Page 31 of Dark Tides
Gently, and then with more confidence, Alys swept the brush through the thick mass of black hair. “It is beautiful,” she said.
“Roberto used to brush it for me. He said that your mother had hair like a wheat field, yours was the color of barley, and I had hair the color of night.”
Alys finished the plait with a neat bow of white ribbon, and turned to undress herself, as Livia went to the bed. “Which side do you like?”
Alys kept her face turned away. “I never slept in the same bed as my husband. I don’t have a side. I don’t know which.”
“Ah,” Livia said quietly. “I will go this side, then, near the door in case I have to go to little Matteo in the night, and you shall sleep by the window, unless the sunlight is too bright for you when it rises?”
“No, no,” Alys said. “The shutters are closed, and anyway, I’m an early riser.” She coiled her hair into a loose knot, pulled on a cap, dragged a nightgown over her clothes, and then blew out their candle. In the dark she shuffled out of her gown and petticoats under her nightgown before shaking them out and laying them on the chest and getting into bed. It occurred to her, for the first time, that though she had lain with a man she had passionately loved, they had never had even one night together, parting on their wedding day.
She lay rigid, stiff as a bolster, her head on the pillow pointing south, her feet due north, like a locked compass. She did not dare to stretch or slump.
“Are you cold?” came a whisper out of the darkness.
“A little.” She did not know what she felt.
A warm hand reached under her shoulders and drew her close. “Rest your head here,” Livia invited. “We are both lonely, we are both alone. Rest your head here, and we can sleep together.”
Through the thin nightgown Alys could feel the warmth of the young woman, she could smell her perfume of roses. Slowly she relaxed, and they fell asleep lulled by the quiet lapping of the low tide.
JUNE 1670, LONDON
In the morning Livia was still sleeping, dark eyelashes swept down over the soft curve of her cheek, as Alys got up, dressed in silence, and tiptoed from the room for fear of waking the young woman who sleptthrough the noise of the stirring house as if she were the princess in the story, and would wake only to the kiss of a prince.
Alys plaited her hair and put on her cap in the counting house before going into the kitchen where Tabs was blowing the embers into life. “Give me a small ale, please,” she said.
“Thirsty?” Tabs demanded cheerfully. “I’m thirsty. It’s that hot in my attic you’d never think it.”
“Yes,” Alys said repressively. “Can you lay the table for breakfast, Tabs? We’ll just be us four. Mrs. Alinor won’t be down. I’ll take up her tray.”
“Getting it done now,” the young woman confirmed. “Will you take her a small ale now?”
Alys took a cup and went up the stairs, although she did not turn to the right to her mother’s door but went to her own bedroom.
Livia was sitting up, leaning against the plain pillows, her embroidered cap framing her dark beautiful face, her nightgown pulled low to show her olive-skinned shoulders. She smiled as Alys came in.
“Ah, there you are!” she said. “I was lonely the moment that I woke, and found you gone.”
“Here I am,” Alys agreed uncertainly, proffering the drink. “I brought you this.”
The family attended St. Olave’s Church and there were special prayers for Rob. They all walked back with the minister who came to pray with Alinor. He wore a smart dark suit, but no vestments and no outward sign of his calling. Alinor had raised Alys during the puritan years of the Commonwealth and they still preferred their religion plain, with nothing of church ritual, even though times had changed. The new king was restoring the surplices and ceremonies at every altar, decking them with gold and silver. His papist wife had her own chapel and half of London genuflected behind her and dizzily inhaled incense at Mass. Alys, and all the old reformers, now had to accept the new rules which had once been called heresy. Anyone who could notstomach it had no choice but to leave the country, as Alinor’s brother Ned had done.
“Will you stay for your dinner, Mr. Forth?” Alys asked politely, as he came down the narrow stairs after his visit to Alinor’s room.
“I have to make other visits,” he replied. “I cannot be seen to fail in my duties for a moment. The previous minister wants his parish back, his rectory, and especially his tithes. The communion expelled him for being a monarchist and half-papist and now the fashion is for monarchy and papistry again. He will return and all my work here will be overset.”
“What will you do?” Sarah asked him.
“If I am forced out, I will sail to the Americas,” he told her. “If I cannot serve the Lord here, I will go where the Saved want to hear my word.”
“My uncle Ned is in the town of Hadley in New England,” Alys remarked. “It’s a new settlement, led into the wilderness by the minister, so they are a godly town with much preaching. He thinks as you do.”
“Does he trade in furs?” he asked. “He could make a fortune.”
“He wants to make a sufficiency, not to be the bane of any other.”
“I pray that a godly man can do that,” he agreed. “But I fear that one man’s wealth is always another man’s loss.”
