She dropped a deep curtsey. “I’m very grateful.”

He gave her a hard look. “If anyone asks, you will tell them that his lordship is generous to poor tenants.”

She dipped a curtsey again. “Yes, sir. I know, sir.”

She turned and walked to the lych-gate with Alys on one side of her, Rob on the other. The two women, mother and daughter, kept their eyes on the ground, and their white-capped heads bowed, the picture of submissive obedience.

“He doesn’t know about the rabbit then,” Alys said with satisfaction.

TIDELANDS, JULY 1648

Rob did not have clothes fit to wear to the Priory and stubbornly resisted the preparations, saying that he did not want to go into service with the Peachey son and heir. He said that he did not know him, that they would not be able to play together, for how could a son of the Peachey family wrestle with the son of a fisherman, or race frogs? But when his mother told him of the food he would eat in the great hall, of the five shillings that would come to them at once, and that it would pay the next quarter’s rent, buy the family a boat, and pull them out of the poverty that always yawned before them like the trough of a drowning wave, he stopped complaining and went to the ferry-house after dinner to borrow a jacket that had once belonged to Alinor’s father, and a pair of Ned’s old boots.

Ned walked back with his nephew at low tide, his dog, a water dog with a bright rufous coat, trotting at his heels.

“Sister,” he said brushing Alinor’s forehead with his lips.

“Brother,” she replied.

She poured him a mug of small ale and he drank it sitting on the bench at the doorway with his back against the cottage wall, overlooking the harbor, his dog, Red, sitting at his feet, looking longingly at the hens as they pecked along the scum at the low waterline.

“I brought you one of those little tokens that you like so much.” He dug into the pocket of his jacket, bringing out a tiny metal disc, snipped into shapelessness and tarnished black.

“Oh, thank you, Ned,” she said with pleasure. “Where did you find it?”

“In the dipping pond behind the house. It’s been so wet, I think it must’ve washed out of the ditch. It caught my eye. How would anyone lose a coin beside a pond?”

“So long ago,” she said, turning the little token over in her hand. “It makes you wonder what they were doing there, doesn’t it? So many years ago. Standing there, with this coin in her hand. Perhaps she threw it in for a wish.”

It was a coin from the time of the Saxon kingdom, from when the Saxons had ruled the tidelands, pushing through the reed banks and the mud in their longboats, building their farmsteads on the islands. Alinor had collected the tokens since childhood, and kept them in her treasure box. Her mother had laughed at her as a miser with a hoard of fool’s gold, but had praised her sharp eyes and told her to watch carefully in case one day she found a coin of value. Only once had Alinor found a beaten coin of silver and they had taken it to be assayed and weighed in Chichester. The goldsmith had given her sixpence for it, a fortune to the little girl. All the other coins in her collection were made of bronze or enameled silver, the valuable metal rubbed off over the years. But she had never wanted them for their value. She loved them for their age, for the sense of them belonging to a forgotten time, to people who were not remembered anymore, the coins engraved with strange symbols and shapes rubbed to invisibility.