“You’ve not heard from Zachary?” Ned asked, thinking that she might have had news of her missing husband. “You look feverish.”

“No,” she said, finding a smile and meeting his eyes. “No. Nothing. It’s just me! I am filled with impatience: I have spring fever in the wrong season. Canterbury tales after Midsummer Day! I think it must be Rob leaving home, and knowing that I can start to save a dowry for Alys, and I have a boat of my own. I feel as if I am young again and free, and could go anywhere or do anything.”

He nodded, putting her rapid speech and the brightness of her eyes down to the wildness that was always a danger, even in the best of women. They could not help themselves. They were like the swallows that were swooping round and round, rejoicing in skimming and dipping in the mill rife, flirting with the warm air, building tiny perfect homes in houses and barns: wild and tame at once, here for summer, gone in winter, perfectly inconstant. He thought his beautiful sister was like a swallow, and that she should never have been tied down to one place. Certainly, she should never have been given in marriage to a man who was so much of the earth that he had probably sunk himself in deep waters and was even now rotting under barnacles on a seabed.

But there had never been a choice for her: she was a woman and had to marry, as all women do, and she was a poor woman who would never go anywhere, however bright her face and breathless she might be. Their mother, knowing that her own death was coming near and nearer, had insisted that Alinor marry, hoping to leave her safe, not knowing that Zachary himself was a wandering haven, no more trustworthy than the shore, vagrant as the tidelands.

“You’ll never get Alys married if she’s inherited your wildness,” he said sternly.

“Ah, she’s a good girl,” Alinor said, immediately defensive of her daughter, sleeping inside the cottage. “She works so hard, Ned. She wants a better life, but you can’t blame her for that! And—see—I only dream.”

“Dreams are worthless,” he ruled. “And anyway, how are you finding the boat?”

The smile she turned on him was so dazzling, it could be nothing to do with the boat. “Rob came over from the Priory two weeks ago with Master Walter and his tutor, and we all went fishing.”

He could see nothing in this to make a woman look as if the world was opening up before her. “Catch much?”

“Yes.” She gestured to the bank. “We made a fire. We ate together. We were just there.” She laughed.

Her joy was a mystery to him. He finished his cup of ale and got to his feet with a grunt at the twinge of pain from the rheumatism that twisted his joints from a childhood of hauling on the damp rope of the ferry and working in all weathers at every high tide.