“Good night,” the man said abruptly. “I pray to God that we never meet again. I will swear that we never met, and I will never speak of it. If I am captured I will deny all this, and you will do the same.”

“Amen,” James said, slumped in his chair.

The man paused at the door. “Even if they burn you, I trust you not to say my name, and I will not speak yours. I don’t want to die for nothing.”

“Agreed,” James said bitterly, as if it was all nothing, as if loyalty was nothing, as if death by burning was nothing. The man let himself out into the night.

James sat in silence by the dying fire, sick with the draining away of his courage. He found his hands were shaking and that all he could see, as he watched the embers, was the triumphantly gloomy face of the king with his dark sorrowful eyes. James thought himself to be a fool to have given his life to such a man and such a fanciful web of plots. The king he had sworn to serve wanted none of his loyalty, and the woman he desired was a whore to the faeries and had murdered the wife and baby of a mortal man. He thought he was very far from God, and very far from grace, and a long, long way from his home.

At dawn in the morning when a man might reasonably be up and about, James went down to the quayside. The air was cool and smelled of salt in the light breeze. The sky was peach pink. It was going to be a beautiful day. If they had sailed overnight as they had planned, they would have had a good wind homeward and the sun on their backs. They would have moored on a peaceful quayside, paid off Zachary, and gone their own ways to their homes. No one would have known that the king was gone until they served his breakfast, late in the morning. The king would have been breakfasting in France, the Stuart monarchy safe in exile, certain to invade; Cromwell’s rebellion doomed. James looked to pink clouds at the east and thought that never in his life had he seen a sun rise and felt such darkness.

Zachary was asleep, curled up under a sail in the stern of the little trading ship. He opened his eyes and sat up as he heard the sound of James’s riding boots on the stone quay.

“Miscarried,” he observed. “Like the babies she says she will deliver that come out blue. Unsatisfied—as she always is.”

“Yes,” James said shortly. “But I know nothing about any babies.”

Zachary hawked and spat over the side. “Her hands are stained with them,” he said conversationally. “She smells of them: dead babies. Had you not noticed? But—anyway—what happened to you? Nothing good. Were you caught? Doing whatever you were doing?”

“No.”

“Probably half the island knows anyway,” Zachary said pessimistically. “He’s not famously discreet, your master. Everyone I know has taken a letter from him and learned his ever-so-secret code.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, you’ll pay me the forty crowns for my silence,” he observed.

“Twenty,” James said flatly. He took the purse from his pocket and tossed it over. Zachary caught it neatly, and it disappeared into the folds of his tattered jacket. “So you failed,” he said spitefully. “Your mission was a failure and so are you.”

“I failed,” James said. “But no one the wiser, and no harm done.”

“But I am wiser. I know of you and where you came from. Who you came from. Where you live. I think you’ll find that is harm done.”

“You know,” James agreed. “But I know of you, so we are equal in that. Will you come to have breakfast at the inn and see your boy this morning?”

Zachary shook his head. “Not I.”

“What am I to tell him?”

“Tell him I went out last night and drowned.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Then tell him whatever lie you can stoop to. For clearly you are not wedded to truth. You have broken your vows and you lie to those who trust you. You lie to your hosts and to their servants. If you have a lover, and I think we both know her name . . .” he paused and leered at the thought of Alinor, “. . . then, for sure, you lie to her, for she’s no royalist. She can’t be faithful to any cause or mortal man. You’re no better than me. In fact, you’re worse than me, for I ran for my life from a witch, but you are running back to her. And she will eat your lying soul and steal your child.”

“I am not running back to her!”

“Then you’re lying to yourself as well.”

“And there is no child.”

“There will be if she wants one.”

James paused and gritted his teeth on hatred. “I will not help her to find you in any way, and I will tell your son that you took a message for me and have not yet come back.”

Zachary nodded indifferently. “I sail on the morning tide anyway,” he said. “I’ll be gone for days, weeks. If the boy comes looking for me, he won’t find me.”

“Good-bye,” James said shortly.

“Godspeed, Priest,” Zachary said, getting a threat into the last word as James turned and walked away.

James went through the day in a daze. The boys wanted to watch the king go to church, but James could not bear to see that mournful face again, so he sent them on their own and they came back full of excitement that the king had saluted the crowd of well-wishers, that someone had raised their voice against him, that some cavaliers had started a brawl, that the king had laughed and gone back to his house, then waved to the crowd from his window, and that everyone said that the parliament men were coming in the next week to give him his crown back.

“D’you want to ride over to Cowes?” James asked. He found that every minute in Newport was unbearable. “We could take a ship to Portsmouth from Cowes, and then hire horses to ride home.”

“Can we?” Walter was exuberant. He cuffed Rob around the head. “Say yes!”

“Yes! Yes!” Rob exclaimed. “But did you say my father was coming to breakfast? Can I see him before we go?”

“He took a message for me to Southampton and he’s not returned,” James lied smoothly. “He said that he might be delayed. We might see him at Cowes. We might not. But I am afraid that he’s not coming home to your mother, Robert. He said he wouldn’t come home. I am sorry.”

“But what is she to do?” Rob demanded. “What if he never comes home? She can’t live off the herbs and the midwifery. Did he say he would send money? And there is Alys to be provided for. She needs a dowry. Her father should give her a dowry, sir.”

James swallowed his own sense of despair. “I will talk to your mother,” he said. He knew that he longed to talk to her. “If we can get you an apprenticeship, then you will earn good wages. You could do well, Robert. You could be her support. If your sister marries well, then your mother can live more cheaply at home. She’s got the boat now; she can earn her own keep. She does not depend on your father. She is skilled, and when she can get work she is paid well.”

“The women won’t use a midwife who is neither a wife nor a widow,” Rob said, flushed to his ears. “They think it’s unlucky.”

“I didn’t know,” James said quietly, realizing how much he did not know about Alinor and her life. “Perhaps she could go and live inland, where people don’t know her, where she could pass as a widow?”