“On what charge? Wasn’t it parliament that rebelled against the king?”

“He raised his standard first. He turned his guns on apprentice lads and clerks. He armed his lords and set them up on great horses to ride us down. He turned against us. You’re signing your boy up to the wrong side, Sister. Nobody is going to love a cavalier at the end of this summer, when they’re all defeated.”

“I don’t want him on any side,” she said fretfully. “I just want him in a good place, and my daughter with a dowry, and a fishing boat to earn my own living.”

He subsided and took a deep draft of ale. Red put his soft chin on his master’s knee. “Ah, I can talk. Talk is all I do now. For all that I marched and prayed and fought, as soon as Da died I came home to the ferryboat. I was on the winning side with my heart set on it, and now I ship a cavalier lord to and fro whenever he hails the ferry. And he never pays me a penny because the ferry is his, and I am his tenant, and he probably thinks the water of the mire is his too, the mud beneath it, and the sea beyond it.”

“You had to come home.” She wanted to comfort him, her only brother and only neighbor. “And we’d have lost the ferry if you hadn’t, and the house and our livelihood with it. There were plenty who would have been glad to take Father’s place. In Sealsea alone were dozens. They would have been queuing at the Priory gates begging for the right to it. You kept it for us, and you kept our house too. And—as it’s turned out with Zachary gone—I’d be a beggar without it. We eat out of your kitchen, and we drink out of your brewhouse.”

“Ah, it’s your home, not just mine. I don’t even want it. My troop is marching north against the Scots and I’m not there. I feel like a coward.”

“You’re no coward,” she said fiercely. “It takes courage to do the right thing. And it was the right thing to come home and keep Ferry-house and the ferry in the family. Where would we be now, if we had lost it?”

“We’d all be relying on you,” he said with a wry smile. “You and your new boat. But I did come home, and we’ve kept the ferry, and you don’t have to take a boat out if you can’t bear it. I know it’s the last thing you want to do, a woman like you.”

She heard the echo of the words: “a woman like you in a place like this” and he was surprised to see her face light up, as he had never seen her look before, not since their childhood.

“You say everything in the world has changed,” she said, and she did not sound fearful. “Perhaps I will change too.”