“That’s it,” Alinor confirmed. “Pull it out gently, gently, and swing it into the boat.”

He pulled too hard and the fish came flying out of the water, swinging into Alinor’s face.

“Watch out!” Father James said, catching the line and holding it away from her as the boy reached out to take the fish, and then flinched, as it writhed on the hook.

“I can’t . . .”

“If you want to eat it, you take hold of it,” Alinor advised him.

The tutor laughed. “She’s right. Take hold of it, Walter, and unhook it.”

Grimacing, the boy unhooked the fish and gasped as it wriggled from his hand and dropped into the basket, as Rob exclaimed: “Another! I have another!”

They were in the middle of a shoal of fish and as soon as they baited their hooks they were pulling them from the water. James and Alinor kept the boat in the middle of the channel as the boys fished, exclaiming at their catch and counting as the basket filled up, until Alinor said: “That’s enough, that’s all that you can eat today, and all that I can dry.”

“Don’t you sell them fresh?” James asked her.

“If my husband had a big catch on a Friday I would take it to Chichester Saturday market, but it takes two hours to walk there, and two hours back again. You can’t sell fish in Sealsea village—everyone catches their own—though I sometimes sell them at the mill. The farmers’ wives buy fish when they come to get their corn ground, or if a grain ship comes in they’ll buy some. Mostly, I dry them for sale, or salt them down.”

“Shall we row back in?”

“Can’t we go out to the hushing well?” Rob asked her. “Walter has never seen it.”

Alinor shook her head, and she and James timed their strokes together and rowed back to the pier. She shipped her oar and stretched out her hand to the pier timbers to pull the boat in, while Rob stood to drop the looped mooring rope over the worn pole.

“You’ll have to wait till you can row yourselves to go there,” she told Walter.

“Why won’t you go there, Mistress Reekie?” Walter asked her.

She steadied the boat as the boys got ashore, and Father James followed them. Then she stood up and handed them the basket of fish, balancing easily against the rocking of the boat.

“I am a foolish woman and I have a horror of deep water,” she told him. Father James put out his hand to help her onto the pier and she took it.

“But you’ve lived all your life on the water,” Walter remarked.

“All my life on the mire,” she corrected him. “Tidelands: neither land nor sea, but wet and dry twice a day, never drowned for long but never drying out. I never go out to sea; I don’t even go out to the deep heart of the harbor. My work has always been on the land with the plants and herbs and flowers. I’m only recently a boat owner, thanks to your father hiring Rob.”

Rob tied off the boat loosely so that it could fall with the tide.

“And now, shall I cook your fish for you?” she asked the boys.

“Can we cook it? On a fire with sticks?” Rob begged.

“Oh, all right.” She smiled, and James could see the love she had for her son. She turned to him. “Will you eat with the boys?”

“If I may,” he said. “Shall we all dine together?”

“You may not want to. Rob hopes to eat like savages around a fire.”

He had to stop himself tucking the tumbling lock of hair behind her ear. “Let’s be savages.” He smiled.

Rob and Walter gathered driftwood and Alinor brought the embers from the damped-down fire in the cottage. James, going to help her, looked around the single room, the bed that she shared with her daughter, the stools where they sat, the table where they ate. It was a typical cottage for a poor working family, and he was struck how the bleak poverty strangely contrasted with the sharp and sweet smell of the place. It smelled of lavender and basil, like the Priory stillroom. Usually a hut like this would stink of old food and excrement, the heavy scent of unwashed people sleeping in their working shifts, but here the salt air blew in through the open door and the room was filled with a grassy smell of drying herbs. In one corner of the room there were cords strung from beam to beam, festooned with posies of herbs. Beneath them, a corner cupboard held a collection of glass jars, and on either side were shelves holding metal trays filled with wax for extracting perfume.

“Your stillroom?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “My corner. I have more room in the ferry-house. I use my mother’s stillroom there, as I used to do with her. This is just for the things from my garden here, while they’re fresh.”

Under her direction James sliced bread from the big loaf under the upturned pot on the table, and carried out four slices to serve as trenchers for the fish. The little fire was burning brightly.

“Will your daughter come home in time to eat with us?” he asked.

“No, she works late in summertime,” Alinor replied. “She won’t be back till sunset. I’ll cook her a mackerel and save it for her.”

Alinor cut and cleaned each fish, throwing the entrails into a pot for later use as bait, but leaving the heads and tails on. She gave the gutted fish to Rob, who skewered each one on a stick and handed them round. Alinor went to the house to wash the scales and blood from her hands and came out with four cups of small ale. Rob watched her give his missing father’s cup to James, but he made no comment.

When the skin on the fish was burned to a blackened crisp and the flesh inside was moist and hot, Alinor told the boys: “That’s done. You can eat them.” Walter nibbled his from the charred stick, but Rob put his between two hunks of bread and took mighty bites. When they had all finished eating they sat in silence, looking at the fire as the sun lay on the horizon, and the tide seemed to stand still, lapping at the pier but rising no higher. The hens came running up from the shoreline and rushed towards Alinor, confident of their welcome and hoping for crumbs. She greeted each one by name and gave each a little piece of her bread, and they pecked around her feet and clucked softly.

“We have to go,” said Rob. He looked to his mother and was surprised to see her gaze turn from him to his tutor.

“Oh, do you?”

James rose to his feet as if he did not know what he was doing. The hens scattered from the stranger; but he did not see them. “Yes, yes, I suppose we do. That’s sunset now. We should go.”

“I’ll lead the way back to the Priory,” she offered.

James wanted to agree, but there was no reason that she should guide them when her son was there.

“I can show the way,” Rob said, puzzled.

Slowly she rose from her fireside seat, and her boy came into her arms. She hugged him, and when he knelt for her blessing she put her hand on his head, whispered a prayer, and bent and kissed him. She dipped a little curtsey to Walter. “I’m glad you came,” she said to him. “You can come anytime, for your mother’s sake as well as your own, you know.”

He flushed. “Thank you,” he said awkwardly, for she was a Peachey tenant and they were, in any case, his fish. “Rob and I will come again.”

The two of them started down the path to the Priory, side by side, companionably silent. Alinor was left alone with James.