“I wish he could have lived to see this day,” Ned said of his father. “He would never have believed it possible.”

Alinor bowed her head in silence. “I miss her,” was all she said.

The four of them turned and went into church, Alys and Alinor going up the stairs to the wooden gallery where the workingwomen of the parish stood in silence, Ned and Rob stood at the left of the nave where the men of the parish waited bare-headed for the Peachey household to enter and Sir William to take his seat. Only when the nobility arrived would the service to God take place. Ned muttered to Rob that nothing would ever change in the tidelands, no matter what took place elsewhere.

There was only one chair: his lordship’s, placed before the chancel steps like a throne. Walter was in Cambridge, and there were no guests at the Priory to sit in the Priory pews. The household stood behind the empty seats. Alinor, looking down from the gallery on his lordship’s beautiful dark felted hat trimmed with a dark feather and a silver pin, as he processed slowly into church, wondered if he missed his son, or if he had heard anything from his son’s former tutor. She knew that she could never ask him, nor anyone of his household. She tightened her thick winter shawl over her round belly, and watched the minister step towards the lectern, bow low to his lordship, and begin.

The service—the new service, as designed by the parliament and delivered by the Church that obeyed them—went through the usual prayers and readings. But when it came to the sermon the minister looked at the men at the back of the church and said, “Edward Ferryman, are you there?”

“Present!” Ned replied with the promptness of an old soldier at roll call.

“Would you tell us what you have witnessed in London, so that we may all know what has befallen the king who betrayed his people?”

The men either side of Ned parted to make him a path to the chancel steps. He came cautiously forward.

“I was not party to any councils or explanations,” he said. “I can only tell you what I saw.”

“The view of an honest man. The report of an honest man is all we want from you,” the minister assured him, and some of the more godly parishioners said: “Amen.”

Alinor found she was holding her hands tightly under the shelter of her shawl. She did not know what Sir William would make of Ned’s report; she did not know if Ned might, with this encouragement, overstep the line of deference. Rob glanced upwards over his shoulder, to the gallery where his mother stood, and she knew he would be thinking the same thing. His apprenticeship in Chichester did not start till the next day. His chance could be blighted before it had even begun.

Ned walked to the minister and then turned to the people in the church. He bowed slightly to Sir William, who gestured that he should speak.