“For love of us,” Alys said through her teeth. “Because she loves you and me so much she faced her worst fear for us, and she nearly died for us. I will repay her with my love. And you will pay too. You will pay for the child that she carries for love of you, you will pay for your betrayal, and you will pay for our silence. That’s worth a purse of gold. And you will go now, and bring it here at once.”

“I must see her again,” he said desperately.

The girl was like a Fury. “I would gouge your eyes out of your head and blind you for life rather than you saw her again,” she promised. “Go and get the money. Leave it on the doorstep, and go.”

“I don’t have that sort of money.”

“Steal it,” she spat at him. “It’s what I did.”

It was a cold dawn on the harbor, the tide coming in fast over snowy reeds and icy puddles, the seagulls crying white against the gray light. The barn owl, quartering the hedge line along the harbor, was bright against the dark hedge and then invisible against the frozen bank. A few flakes of snow filtered from the pewter clouds as Alys helped her mother to the seat of the wagon and climbed up beside her.

Alinor was shuddering with cold, and she constantly coughed into the hem of her cloak. Tenderly Alys took up the reins, putting her other arm around Alinor, who rested her head on her daughter’s shoulder. Alys clicked to the horse to start up the road to London.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

A few years ago I realized that, though I still loved my fictionalized biographies of well-known and lesser-known women, I wanted to write a different sort of historical fiction: actually a series of books tracing the rise of a family from obscurity to prosperity. I reread the Forsyte Saga and discovered that my favorite scenes were the few and rather minor moments when the principal character went back to explore his ancestral home. As a reader, I wanted to know more about the story before the saga; as a writer, I understood that I wanted to write a historical fiction series of many generations of an ordinary family.

So many of us are exploring our family histories these days because we want to know who our ancestors were and what they did. Some of us take that very deep, exploring epigenetics. Some of us want to trace our connections with peoples and landscapes that are now strange to us. Some of us find remarkable echoes of our own modern lives in the historical past, as if we have inherited gifts or skills or preferences. Most families are like my family: with the earliest documents showing a family as humble and poor and, by little ordinary acts of courage and years of perseverance, largely unrecorded, rising and prospering—and sometimes, of course, declining.