The sleeping baby gave a gurgle and Alys shifted him from her shoulder to hold him in her arms, so she could look into the little pursed face for any sign of Rob.

“I think he is very like your brother,” the widow said quietly. “It is a great comfort to me. When I first lost my love, my dearest Roberto, I thought I would die of the pain. It was only this little—this little angel—that kept me alive at all.”

Alys put her lips to the warm head, where the pulse bumped so strongly. “He smells so sweet,” she said wonderingly.

Her ladyship nodded. “My savior. May I show him to his grandmother?”

“I shall take you to see her,” Alys said. “This has been a terrible shock for her, for us all. We only had your letter telling of his death last week, and then your letter from Greenwich three days ago. We’re not even in mourning. I am so sorry.”

The young woman looked up, her eyelashes drenched with tears. “It is nothing, it is nothing. What matters is the heart.”

“You know that she is an invalid? But she will want to welcome you here at once. I’ll just go up and tell her that you have come to us. Can I have them bring you anything? If not tea, then perhaps a drink of chocolate? Or a glass of wine?”

“Just a glass of wine and water,” the lady said. “And please tell your lady-mother that I wish to be no trouble to her. I can see her tomorrow, if she is resting now.”

“I’ll ask.” Alys gave the baby to the nursemaid and went from the room, across the hall, and up the narrow stairs.

* * *

Alinor was bent over her letter, seated at a round table set in the glazed turret, struggling to write to her brother to tell him such bad news that she could not make herself believe it. The warm breeze coming in with the tide lifted a stray lock of white hair from her frowning face. She was surrounded by the tools of her trade: herbalism, posies of herbs drying on strings over her head, stirring in the air from the window, little bottles of oils and essences were ranked on the shelves on the far side of the room, and on the floor beneath them were big corked jars of oils. She was not yet fifty, her strikingly beautiful face honed by pain and loss, her eyes a darker gray than her modest gown, a white apron around her narrow waist, a white collar at her neck.

“Was that her? So soon?”

“You saw the carriage?”

“Yes—I was writing to Ned. To tell him.”

“Ma—it’s Rob’s… it is…”

“Rob’s widow?” Alinor asked without hesitation. “I thought it must be, when I saw the nursemaid, carrying the baby. It is Rob’s baby boy?”

“Yes. He’s so tiny, to come such a long way! Shall I bring her up?”

“Has she come to stay? I saw trunks on the coach?”

“I don’t know how long…”

“I doubt this’ll be good enough for her.”

“I’ll get Sarah’s room ready for the maid and the baby, and I’ll offer her Johnnie’s room in the attic. I should have done it earlier but I never dreamed she’d get here so soon. She hired her own carriage from Greenwich.”

“Rob wrote that she was a wealthy widow. Poor child, she must feel that her old life is lost.”

“Just like us,” Alys remarked. “Homeless, and with the babies.”

“Except we didn’t have a hired carriage and a maid,” Alinor pointed out. “Who was the gentleman? I couldn’t see more than the top of his hat.”

Alys hesitated, unsure what she should say. “Nobody,” she lied. “A gentleman factor. He was selling a share in a slaver ship to the Guinea coast. Promised a hundredfold return, but the risk is too much for us.”

“Ned wouldn’t like it.” Alinor glanced down at her inadequate letter to her brother, far away in New England, escaping his country that had chosen servitude under a king. “Ned would never trade in slaves.”

“Ma…” Alys hesitated, not knowing how to speak to her mother. “You know that there can be no doubt?”

“Of my son’s death?” Alinor named the loss she could not believe.

“His widow is here now. She can tell you herself.”

“I know. I will believe it when she tells me, I am sure.”

“D’you want to lie on your sofa when I bring her up? It’s not too much for you?”

Alinor rose to her feet and took the half-dozen steps to the sofa and then seated herself as Alys lifted her legs and tucked her gown around her ankles.

“Comfortable? Can you breathe, Ma?”

“Aye, I’m well enough. Let her come up now.”

JUNE 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

Ned was in a land without kings, but not without authorities. A selectman from the town council of Hadley banged through the north gate from the town and clambered up the embankment of the river and down the other side to the rickety wooden pier, so he could clang the dangling old horseshoe on a rusty iron bar to summon the ferryman from wherever he was. Ned mounted the bank from the back yard of the little two-room house, wiping the earth from his hands, and paused at the summit to look down on him.

“There’s no need to raise the dead. I was in my garden.”

“Edward Ferryman?”

“Aye. As you know well enough. D’you want the ferry?”

“No, I thought you might be in the woods, so I clanged for the ferry to fetch you.”

Ned silently raised his eyebrows, as if to imply that the man might call for the ferry but not the ferryman.

The man gestured to the paper in his hand. “This is official. You’re wanted in town.”

“Well, I can’t leave the Quinnehtukqut.” Ned gestured to the slow-moving river in its summer shallows.

“What?”

“The river. That’s its name. How come you don’t know that?”

“We call it the Connecticut.”

“Same thing. It means long river, a long river with tides. I can’t leave the ferry in daylight hours without someone to man the boat. You should know that. It’s the town’s own regulation.”

“Is that French?” he asked curiously. “The Quin… whatever you called it? D’you call it by a French name?”

“The native tongue. The People of the Dawnlands.”

“We don’t call them that.”

Ned shrugged. “Maybe you do or you don’t; but it’s their name. Because they’re first to see the sun rise. All these lands are called Dawnlands.”

“New England,” the man corrected him.

“Did you come all this way to teach me how to talk?”

“They said in the town that you speak native. The elders say you must come to explain a deed to one of the natives.”

Ned sighed. “I only speak a little; not enough to be of any use.”

“We need a translator. We want to buy some more land, over the river, farther north, over there.” He waved to where the huge trees came down and leaned curving boughs into the glassy water. “You’d want land there yourself, I suppose, you’d want land around your ferry pier?”

“How much land?” Ned asked curiously.