Alinor attended church and saw Rob, she picked fruit in the ferry-house garden, she worked in the Mill Farm dairy. She delivered hanks of spun wool to the wool merchant and received, in return, her pay and a bale of fleeces for spinning. She went through every day, her eyes down, her behavior demure, as if she were not burning up inside, white cap on her feverish forehead, gray dress wrapped as tight as an embrace around her waist. She took the boat out on a turning tide at slack water and laid four lobster pots, holding her nerve, though the boat rocked as she leaned over the side. She drew them in again next day, heaving against the weight of the pot and the rope, with two snapping monsterlike lobsters inside. She baited the pots again with stinking fish, threw them out, then rowed to the mill quay with her catch, and sold it to a couple of farmers’ wives for fourpence each.

“You look well,” Mrs. Miller said, staring at Alinor’s flushed smiling face as she pocketed the pennies.

“I’m just the same,” Alinor said, though her heart pounded too fast.

“I don’t know how you can bear the work.” Mrs. Miller looked disdainfully from Alinor’s soaked hem to the stinking bait jar. “Especially this work. In this heat.”

“Oh,” said Alinor, as if she had not noticed.

She went to her beehive and watched the bees coming and going with their determined purpose from the little doorway at the foot of the skep. “Something has happened to me,” she told them. “Something very important.” She listened to the warm comforting rumble of the hive as if the swarm was agreeing that it was important to them too; but she did not tell them what it was. She weeded her vegetable bed on her knees with her little hoeing stick, the sun hot on her back. She stood up, suddenly dizzy, her hands empty, as if she were walking in her sleep, and remembered the morning when she had looked through the cottage door at the unearthly whiteness of the sky and thought herself enchanted.

The wheat in the harborside fields was a rippling sea of gold, ready for harvest, the miller more and more fearful of a summer storm in this year of terrible rain. Finally, Mrs. Miller declared that they would start the harvest, and all the poor cottagers nearby were summoned to Mill Farm for the work.

Alys was one of the binding gang that followed the reapers, picking up the cut wheat, binding it into a stook, and loading it into the wagon. It was painfully hard work and when Alys came home, her arms were scratched by the stalks and her back was aching from bending and lifting and throwing stooks into the wagon. She worked from dawn—harvest days were long days—and her face was white with exhaustion. She was paid for extra hours with a small loaf of wheat bread baked in the mill’s big bread oven, in the harvest bake—one for each reaper and binder on top of their daily pay. It was a luxury that the Reekies only tasted at harvesttime. The rest of the year they baked their own coarse bread of mixed grains.

Alinor bathed Alys’s arms and face with elderflower water. She fed her nettle soup to ease the stiffness in her back and arms. Alys drank her soup and ate her bread in silence.

“I’m fine,” she said, as soon as she had finished, pushing back her stool and heading for bed, pulling off her skirt and filthy shirt. “It’s only as bad as always. I forget how vile the work is. The fields go on forever.”

“Soon be finished,” Alinor reminded her, picking up the bowls. “I’ll wash your gown and linen overnight. You can wear your new shift tomorrow.”

“I swear next year I won’t do it,” Alys said as she rolled into bed, almost asleep. “I swear next year I’ll have work somewhere else: clean work, easy work. Indoor work. You know, I’d sell my soul for indoor work.”

“I hope that you get it,” Alinor said gently; but she could not imagine what work Alys would find that could pay her a wage to live on.

“And that Jane Miller—” Alys broke off, almost too sleepy to speak.

“Jane?”

“Eyeing up the miller’s lads, just because her father owns the mill. Giggling with Richard Stoney. She’s such a stupid whey-faced thing . . . I’d like to push her in the millpond.”

Alinor smiled. “You go to sleep on a pleasant thought,” she counseled. “And have kindly dreams.”

“I am,” Alys whispered. “That is a pleasant thought.”

Alinor took the washing bowl outside the cottage, and as she was wringing out the skirt and rough linen shirt, and spreading them on the rosemary bush to dry, she saw her brother, Ned, picking his way on the bed of the mire from shingle bank to dry sand on the hidden shortcut from Ferry-house to her cottage. He brought a half round of cheese—a fee for ferrying a wagon going and returning from Chichester market. They sat together, outside the cottage on the bench facing the mire as the low tide ebbed farther and farther away until all around them was dry land, and the water was a silvery line on the horizon at the bar of the harbor. He watched her as she ate a tiny slice.

“Are you sick?” he asked. “Is it quatrain fever?”

All the people who lived on the side of the mire had marsh fever three or four times a year. They were accustomed to the onset of cold shivers and the sweats that would last perhaps a week, and then pass off. Alinor gave her patients willow and mint tisanes for their fever, and grew marigolds and lavender at the door and windows of the cottage to discourage the insects that brought the illness in their bite.

“No, I’m well,” she said, though the high color in her cheek and the brightness of her eyes contradicted her.

Across the mile of mud, they heard the squeal of the sluice gate key opening the millpond, and then the roar of water in the millrace. They heard the wheel creak and turn and the sound of the grinding stones. Then the water poured out into the dry channel in the mire in a sudden deep flood.

“You’ve not heard from Zachary?” Ned asked, thinking that she might have had news of her missing husband. “You look feverish.”

“No,” she said, finding a smile and meeting his eyes. “No. Nothing. It’s just me! I am filled with impatience: I have spring fever in the wrong season. Canterbury tales after Midsummer Day! I think it must be Rob leaving home, and knowing that I can start to save a dowry for Alys, and I have a boat of my own. I feel as if I am young again and free, and could go anywhere or do anything.”

He nodded, putting her rapid speech and the brightness of her eyes down to the wildness that was always a danger, even in the best of women. They could not help themselves. They were like the swallows that were swooping round and round, rejoicing in skimming and dipping in the mill rife, flirting with the warm air, building tiny perfect homes in houses and barns: wild and tame at once, here for summer, gone in winter, perfectly inconstant. He thought his beautiful sister was like a swallow, and that she should never have been tied down to one place. Certainly, she should never have been given in marriage to a man who was so much of the earth that he had probably sunk himself in deep waters and was even now rotting under barnacles on a seabed.

But there had never been a choice for her: she was a woman and had to marry, as all women do, and she was a poor woman who would never go anywhere, however bright her face and breathless she might be. Their mother, knowing that her own death was coming near and nearer, had insisted that Alinor marry, hoping to leave her safe, not knowing that Zachary himself was a wandering haven, no more trustworthy than the shore, vagrant as the tidelands.