“We have to go,” said Rob. He looked to his mother and was surprised to see her gaze turn from him to his tutor.

“Oh, do you?”

James rose to his feet as if he did not know what he was doing. The hens scattered from the stranger; but he did not see them. “Yes, yes, I suppose we do. That’s sunset now. We should go.”

“I’ll lead the way back to the Priory,” she offered.

James wanted to agree, but there was no reason that she should guide them when her son was there.

“I can show the way,” Rob said, puzzled.

Slowly she rose from her fireside seat, and her boy came into her arms. She hugged him, and when he knelt for her blessing she put her hand on his head, whispered a prayer, and bent and kissed him. She dipped a little curtsey to Walter. “I’m glad you came,” she said to him. “You can come anytime, for your mother’s sake as well as your own, you know.”

He flushed. “Thank you,” he said awkwardly, for she was a Peachey tenant and they were, in any case, his fish. “Rob and I will come again.”

The two of them started down the path to the Priory, side by side, companionably silent. Alinor was left alone with James.

“Shall you come again?” she asked him, her tone carefully neutral.

“Yes,” he said, rushing into speech. “Yes. I want . . . I really want . . . May I come again? May I come back now, as soon as I have taken them home?”

She had a dizzy sense of the world turning too fast around her. She looked up and felt a jolt of desire as his brown eyes met her dark gray gaze.

“You can’t come through the mire on your own.”

“I’ll come the long way round. I’ll follow the road,” he said.

“Yes, you can come back tonight,” she agreed, and as if to deny her words she turned from him and kicked the embers of the fire so they were darkened and cool, and then she went along the bank towards her cottage without looking back at him.

The waxing yellow moon had turned the water of the mire to a yellowy shine, and the land to tarnished black as James turned off the main road at the ferry-house, walked quietly past Ned’s back garden, and then loped along the sea bank to Alinor’s cottage. He had left the boys in the schoolroom, evening prayers done, tasked with reading and completing some mathematical exercises, and putting themselves to bed. James did not know what was ahead of him. He did not know if he would find Alinor alone, or if her daughter would be there. He did not know, if he found her alone, what he should say, or what he should do, nor what she might allow. He could not imagine how he had dared to ask to return, nor why she should have consented. He knew that he must not break his oath of celibacy. He was sworn to the Church; he could not consider a woman as a lover, he should not even be alone with a woman outside of the confessional. But, at the same time, he knew he could not stay away.