“Shall you come again?” she asked him, her tone carefully neutral.

“Yes,” he said, rushing into speech. “Yes. I want . . . I really want . . . May I come again? May I come back now, as soon as I have taken them home?”

She had a dizzy sense of the world turning too fast around her. She looked up and felt a jolt of desire as his brown eyes met her dark gray gaze.

“You can’t come through the mire on your own.”

“I’ll come the long way round. I’ll follow the road,” he said.

“Yes, you can come back tonight,” she agreed, and as if to deny her words she turned from him and kicked the embers of the fire so they were darkened and cool, and then she went along the bank towards her cottage without looking back at him.

The waxing yellow moon had turned the water of the mire to a yellowy shine, and the land to tarnished black as James turned off the main road at the ferry-house, walked quietly past Ned’s back garden, and then loped along the sea bank to Alinor’s cottage. He had left the boys in the schoolroom, evening prayers done, tasked with reading and completing some mathematical exercises, and putting themselves to bed. James did not know what was ahead of him. He did not know if he would find Alinor alone, or if her daughter would be there. He did not know, if he found her alone, what he should say, or what he should do, nor what she might allow. He could not imagine how he had dared to ask to return, nor why she should have consented. He knew that he must not break his oath of celibacy. He was sworn to the Church; he could not consider a woman as a lover, he should not even be alone with a woman outside of the confessional. But, at the same time, he knew he could not stay away.

As he walked along the path from her brother’s house, ducking below the blackthorn boughs, the high tide licking the raised bank, he did not think what he was doing, only that he could do nothing else. He thought he was a fool to run through the dusk to see a woman who was little more than a cottager, a poor woman, a woman far beneath him in the eyes of the world. But he knew that he could not help himself, and he was reveling in the sense of his own helplessness. Promised to God, engaged in a conspiracy for the King of England, he should have no time to fall in love. But as he ran, he knew very well that was what he was doing: he was falling in love. He could not stop himself feeling a leap of joy as he recognized that he was falling, unstoppably, in love with a woman as if he were an imaginary knight in a poem and she the greatest of ladies in a castle.

She was waiting for him. As he saw her slim silhouette at the outermost end of the rickety wooden pier, her dress gray against the gray waters, her white cap pale against the night sky, he knew that she had gone out to the end of the pier so that she could watch the bank path and see him walking towards her. Instead, she had seen him running like a lover to his love. He skidded to a walk at the sight of her as she came down the pier, stepping carefully over the rotting planks, so that as he arrived where the steps met the bank and held out his hand to help her, they were handclasped before they had even said one word.

At the touch of her hand, her scratched rough palm, he could not help himself: he drew her closer towards him and put a hand around her waist, feeling the warmth of her body through the homespun cloth. She did not resist him but stepped into the circle of his arm and raised her face to look at him. They gazed at each other silently and then, as if the exchange of looks had been an exchange of vows, he dropped his head to hers and their mouths met.

She was willing. Years later he would remember that, as if it absolved him from guilt. She was longing to be loved, she was longing to be loved by him.

Her kiss was sweet. It was the first time in his life that he had kissed a woman and he felt desire rush through him as if his knees would go weak beneath him. He felt her relax against him as if she too were feeling a wave pass through her, as irresistible as the flow of the tide.

“I should not,” she said when she took a breath. “I don’t even know if my husband is alive or dead.”

“I should not,” he said, finding the words awkward in his mouth as if he had no speech but only the power of touch. “I am an ordained priest.”

She did not move from him, she did not take her eyes from his face, his mouth, his dark gaze.

“Kiss me again,” she said quietly, and he did.

They stood enwrapped in each other’s arms, his body pressing against her, his mouth on hers, his arms tightening around her, and then she moved a little away from him and at once he let her go. In silence, just a halfpace apart, they waited to see if they would move together again, if he was going to take her hand and lead her into the little cottage to make love in her missing husband’s bed. She shook her head, as if he had said words of desire out loud, but she did not speak.

“I will come to you again next month, in the evening at this time,” he said as if a month apart would teach him what to do and what to say to her, while today each was dazed by the other’s closeness.

“Next month?” she queried, as if it were a year away. “Not till next month?”

“I have to go away tomorrow,” he said.

She made a little gesture as if she would take his hand and delay him. “Not back to France?”

“No, no. But I have to serve . . . I have made a promise . . . I will go and I will return.”

She guessed at once it was the secret business of his Church, and the king imprisoned on the Isle of Wight. “Into danger? Are you going into danger?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “But I hope to be back with you within the month.”

She heard, as a woman in love will always hear, the promise of love more than the meaning of the sentence. “Here, with me,” she repeated.

“Without fail.”

“Can’t you refuse to go?” she demanded. “Can’t you say you’ve changed your mind?”

He smiled. “But I have not changed my mind,” he said. “I think as I did about everything, and I cannot break my word. There are men depending on me; there is a great man depending on me. Nothing has changed . . . except . . .”

She was silent, while she waited for him to say what had changed.

“My heart,” he told her.

TIDELANDS, AUGUST 1648

Alinor worked as usual, through the next weeks of summer storms and sudden days of heat, which made a haze on the mire that looked like palaces and streets and warehouses. The visions made her wonder what James was seeing, if he was admitted into great buildings or was walking down beautiful streets, far bigger and cleaner than Chichester, far grander than anything she had ever seen, if the gates of palaces opened for him, if there were garden doors into beautiful houses.

She walked to Chichester market and at the secondhand clothes stall she bought Alys a pair of boots, hardly worn and with a good sole that would keep her feet warm and dry through the coming autumn and winter. She bought linen shifts and caps for both of them, and a new petticoat for Alys. She bought a ribbon to trim it, since Alys had so few pretty things. It was too hot to imagine that winter would ever come, but the secondhand clothes were cheapest in August, so Alinor bought her daughter a winter shawl and a cape of waxed cloth that would keep her dry when she had to go out across the ferry to the tide mill or work outside.