, in a new house that he would build, perhaps in the fields below the great house: perhaps a small house, a manor house, set in a walled garden for her herbs, with a fruit orchard. He would present her to the village and the parish as his wife, acknowledging that they could not yet be legally married, but calling her his betrothed, and demanding for her the respect that an Avery commanded in the manor of Northside. And he was certain that, though people would gossip behind their hands, though his mother would disapprove, in a world of such momentous change in which everything was turned upside down, and a middling farmer from Cambridgeshire was running the country, the fact that the future Lady Avery was not yet married to the son and heir would quickly become old news.

All he had to do, James thought as the road wound over the height of the South Downs, so pale and gray and misty in the bitterly cold morning, was convince Alinor to leave her little fisherman’s cottage, her beloved daughter and her adored son, and come north with him. Confidently, James thought he could do that. She could bring her daughter and son, if she wanted, if that was the price of her coming. Or they could visit. Or anything, James thought passionately, any condition she wanted to make. If she would only come to him.

TIDELANDS, FEBRUARY 1649

Ned, Rob, Alinor, and Alys walked along the bank at the side of the harbor, past Alinor’s old cottage and net shed, through the quickthorn tunnel, dropping down to the shingle beach, bending their heads beneath the low boughs of the overhanging oak tree, then climbing up the rough steps cut out of the sea wall to the footpath to the church. The rumbling of the millstones across the mire and the rush of the millrace water sounded loud on the cold air, and Alinor glanced back as if she feared that the waters were rising up after them. Ned helped the two women over the stile into the churchyard and they went silently in single file along the path that wound through the gravestones. Ned and Alinor paused before the plain stone that marked their parents’ burial site.