TIDELANDS, JULY 1648

Alinor walked with her boy on the seashore path to the Priory through a haze of midges and mosquitoes that rose as their steps crushed driftwood and dried reeds at the high-water mark. The tide was coming in; they could hear the bubble of the hushing well as they turned inland, away from the rising waters, across the Priory meadow, the haystacks as pale as straw in the late summer sunshine.

She said: “You’ll come home on Michaelmas Day and I’ll see you every Sunday in church.”

He was pale with fear. “I know,” he said shortly. “You’ve said it a dozen times.”

“I’ll come to the kitchen and ask after you on Friday. You can tell the cook if you want to see me before then, and she’ll tell me.”

“You said.”

She nodded. “If you really don’t want to go, you don’t have to. We can manage.”

“I’ve said I’ll go.”

She turned the handle on the wooden door set in the flint wall and suddenly remembered leaving the priest, Father James, to hide behind the haystack while she spoke to Mr. Tudeley. The metal handle was warm from the sunshine, the timbers of the door dry to her touch, just as they had been on that day last month. She felt that she was wrong to think of that moment, of that man, when she was sending her own son into service.

“Come on then,” she said, giving him a smile for courage, dismissing the day that a priest had looked at her with desire and said: “a woman like you.”

They went through the garden, to the kitchen door. The cook looked up from the table where she was kneading an enormous ball of dough, floury to the elbows. “You’re expected,” she said. She looked Rob up and down. “Good lad,” she said. “You mind your manners here and this will be a great chance for you.”

He pulled his hat off his head. “Aye, mistress.”

“You say ‘Yes, Mistress Wheatley,’ ” the cook corrected him.

“Yes, Mistress Wheatley,” he repeated.

“Stuart will take you up,” she said, turning her head and shouting towards the hall. “Where is that man?”

Stuart appeared in the doorway, a thin man dressed in the Peachey livery with down-at-heel shoes.

“Look at the state of you!” she scolded, without any hope of improvement. “Take Goodwife Reekie’s boy in to Mr. Tudeley. He’s expecting him. In his room. And then come straight back here. You’re wanted to get the platters down.”

He nodded to Rob and turned towards the door that led to the steward’s room.

“Wait! Say good-bye.” Alinor caught her son as he was following obediently, without another word to her.

He turned back to her, his face pale and closed, and dropped to his knee before her. She put her hand on his curly head in her blessing and then she bent down and kissed him. “Be good,” she said inadequately. She had no words for how much she loved him, how much she hated leaving him here. “God bless you, son. I will see you at church on Sunday.”