Page 60 of Dark Tides
“You dream of him like a wish?” the girl asked with ready sympathy.
“No,” Alinor said firmly. “I dream of him like a certainty.”
Sarah drew up the little stool and sat beside the bed. “A certainty? What d’you mean?”
“He was sure-footed, my son: that’s certain. He was a good swimmer: that’s certain. What she told us—”
“What Livia said?”
“Aye. What she told us can’t be true: that’s certain. She told us he was always taking out a boat on the lagoon, and walking on the sandbanks and islands. So he wouldn’t have drowned there. Not my Rob, not in water that came and went, that was sometimes land and sometimes sea.”
Sarah listened, wide-eyed.
“If she’d told me he’d been killed in a fight or taken sick, I might’ve believed her. Sudden, and with no time for him to think of me. If she’d told us he was buried, I might’ve come to believe it. But I can’t imagine him drowned and no gravestone in his name. Besides, if he’d drowned, I’d have known it. I’d have known the moment it happened. It’s not possible that Rob drowned—and me in the yard on a sunny day, shredding lavender, picking thyme, singing… it just couldn’t happen.”
Sarah nodded.
“I see you sitting there, thinking that I am losing my wits.” Alinor smiled at her granddaughter. “But I so nearly drowned once, myself. Could my son go beneath the water and me not feel it? In the water that’s even now in my lungs?”
Sarah got to her feet and drew the curtain a little more open so they could both see the path of the moonlight on the river.
“I keep looking for him,” Alinor confessed. “I see the sails and think one of these ships will bring him home. I think he’ll come with her statues.” She turned and smiled at her granddaughter. “For some people, this world is not quite… watertight. The other world comes in… sometimes we can reach out to it. It’s like Foulmire—sometimes it’s land and sometimes it’s water. Sometimes I know this world, sometimes I glimpse the other. Don’t you?”
“Oh, Grandma— I know you hope I do, I’d like to think that I did,” she said quietly. “But I don’t have the sight.”
“I know you do,” Alinor challenged her.
“Well it’s not clear to me…”
“It’s rarely clear,” Alinor confessed. “And I’ve no proof of anything. Nothing to say to your mother. Nothing to ask anything of Livia.”
“What would you ask her if you could?”
“I’d ask why she’s dressed in black but spending every day withanother man? Is her little heart broken but mending fast? And if she is no widow; then where is my boy?”
SEPTEMBER 1670, LONDON
The tide was on the ebb and the terns, hovering over the water, were dropping into the waves with a splash and coming up with tiny silver fish in their sharp beaks. Livia hesitated in the doorway of Alinor’s bedroom, Matteo in her arms, and spoke to Alys, who was collecting a tray full of posset bags from her mother’s worktable.
“Can you have him this morning?” she asked. “I need Carlotta to walk me over London Bridge.”
“Not now,” Alys answered. “I’m expecting a ship.”
“He can spend the morning with me,” Alinor offered. “He’s no trouble.”
“I’ll take him for a walk when they’ve unloaded,” Alys promised. “I’ll be free at noon, but then I should have another cargo this afternoon…”
There was a shout from the quay below, where a lighterman stood up in his rocking boat. “Delivery for Reekie Warehouse,” he yelled.
Alys opened the door and stepped out onto the little balcony. “Reekie Wharf! What’ve you got?” she shouted down.
He gestured to the crate in the prow of his boat. “From New England,” he said. He pointed to the ship behind him, hove to, and taking on lines from a barge to go upriver.
“Wait there! I’ll come down.” Alys hurried from the room.
Livia raised her arched eyebrows at Alinor. “How she runs when someone shouts for her!”
“She has to pay for their time,” Alinor said. “Of course she runs. I’ll go down and see as well. It’ll be something from Ned.”
