“It’s a good year. Look at the branches.”

They admired the tree, the branches bowed down with the purple fruit. Alinor ate one. “Sweet,” she said. “Very good.”

“Going to the mill for gleaning?”

She nodded, glancing at the ferry bobbing as the in-rushing tide met the flowing river.

“I’ll take you over,” he offered. He led the way down the steps to where the ferry was moored to a post, pulling on the rope and sidling in the tide. He untied it and looped the painter around the overhead rope, which stretched from one side of the swirling deep water to the other.

“Running fast,” Alinor observed.

“It’s been such a wet summer,” he said. “I’ve never known the rife so high at harvesttime. Come on.”

She stepped down to the raft and held to the rail that ran on either side. He smiled at her fear. “Still agauw? The ferryman’s daughter?”

She shrugged at her fears. “I know. I’ll walk home on the wadeway.”

“You’ll get wet feet,” he warned her. “It’s high till dusk tonight.”

“Hold tight to the rope,” she begged, as the current took the raft and pushed it farther up the rife, and the rope on the overhead line went taut and the ferry rocked.

Ned went hand over hand to haul the ferry across the swiftly flowing rife. They reached the other side in moments and she was off the raft and up the steps to the safety of dry land before he had even tied up. “See you tonight,” he said. “You’d best come on the ferry. No point getting soaked.”

“Thank you,” she replied, and started off down the track along the shoreline to where the mill and the granary stood beside the stone quay with the deep water lapping at the quayside.

For once, it was peaceful in the mill yard. The water wheel was stilled; there was no rushing torrent in the millrace. The millpond was quietly filling, the great sea gates pushed open by the incoming waters, the little waves lapping up the pond wall, the water level rising steadily. Inside the mill the great grinding stones were parted and the cherrywood cogs detached. The miller was bagging up flour, and the two lads were humping it to the quayside, ready for the high-tide ships of the flour merchants.

“Good day, Mr. Miller,” Alinor called as she went past the open door.

He was white as a ghost from his flour-dusted hair to the hem of his white apron. But his smile was warm. “Good day, Mrs. Reekie! Come for gleaning?”

“Yes, and I’ve brought Alys’s dinner.”

“She’s a lucky girl to have you for a mother. Will you come to the harvest supper? Shall we have a dance, you and I?”

Alinor smiled at the old joke. “You know I won’t dance. But, of course I’m coming.”

She waved her hand, and walked across the yard between the mill and the house, through the gate at the north of the yard and into the wheat fields. The fields looked shorn, the wheat stooks dotted around on the stubble. As Alinor went through the open gate, a flock of rooks rose up before her, one after another like a string of black rosary beads.

Alys was in the line of binders, working alongside the other women laborers, following the reaping gang of men. Most of the men were stripped to the waist, their backs blistered from the sun, but the others, godly men, some of them puritans, wore their shirts modestly tucked into their breeches and tied at their sweating throats. The men were working in a line across the field in a punishingly hard rhythm: grasping a handful of wheat stalks, bending and slashing at the stalks with the sickle, straightening up and throwing the bunch behind them. Alys and other women followed them, gathering the cut stalks into armfuls, tying them with a twisted stalk, piling them in a heap for the wagon. Every so often Mrs. Miller or her daughter, Jane, came out of the house, crossed the yard, and stood at the gate to the field, her hand shielding her eyes, glaring across the field to make sure that the reapers were doing their job, and not leaving uncut wheat for the gleaners.

Alys was pale with exhaustion, her hands and arms scratched from hugging the stooks, her apron filthy, her hair falling loose under her working cap, walking in the line with the other women, bending and gathering the cut wheat, straightening up, tying it, stacking it, bending again. She was working alongside women from Sealsea Island that she had known from childhood; but there were also day laborers come from inland, and half a dozen women were travelers, a harvesting gang that went from one farm to another through the summer. They were paid by the job, not by the day, and they set an exhausting pace that Alys had to match: she was struggling to keep up.

Alinor waited at the gate and was joined by half a dozen other women who had the gleaning rights to the mill fields. They stood together, commenting on the richness of the crop and the heat of the day until Jane rang the bell in the mill courtyard and everyone in the field turned from their work to the shade of the hedgerow and the dinner break. The gleaners went into the field, some to meet husbands or children with their dinner. Alinor walked across the spiky stubble and wordlessly held out the pitcher of small ale to her daughter. Alys drank deeply.

“Thirsty work,” Alinor said, looking at her beautiful daughter with concern.

“Filthy work,” the girl said wearily.

“Nearly done,” her mother promised her. “Come and sit.”

The men gathered into one group, passing around flasks of ale, eating the food they had brought from their homes. The women gathered at a little distance. One woman untied a swaddled baby from her back and put him to the breast. Alinor smiled at her. It was one of the babies that she had delivered in the spring.

“Is he feeding well?” she asked.

“God be praised, he is,” the woman replied. “And I still name you in my prayers for coming to me in my time. D’you want to see him?”

Alinor took the baby into her arms and gently pressed her lips to his warm head, marveling at the warmth of his skull, and the tiny plump hands.

No one else spoke as they drank and ate their first food since breakfast. When Alys had finished the thick slices of bread and the last of the smoked fish, Alinor returned the baby to the young mother, and she and Alys shared the plums from Ned’s plum tree.

“I’m surprised at you eating fruit in the sunshine, Mistress Reekie,” one of the women remarked. “Aren’t you afraid of the gripe?”

“These are from my brother’s garden. We’ve eaten them every summer and never taken ill,” Alinor explained.

“I’d never eat fruit with the sap in it,” one of the older women declared.

“I stew most of them,” Alinor agreed. “And I pickle some, and make jam, and I dry a lot of them.”

“I’ll buy two jars of your stewed plums,” one of the women offered. “And a jar of dried plums. We had your dried gooseberries at Christmas and everyone wanted more. How much’ll they be this year?”

Alinor smiled. “Tuppence a jar, for them both. I’ll bring them to you with pleasure,” she said. “It’s been a good year for gooseberries too.”

“I’ll take a pound of them,” another woman offered.

The women stretched out their weary legs. Some of them lay back on the prickly stubble.

“Tired?” Alinor asked her daughter quietly.