“God be praised,” Alinor said. “And, Rob,” she lowered her voice as he stepped closer to the wall and looked trustingly up at her. “Don’t be troubled about your father. Mr. Summer won’t speak of meeting him and we need say nothing. Don’t speak of Zachary till I come out and we can agree what we want to say. Especially, Rob . . . don’t be unhappy about him. He has made his choice and will live his life. We’ll make ours. You should be happy. You have so much to look forward to.”

He nodded, his eyes on her face.

“And go and tell Alys to stay the night at Ferry-house,” she instructed him. “I’ll be home tomorrow. And say nothing to her yet.”

She blew him a kiss and he ducked his head in embarrassment, waved his hand to her, and went from the yard.

James, in his makeshift bed, watched her close the window and step back so that she could not be seen from the yard below.

“All well with him?” he asked her.

“God be praised,” she said.

He found he could not say: “Amen.” He thought that he could no longer speak to his God.

“I think I should make a new bed for you with clean sheets,” she said. “And shall I ask Stuart to bring water for you to wash?”

“Yes,” he said. “And we shall have all day and all night,” he said. “This is like a dream, as if I still had fever.”

At once she put the back of her hand against his forehead. “No,” she said. “No fever and it’s no dream.”

“And tomorrow . . .”

“Let’s not think of tomorrow till we have to,” she whispered, and he drew her down to him, as he lay on the bed and pressed her against him.

The hours went by unnoticed. Two or three times Stuart called from the yard below, and Alinor threw on her gown and let down the rope from the window. He passed up food, water for washing, ale for drinking, but they hardly noticed how often he came, nor what he brought. Alinor made up the bed with clean linen and they both lay down together naked, made love, fell asleep, and woke to make love again. They watched the sun set over the marshes from the west window, and they saw the moon set. All night they stirred and woke and made love and slept, as if there was neither night nor day, and they needed no light but the flickering candle that made their moving bodies glow.

“I never knew that it was like this,” James confessed. “When the brothers spoke of the love of a woman in the seminary I thought it was somehow harder and cruel.”

“Was this your first time? Your very first?” Alinor asked, feeling a pang of guilt as if she had sinned against James and taken his innocence.

“I’ve been tempted,” he said. “When I was in hiding and traveling from one house to another. There was a lady in London, and another at a house in Essex, I knew that I felt desire; but it always felt like sin, and I could resist it; but this feels right.”

Alinor imagined that the handsome young priest had been desired by more than one woman, receiving him into her house and hiding him from everyone, delighting in the secret. She laughed at the thought of it and at once his face lightened. “You must think me a fool,” he said. “To be a virgin at my age!”

“No,” she assured him. “I’ve learned to despise a man who has been with many women and loved none. Zachary was the only man I was ever with, and he was a hard husband. They were right to teach you that at the seminary. Hard and bitter and . . . thankless.” She found the truest word. “It was a thankless task being wife to Zachary.”

He took a bright lock of her hair and twisted it around his third finger as if it were a ring. “And have you had no man since him?”

She looked at him. “Did he tell you otherwise?”

He shook his head. “He told me all sorts of fears and terrors,” he said. “I was not asking because of his lies, but because I cannot believe that no one courted you.”

“I had no desire,” she told him. “If anyone had asked me—but nobody speaks of such things on Foulmire—I would have said that I was one of those women who feel no desire. For me, it was always pain and harsh treatment. Zachary said that I was cold as stone to him, and I thought there was no other way to be. I never knew that it could be like this.”

He smiled at her and touched her warm cheek with his finger.

“When I delivered a baby sometimes, and the woman asked me when she could lie with her husband again, I never understood why she would want to. I would tell her she must wait for two months, until she was churched, and I used to wonder why she complained that it was so long.”

“Would it seem long to you now?”

“A day would seem too long a time to wait, now.”

“So now you understand love?”

“For the first time.” She smiled at him. “So it is the first time for me too, in a way.”

He kissed her hand. “The woman of stone has melted?”

“I’ve become a woman of desire.”

Later in the night they woke, ravenously hungry, and ate the rest of the bread and cheese, good white bread from the Priory bread oven, smooth hard cheese with a salty crust from the Priory dairy.

“Zachary spoke of something,” James said tentatively, afraid of the darkening of her eyes, of her turning away.

“Oh, he’s one that never stopped speaking,” she said, with a smile. “He thundered like the tide mill at every low tide.”

“He said that Ned had a wife . . .” he began.

His words were like a blow. He had knocked the smile off her. At once she went as white as guilt.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . Don’t say anything,” he begged her. “You need say nothing. It was just . . .”

“Did you believe him? Will you repeat to Sir William . . . what he said? Whatever it was he said? Are you bound by your vows to tell the minister at St. Wilfrid’s?”

“No, I’ll never say. I wouldn’t have said anything now but . . .”

“But he made you wonder,” she said slowly. “For all your learning, and your languages, and your knowledge—for all your faith!—he made you wonder. He made you . . . afraid.”

“I’m not afraid!” he started up, but she put a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“If the world was as Zachary sees it, we would all be afraid,” she said gently. “For like a poor fool he has peopled it with monsters to frighten himself. He speaks of me as a woman who lies with faerie folk. He denies his own children. He says I cast a spell that unmanned him. He says that I killed my poor sister-in-law, Mary. You know, if people around here believed just one of these things, they would test me as a witch?”

He shook his head in denial of the terrible accusations against her. “They must know you’re innocent!”

“You didn’t know.”

“I did! I do!”

“You know what they would do to me?”

“I don’t know.” He did not want to know.

“They have a ducking stool on Sealsea quay and they strap a woman into the seat, truss her like a kitten for drowning. The seat is on a great beam that the blacksmith—usually it’s the blacksmith—pushes down on the other end. The woman goes up into the air, where everyone can see her, then he lowers her down into the water, underneath the water. They take their time and when they judge that the trial has been long enough, they bring her up and raise her in the air again, to have a look at her. If she’s retching seawater, they say that the devil has protected her, and they send her to Chichester, for trial in the court before the judges, who will hear the evidence and may sentence her to death by hanging. But if she comes up white as sea-foam, and blue as ink at the lips and fingernails, her mouth open from screaming in the water, her hands like claws from tearing at the ropes, then they know she was innocent, and they bury her in the holy ground in the churchyard.”