The sun was rising through the thick banks of rain clouds, and it was getting hot. Alinor put on her working hat, with the wide brim over her face and the fall of linen over the back of her neck to protect from the dangerous glare of the morning sun, and went back out to the garden at the side of the cottage where she grew vegetables: peas, beans, and cabbages. As she dug at the sturdy deep roots of a dock leaf, her hens saw her, and came rushing up from the shoreline. They scratched companionably, looking for worms and little insects in the turned earth, clucking contentedly at Alinor, and she scolded them gently. “You go down to the shore, don’t you scrape up my plants.” One copper-brown hen pecked up a little worm and made a funny grunting noise of appreciation. Alinor, alone under the arching sky with the empty harbor before her, laughed as if she were with friends. “Was that good, Mistress Brown?” she asked. “Tasty?”

Alinor worked all the morning, and as the sun started to slowly descend from the midday high, she went into the house, cut four slices of day-old rye bread, took two smoked fish from the rack at the chimney, a pitcher of small ale from the cool damp corner, and put them all in a little sack to eat with Alys before they started gleaning.

The tide was flowing in, there was only a quiet hiss from the hushing well as Alinor walked along the raised bank to her brother’s house and found him picking plums from the fruit tree. “Want some?”

“I’ll take some for Alys’s dinner. I’ll come tomorrow and pick the rest for bottling and drying.”

“It’s a good year. Look at the branches.”

They admired the tree, the branches bowed down with the purple fruit. Alinor ate one. “Sweet,” she said. “Very good.”

“Going to the mill for gleaning?”

She nodded, glancing at the ferry bobbing as the in-rushing tide met the flowing river.

“I’ll take you over,” he offered. He led the way down the steps to where the ferry was moored to a post, pulling on the rope and sidling in the tide. He untied it and looped the painter around the overhead rope, which stretched from one side of the swirling deep water to the other.

“Running fast,” Alinor observed.

“It’s been such a wet summer,” he said. “I’ve never known the rife so high at harvesttime. Come on.”

She stepped down to the raft and held to the rail that ran on either side. He smiled at her fear. “Still agauw? The ferryman’s daughter?”

She shrugged at her fears. “I know. I’ll walk home on the wadeway.”

“You’ll get wet feet,” he warned her. “It’s high till dusk tonight.”

“Hold tight to the rope,” she begged, as the current took the raft and pushed it farther up the rife, and the rope on the overhead line went taut and the ferry rocked.