Page 21 of Dark Tides
“What else?”
“I will come back,” he said. “I can’t leave it like this.”
She said nothing but gestured to the front door and he could do nothing but bow to her, his face flushed and angry. He had to open the front door himself, and step out onto the wharf, ignoring the stevedores loading another cargo into a ship bobbing at midtide, and walk beside the river to Horsleydown Stairs to hail a wherry to take him back to the north side, to his beautiful London house on the Strand.
He thought for a wild moment that he should plunge into the muddy tide and drown before her house, that nothing else would wash his honor clean, that nothing else would free him from this pain. He heard the clink of chains from the bones hanging at the gibbet at the edge of the River Neckinger and thought how hateful this place was. He hated Alys with a hot murderous fury, and for a moment, he even hated Alinor too. She had been his inferior in every way, his for the taking, but somehow she had slipped away from him, like a mermaid in dark tides, and his son had gone too, like a changeling stolen by faeries. He wheeled and looked back at the house. The shabby little door was tight closed.
He looked up at her window and thought he could see the pale outline of her gown as she looked down at him. At once, his hand went to his hat; he swept it from his head and stood looking up, at her, bareheaded. “Alinor!” he whispered, as if she would throw open the window and call down to him.
He bowed with what dignity he could find, put his hat on his head, and turned to walk to the water stairs to hail a waterman, but there were no craft plying the incoming tide and he stood for a lifetime, looking at the dazzle of the sunlight on the dancing ripples, wondering if he could have said anything that would have persuaded her. The day was hot and exhausting, and he felt old and defeated, marooned among the poor on the wrong side of the river.
“Sir James?”
It was the widow, with a black lace shawl over her head, as if she had run down the stairs to bring him a message. At once he turned from the edge of the quay and went towards her.
“Tomorrow is Saturday,” she said briefly. “The children come home after they have finished their work in the afternoon. If you were to come to take me for a walk at, say, four o’clock, we could come back at five. You would see the grandchildren. And perhaps they will invite you for dinner.”
“She refuses to see me ever again.”
“But you will see your boy, despite them both, if you meet me at four.”
“He’s my boy?” he said with a surge of longing. “He is?”
She spread her hands. “Only she can say. But you can at least see him.”
“You are kind to me…” he said awkwardly.
“I have no friend in England but these…” She gestured at the mean little warehouse. “And perhaps you?”
JUNE 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND
Ned walked up the broad grazing lane that ran through the center of Hadley village with a big basket loaded with the fat red strawberries grown in his garden on one arm, and on the other a basket of wild leeks and mushrooms that he had gathered from the forest. Horses, cows, sheep, and even pigs cropped the wide track that ran through the center of town. Later in summer the cows would be released to graze with a cowherd to watch over them, the pigs would run freely in the forest to root for nuts and mushrooms, tearing up the earth with their sharp little hooves and their rooting tusks, and the horses would be released to run free and only brought in to work.
The weave of the basket on Ned’s arm was the signature of the maker, a woman from the Pocumtuc who lived a few miles upriver of Ned’s ferry and had given him a basket in return for free crossings. He had taught her some English words earlier in spring, when he was digging his plot, and the women used to call his ferry over to the north bank to bring them into the little town. She had come into his garden one evening at dusk and shown him the Seven Sister stars, just visible in the evening sky, and told him that their coming was a sign that it was time to plant beneath them.
“My name,” she told him. “Plant-time Star.”
“My name Ned,” he replied.
Plant-time Star showed him how to heap the earth into hillocks, how to plant the seeds with a fish to feed them, how the three seeds—squash, beans, and maize—should grow together to feed the earth and should be eaten together to feed the body. “The three sisters,”she said, as if there was something holy about planting. “Given to us: the People.”
He had thought she would come back to see how the crops had grown but he had not seen her after an argument about fish traps set in the river. Someone going downriver to the sawmill at Northampton, steering a raft of felled logs, had grounded the boat on half a dozen of the exquisitely made basket traps. The women had complained to the elders at Hadley who had said, reasonably enough, that it was no one from the town, and that they must go for compensation to the sawmill, or to the logger himself—whoever he was. Now the women crossed the river in their own dugouts, as if they did not trust the raft ferry nor the broad green common that ran through the center of the town, where every house stared at them as they went by.
Ned missed their cheerful chatter, and the little goods they paid him as fees. He even spoke up for them at the town meeting, but no one could agree how long a native fish trap took to make, and what one of the fish traps would be worth. No Englishman had the knack of making them so no one could say, and many declared that native time was worthless anyway, and the traps were made from twigs that were worthless too.
Without the native women traders to walk with him, Ned went alone, calling at one house and then another down the street, exchanging his goods for a small tub of butter at one house, a whip of an apple tree at another, and setting some new-laid eggs against his slate at the third. He sold to households whose gardens were not as productive as his, and to those who would not spend time in the woods looking for food. The debts he paid with his produce were part of the constant exchange of the town. When Ned had first arrived he had hired other settlers to help him build his house, roof it, and set up his stock-proof fence.
“I don’t dare go into the forest,” one woman said, standing on her doorstep and looking at his basket of mushrooms. “I’d be afraid of getting lost.”
“No fish today, Mr. Ferryman?” a woman called over the stock fence, irritated at the shortage.
“Not today,” he said. “Probably next week.” He did not tell herthat he had set his fish traps as usual but someone had pulled up the stakes that held them to the riverbed and released all the fish but two or three, as if to leave enough for Ned to eat, but not enough for him to sell.
“You won’t get my business if you can’t be relied on,” she said sharply.
“Why? Who else are you going to buy from?”
She looked around at the empty lane. The women who usually brought fish and food to trade walked past in silence, their creels dangling empty from their hands, their faces closed and unfriendly.
