She smiled. “I am Alinor. Alinor Reekie.”

He nodded. He could think of nothing to keep her, but he found he did not want to let her go. “I shall pray for you. And that you get your boat.”

“I might,” she said.

They spoke together and both broke off. “Will you ever . . . ?”

“If I come back here . . .”

“I don’t expect to come back here,” he admitted. “I have to go where I am sent.”

“I won’t look for you,” she assured him. “I know this is no place for you.”

“You are . . .” he started, but still there was nothing that he could say.

“What?” she asked. There was a slight blush on her neck just above the rough homespun gown.

“I didn’t know . . .” he began.

“What?” she asked softly. “What didn’t you know?”

“I did not know that there could be a woman like you, in a place like this.”

The smile started slowly, in her dark gray eyes and then her lips curved and the color rose in her cheeks.

“Good-bye,” she said abruptly, as if she did not want to hear another word after those, and she turned and went across the meadow towards the sea, where the tide was coming in, a dark line against a cloudy sky.

Elation at his words—“a woman like you, in a place like this”—lasted her for days, while she went about her work in the heat of the summer: weeding her garden, cutting herbs and drying them in the ferry-house stillroom, walking all the way to Sealsea village to see one of the farmers’ wives who was expecting her first child after the harvest. Her husband, Farmer Johnson, was well-to-do, owning his own lands as well as renting a share of the manor lands, and he gave Alinor a shilling in advance to visit his wife every Sunday, and promised her another shilling to attend the birth. She tied the two silver shillings in a rag and hid it under one of the stones of the hearth. “A woman like you, in a place like this” sang in her head through the long hours of summer daylight. She thought that when she had saved three shillings she would speak to her brother about buying a boat. “A woman like you, in a place like this.”

She repeated the words so often to herself that they came to lose their meaning. What was a woman “like her”? What was this place like, that her living here struck him as incongruous? Was there any sense that he meant the place was fine and she was not fit for it? But then she remembered his brown gaze on the neck of her gown, the warmth in his eyes, and she knew exactly what he meant and she felt the joy of his words over again.

It never occurred to her that his words were wrenched from him, that it was a sin for him to voice them, even to think them. She had been baptized into a church where ministers were allowed to marry: there had been no celibate priests or monasteries in England for a hundred years. She did not understand that it was a sin for him to even look at a woman, let alone to whisper to her with desire. She heard the words forced from him as if he could not help but speak them; but she had no idea that he would have to confess them when he returned to his monastery; he would have to tell his confessor he had fallen into a mortal sin: he had felt desire.