“I’ve heard of such things but—”

“It’s the law that every parish should have a ducking stool. You must know that.”

“I thought it was just a ducking?”

She showed him a thin smile. “Yes, that’s what it’s called. Makes it sound light work, doesn’t it? And some women are only ducked. But of course, some drown.”

“Sir William should make sure it is only a ducking.”

She shrugged. “He should. When he’s here. But it’s better for Sir William that they duck a witch from time to time, and blame some poor woman for their misfortunes, than ask him whose side he took at Marston Moor, what he did at Newbury—and why they should pay their tithes to him.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it! He’s paid his fine for serving the king. And he’s been forgiven by parliament.”

“We’ll never forgive him,” she said, speaking for her brother, for all the men who hoped for a better life without a lord. “He took a dozen lads from Sealsea with the king’s cockade in their hats, and he brought only seven home.”

“But that has nothing to do with it,” he explained patiently. “And he’s a civilized man—he would stop a witch trial. He’s a justice of the peace—he would uphold the law. He’s an educated man, a lawyer. He wouldn’t hurt an innocent woman.”

She smiled at him as if he were a child. “No woman is innocent,” she remarked and her words made him shudder as if it were Zachary speaking. “No woman is innocent. The Bible names the woman as the one to blame for bringing sin into the world. Everything is our fault: sin and death are at our door, from now till Judgment Day. Sir William isn’t going to risk his own authority by stepping in to save some poor slut from drowning.”

He was chilled by her cynicism, and he did not want to hear her. He wanted her back in his bed, warm and responsive. She had been hardened by the cruelties of her life and he wanted her to be soft and melting.

“But it doesn’t matter to us,” he suggested. “And I daresay there was nothing in what Zachary said anyway, about your sister-in-law?”

“Mary died under my care,” she told him frankly. “And the world knew well enough that we quarreled like a cat and a dog in the same barn, every day since Ned brought her into Ferry-house and set her up in my mother’s place. I disliked her and she loathed me. But, all the same, I cared for her the best that I knew how. I didn’t know what should be done for her; I don’t think anybody would have known. Her baby came too soon, and it was a bitter stillbirth for us all. Then I couldn’t stop her bleeding. She died in my arms and I couldn’t save her. I don’t even know what caused either death: hers or the child’s. I’m not a physician, I’m just a midwife.”

“Zachary said it was his child, and you were jealous,” he said, and instantly regretted it.

She looked at him very coolly and levelly. She drew the sheet around her shoulders as if it was a silken stole. “He told you that, did he?” Suddenly she was cold. “Well, you must be the judge of what you hear. I’ve never defended myself against Zachary’s lies, and I’ll not reply to his foul words in your sweet mouth. But if it was his child—as he boasted to me, after she was dead and couldn’t answer back—then I doubt she was willing.”

He shivered with distaste. He felt that he could not bear the ugliness of these people’s lives on the very edge of the shore, with their loves and hates ebbing and flowing like a muddy tide, with their anger roaring like the water in the millrace, with their hatreds and fears as treacherous as the hushing well. That Zachary might have raped his sister-in-law, or seduced her, that he bedded his own wife without her consent, that her brother tolerated this, and instead of putting it right, went away to fight against the king, that Alinor’s own husband denied fathering her children! James’s shudder told him that he wanted nothing to do with any of them. He wished himself back with his own people, where cruelty was secret, violence was hidden, and good manners more important than crime.

Tentatively, he reached out to her; he wanted her to be the lover of his feverish dream, not the woman who struggled in this sordid world. “I believe in you. I believe in you, Alinor.”

The face she turned to him was warm and trusting, her eyes brimming with tears. “You can,” she said simply, and he felt that he was falling into the deepest sin as he kissed her soft mouth and her wet eyelashes as they rested on her cheeks.

After that, they kept to their promise not to think of the world outside the stable loft; not to think of tomorrow; but at dawn, making love even before they were fully awake, when her eyelids fluttered open in pleasure, she saw the dim light at the window and she said quietly, sorrowfully, “Ah, my love, it’s morning.”

“Not yet,” he said, moving slowly above her. “That’s moonlight.”

“No. It’s dawn. And I have to go back to my home today, and we have to tell Sir William that you are well.”

He rested his head on her shoulder as he moved within her. “I can’t bear it.”

“Can’t bear the pleasure or can’t bear the parting?”

“Both. Can’t we say that I am still ill? Can’t we take another day? Alinor, my love, can’t we steal another day together?”

“No. You know we can’t. Neither of us can come under suspicion.”

“I won’t let you go.”

She raised herself up to his kiss and her rich hair tumbled back from her face. “Let me kiss you once,” she said, “and then I’ll get up and get dressed.”

He wanted to hold her, but she shook her head and he rolled away and lay back, gripping his hands behind his head so that he should not snatch at her, as she leaned over him and kissed him passionately on the mouth and then rested her forehead on his chest, inhaling the scent of him as if he were a rose beneath her lips. Then she peeled herself off him, as if she were shedding her own skin, and turned away, to pull her linen shift over her head so that the stiff fabric fell, concealing her.

“I can’t do this,” he said quietly. “I really can’t be parted from you.”

She said nothing, but stepped into her skirt and tied the laces at her waist with meticulous care, and then sat on a bench at the side of the room to pull on her woolen hose.

“Alinor,” he breathed.

“Let me dress!” Her voice was choked. “I can’t dress and speak. I can’t hear your voice and think. Let me dress.”

He sat up in the bed in silence while she twisted her hair into a knot at the back of her head and pulled on her white cap, crumpled as it was. When she turned to him she was, once again, the respectable midwife of Sealsea Island; and the tranced lover of the night was hidden under the shapeless bulky clothes.

“Now you,” she said.

He started towards her and she put out her hand to fend him off. “Don’t touch me,” she begged him. “Just get dressed.”

He pulled on his linen shirt. For the first time in his life he noticed what fine linen he wore, and he thought that the first thing he would do, as soon as he was well, would be to go to Chichester and buy her some beautiful shifts, as smooth as her flawless skin. He pulled on his hose, heaved up his breeches, stamped his feet into his riding boots, and turned to her.