Page 18 of Dark Tides
As Alys went into her counting room, in the corner of the warehouse, and Alinor rested upstairs, Livia left the baby with the nursemaid, put on her hat, and walked out on the quayside where the incoming tide was running fast, slapping against the walls and sweeping away the rubbish upstream. Laborers fell back from her path with exaggerated respect, lounging sailors tipped their caps to her face and whistled behind her back. She ignored them all, walking through them as if she were deaf to the shouted suggestions and catcalls. She did not turn her head, she did not flush with embarrassment. Only once did she stop, when a tall broad man blocked her path and seized her hands.
“Gi’ us a kiss,” he said, bending down and breathing a warm gust of beer into her face. To his surprise, instead of shrinking back she instantly gripped him tightly and pulled him closer, so that she couldkick him, hard, just under the kneecap with her pointed shoe. He let out a yelp of surprise and pain and jumped back.
“Vaffanculo!”she spat at him. “If you lay one finger on me, you’ll be sorry.”
He bent and rubbed his knee. “God’s blood, missis… I just…”
She turned her head and walked away before he could answer.
“Oy! Oy!” came the shout from his mates. “No luck, Jonas?”
He straightened up and made an obscene gesture, but he let Livia walk on, upriver. She turned inland from the quay along the little road that ran, potholed and muddy, behind the warehouses. She turned again, onto a cart track leading south, lined with small cottages with vegetable gardens. Behind them were green fields, and beyond them, a slow rise of green hills trimmed with darker hedges, capped with the soft billows of midsummer woods. Livia shaded her eyes and looked towards the horizon: nothing.
Nothing.
Livia, who had lived most of her life among the crowded squares and busy markets of Venice, saw nothing but emptiness: a waste of green, a few cows, a child watching them from the shade of an ash tree, and in the distance, the smoke from the chimney of an isolated farmhouse. Nothing.
“Dio!”she said horrified. “What a place!”
She gave a little “tut” of disapproval at the absence of activity, of shops, or diversion; she sighed irritably at the silence broken only by the cry of the seagulls over the river and the aspiring trill, high above her, of a lark. There was nothing here to give her any pleasure, and she turned her back on the fields, and went back the way she had come. The birds were singing in the hedges as she walked; she did not hear them.
“Where is she?” Alinor asked the maid who brought her some warm broth.
“Walking.”
“Where has she gone walking?” she asked Alys, who came in, stillwearing her baize apron from the counting house, with an ink stain on her finger.
“I don’t know. I didn’t even know she was out,” Alys said indifferently. “Perhaps she’s walked over Horsleydown.”
“Wouldn’t she have taken the nursemaid? Wouldn’t she have taken the baby for fresh air?”
“I don’t know,” Alys said again. “Ma, this afternoon…”
“Yes?”
“Are you sure you want to see him? You don’t have to see him at all, of course. I can just tell him…”
“What’s he coming for?”
“I don’t know.”
“For his child?”
“He doesn’t have a child,” the younger woman replied stubbornly. “He’ll never learn it from me.”
“Nor me,” Alinor promised, and when her daughter looked at her she smiled, with her old confidence. “Truly.”
“He knew you were with child back then?”
Alinor turned her head away.
“Ma, did you tell him?”
“He knew I was carrying his child; but he did not claim me, nor own it.”
“He may claim you now,” Alys warned her; and was surprised by the luminous clarity of her mother’s smile as she raised her head.
“Then he’s a bit late,” she said.
