“I have to go with Walter,” Rob pointed out. “I’m his companion. I have to accompany him!”

“Yes, but—”

“And it’s not as if the king’s still at war. He’s in Newport to meet with the men from parliament. It’s all at peace now. They’re meeting him at Newport to make peace and he’ll be released. I’d like to see him, now it’s all over. Think of me, seeing the King of England!”

“I’d still rather you didn’t,” Alinor repeated.

Rob was suddenly attentive. He looked up at her pale face. “Why? What’s the matter? Is it the sight, Mam?” he asked quietly.

She shook her head. “No, nothing like that. It’s just that . . .”

“What?”

“Oh, poor Mrs. Whiting, and having to stand before the church . . .”

“That’s got nothing to do with us,” he rightly said.

“I know her, and yet I said nothing in her defense,” she said.

“There was nothing to say.” Alys came up quietly to the two of them. “Everyone would have turned on you, and on the three of us, if you’d spoken up for her. And besides, she did go behind the hedge. I saw her.”

“Yes, but—”

“How’s this got anything to do with me going to the Isle of Wight?” Rob demanded.

“It hasn’t!” Alinor owned. “You know how I feel, Rob . . . it’s just—”

“Is it the sea?” he guessed. “The deep water?”

“The sea,” she said, grasping at the word as if her fear of the ocean could explain the sense of dread that she felt at her son going to Newport to see the defeated king. Going to Newport in the company of his tutor—the king’s spy.

TIDELANDS, SEPTEMBER 1648

James Summer, Rob, and Walter took ship from the mill quay in a coastal trader bound for the Isle of Wight, Southampton, and westerly. Richard Stoney, Alys, and a couple of the mill girls watched them go. Rob waved as extravagantly as if he were leaving for the Americas and might never return as the two-masted ketch went slowly down the deep channel, with the crew on either side watching for sandbars and shouting the depth.

James went to starboard to look for the little cottage perched on the harbor bank, as ramshackle as if it had been washed there by a high tide. The door was standing open and he wondered if Alinor was watching the ship from the dark interior. He guessed that she was unhappy at Rob sailing to the island, but she had not asked him not to take the boy. She had not spoken to him at all. Not even after church when she made her curtsey to Sir William and rose up to find James’s brown eyes on her face. She had behaved—just as he had prayed that she would—with icy discretion. She had withdrawn from him as if she had never known him, as if she had never held him, as if she had never opened her lips to his demanding mouth. He had prayed to be released, and she had let him go at once, as if she had never whispered that she wanted to be with him, that she wanted to be with him alone. Even as she curtseyed to him, she looked beyond and away from him. He would have thought that he was nothing to her, that he had never been anything to her. He would have thought that he was unseen.

And of course, as soon as she withdrew from him, he wanted to catch her hand, to say her name, to make that gray gaze turn back to him. As the poorest tenant on the estate, a woman that he had stooped to notice, she should have been alert for the least sign of his forgiveness. But it was as if he were invisible to her. He had to stand at Sir William’s shoulder and let this woman, this nobody, walk away from him as if he were nothing.

Now, as the sails of the ship caught the wind and the craft moved a little forward, he looked for the poor cottage that was her home, which she had opened to him as a refuge when he had nowhere else to go. He could see a trail of smoke from the chimney, he saw that the door stood open, he could even see a movement in the dark interior: the glimpse of her white cap. Then, as he watched, she came out of the doorway and stood on the cracked stone of her front step so that he could see her. She raised her hand, her scarred worn hand, to shade her eyes. He could hardly believe it: but she was looking for him. She saw him; she saw the ship that was taking her beloved son into danger, using him as a shield against inquiry, as an alibi in the incredible treason that he was about to commit. He thought she must be ill-wishing him, as he did the one thing that she must dread—taking Rob into deep waters. But then he saw her raise her hand to his ship, in a blessing, as any sailor’s wife would wave to a sail and whisper, “Godspeed! Come safe home!” He saw her stand, watching him. It was unmistakable. She loved him, she had a love deeper and wider than his, for she forgave him for his stupidity and his unkindness, and she was wishing him Godspeed on a journey, even though he was serving the king and taking her boy across the deeps.

He leapt up to balance on the rail of the boat, he gripped the rigging, he leaned outwards over the dark water rushing under the prow. He could hear the ominous hushing of the receding tide as it sucked them towards the harbor mouth, but he wanted her to see him. He stretched out his arm to wave to her. He wanted her to know that as he left Foulmire, the one thought in his mind was not his cause, which he had put before her, nor his king, who should come before everything, but her: Alinor.

NEWPORT, ISLE OF WIGHT, SEPTEMBER 1648

The town of Newport was as busy as a fair day; nothing like this had ever happened on the island before. The arrival of the king to the house of the wealthy townsman Mr. Hopkins gave the provincial street the status of Whitehall Palace. When the parliamentary negotiators arrived, Newport would be at the plumb center of the affairs of the kingdom—“of the world”—according to the dizzied Newport royalists. All the gentry flocked in from the outlying towns and villages to stay with friends and cousins, to dawdle through the narrow streets in the hope of seeing the king. They attended St. Thomas’s Church; they scrambled for the front pews to kneel behind His Majesty at prayer; they sent their servants round to the Hopkinses’ kitchen door to learn what was cooking for the royal dinner. Noblemen, with their ladies, sailed from the mainland on their own ships, or chartered passages to pay their respects to the king who, though defeated, could never be vanquished. All the royalists who had attended the king at London, at Oxford, in victory and facing defeat, now reappeared, learning that he was set free again. Whatever anyone might say, whatever he himself might do, the king was the king, and it was apparent to everyone that sooner or later he would return to London and to his throne.

And would he not be certain to remember the gentlemen and ladies who had called upon him in his time of troubles? Would he not reward those who had invited him to visit, stretching his parole in lengthy jaunts around the island, sent him game from their estates, fruit from their forcing houses? Would he not repay those favored few who had ridden with him in the enormous lumbering royal coach which had been shipped with such trouble, to block the narrow lanes of the island? When he was Charles the king again, would he not be obliged to remember those who had treated him with the most obsequious respect when he had been Charles the prisoner?

Mr. Hopkins’s house was as easy to enter as the royal court had been in the grand old days in London, when any wealthy man might walk in to gaze on his monarch and the royal family. The king believed that his dinner table should be on view in his dining hall, as an altar should be on view in church. There was divinity in both. Here in Newport, although there was a brace of guards on each door, they did not challenge anyone: if a man was richly dressed, he could enter. The king was free to come and go as he wished, bound only by his given word not to leave the island. The street outside was crowded all the day with gorgeously dressed well-wishers, parading up and down the freshly swept cobbles, remarking loudly on the simplicity of the town and the poverty of the buildings, besieged by common people wanting a glimpse of a man who claimed to be semidivine, constantly circled by beggars and the sick. King Charles was famous for the healing powers of his long white fingers. A sick man or woman could kneel before him and be restored with one light touch of the hand and a whispered blessing. No one was refused access to the king’s powers. Already a young woman was claiming that he had cured her blindness with his divine grace. Everyone knew that the king was not a mortal man. He had the holy oil on his sacred breast, he was the descendant of ordained kings, he was only one step down from the angels.