“This is a terrible risk.”

“I know. But I had to take it, Ma. I had to stop the Stoneys from saying no today. They won’t go back on their word, even if I can’t get the money. Richard will help me, and Mr. Stoney loves me—he’ll let me off. I’ll put the purse back, Mrs. Miller will be none the wiser, and when we get to market I’ll get some more wool for spinning. I’ll earn as much as I can before my wedding day, and I’ll give them all that I have at the church door. It won’t be sixty pounds, but it’ll be too late by then. They’ll never cancel the wedding. I’ll tell them then that I’ll owe the rest.”

Alinor shook her head at this solution. “It’s false dealing. Alys, it’s bad for us to be seen as cheats. If you cheat them on your wedding day, they’ll throw it in your face every quarrel you have. They’ll never trust you again.”

“Richard’ll never throw it against me.”

“His mother will.”

Alys shrugged. “Who cares? Once we’re married, she can say what she likes. I don’t care. It’s him I’m marrying, not her. And he’s worth stealing for, and cheating for. He’s worth anything.”

Alinor put a hand over her eyes as if the morning sun was too dazzling to bear. Vividly, in her mind’s eye, she saw Alys at the church door offering an underweight purse, the Stoneys’ white-lipped resentment, and her own shame.

“It’s no way to start a marriage,” she said miserably. “It’s not how you should be on your wedding day.”

Alys hugged her arm. “Ma, I know this is terrible for you, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but I can’t be stuck here, getting nowhere. I have to marry Richard. I have to be with him. I’m young, I want my life! I can’t be patient under misfortune like you. I can’t wait and wait for our da to come home, as if that would ever make anything better, when we know it’d be worse! I can’t creep about all humble, and hope that the neighbors are kind to my face while calling me a pauper and a faerie bastard behind my back.”

“They don’t say that!”

“It’s exactly what they say. Look how you have to fawn on Mrs. Miller. Look how you bow to Mrs. Wheatley. Look how you cringe to Mr. Tudeley, and that horrible tutor! We’re on the edge of charity all the time. We’re always leaching off someone’s goodwill. I can’t stand it. I’d rather be a thief than a beggar. I’ve got to take my chance now. I’ve got to live my life now!”

“Oh, don’t say that of him!”

“Mr. Tudeley is a monster!”

Alinor silenced her response, shamed by her own daughter, looked at Alys but could not find the words to reprimand her. “I’m not craven,” she said, her voice very low. “I don’t cringe. I don’t leach.”

“Yes, you do,” Alys said mercilessly. “Anyone can say anything to you, if they’ll only buy a bottle of plums.”

“I didn’t know you felt like this.”

“I’ve always hated being poor.”

“Rob, too?”

“Rob doesn’t matter!” Alys exploded. “This is not about your precious son, for once.”

Alys’s jealousy and her resentment stretched before Alinor for the first time, as if she was seeing the waste of Foulmire for the first time, in its vast emptiness, and smelling its mud.

“I can’t afford to offend anyone,” Alinor said quietly, the words forced from her. “If I want to earn enough to put food on the table for the two of you, I can’t afford pride.”

“I know,” Alys said.

“And Rob is not more precious than you.” She choked on her words. “Nothing in my world is more precious than you.”

“I know,” Alys repeated. She put her arm round her mother’s shoulder and held her closely. “I know what you’ve done for us. I don’t know half of what you’ve suffered—for us. You’ve been mother and father to us, I know. And it was too much for any woman to do on her own. I’m grateful, I am—really. But I’m only saying that I can’t be like you. I can’t do what you do. I can’t bend under the wheel. I can’t stand it. I’d rather risk everything than settle for a poor life, like you have.”

“You think I’ve settled for poverty?”

“Yes,” said Alys with the blunt cruelty of the young.

“I understand,” her mother said quietly. “I do understand wanting to be proud, being in love, being reckless.”

“Do you?”

She nodded, pressing her lips closed on her secret. Only last night she had been proud of her desire, entranced by lovemaking, and reckless. “I do know,” she repeated.

They stood for a moment, holding each other close, then they turned and walked side by side up the road to Chichester.

“I’m sorry,” Alys said quietly. “You know I love you. I didn’t mean to say all that.”

“I know.”

They walked a few minutes in silence then Alinor spoke: “This life isn’t what I intended for myself. It isn’t what my mother wanted for me. She thought Zachary was a man with his own boat, who’d do well. She thought we’d be neighbors, and she and I would work together, and he’d make a better life for me. She thought Ned would inherit the ferry, and have a good wife and a child of his own, and I’d have money coming in from Zachary and we’d live next door to my brother in our home. She couldn’t foresee that Mary would die, and that your father’d turn out bad.”

They walked in silence for a while until they heard a shout from behind and turned to see a farmer with a wagon piled high with fleeces, his wife sitting up beside him with baskets of cheeses.

“Going to market?” he asked as they paused on the side of the road and turned to him. “Ah, Mrs. Reekie, I didn’t recognize you, out of your way, on the Birdham road. Are you going to Chichester market?”

“Yes,” Alinor said, smiling brightly. “And this is my girl, Alys.”

“Grown like a weed,” he said. “I remember you when you were a little tot. Would you like a lift?”

“Come up and sit on the bench beside me,” his wife said to Alinor. “Alys can go in the back on the fleeces if she doesn’t object.”

“Thank you,” Alinor said gratefully, as the goodwife leaned down and offered a hand to help Alinor up to the driver’s bench and Alys put one foot on the hub band, the other on the spokes, and clambered up.

“Are you selling some of your oils?” the woman asked, looking at Alinor’s basket.

“Yes,” Alinor said. “And buying some lace for Mrs. Miller, if there’s anything good to be had.”

“Terrible dear,” the farmer’s wife said. “I wonder she doesn’t make her own.”

Alinor, knowing that anything she said would be repeated, smiled and made no comment.

“But I suppose they’re doing so well, she can afford to buy,” the woman said.

“I don’t know,” Alinor said levelly.

“Oh, weren’t you there at harvest home? Didn’t we all see the best wheat harvest they’ve ever had? And don’t they sell half of it for profit and send it out of the county? And her yaddering away all dinnertime with Master Walter’s tutor from Cambridge, as if she were as good as him? As if she would have anything to say to him that he would want to hear!”