He grinned like a lad. “Pull us over then,” he said.

“A halfpenny for the two of you,” she said, putting out her hand and slipping the coin that he gave her into the pocket of her gown. Ned took Alinor’s arm and helped her onto the ferry; she clamped her scarred hands on the wooden rail.

“Don’t fear,” he said to her. “No harm will come to her on the water. How should it? There’s nothing to fear except your dreams of drowning. And I’ll come back soon.”

“When?” she demanded.

“When it’s over,” he said, his face bright. “When the king has begged pardon of the people of England.”

Alinor and Ned parted at the Market Cross in the center of Chichester where the stone cross marked the roads that ran north and south, east and west. Ned was going to walk north to London, confident that someone would offer him a lift on the way, the wagons rolling easily on the frozen roads.

“There’ll be many old soldiers going to London for news,” he said confidently. “Many of us have waited for this for years.”

“But you’ll come back when it’s all over?” Alinor asked, putting her hand on his sleeve. “You won’t enlist again? Not even if the Irish rise against us, or the Scots invade again? You won’t go with Cromwell’s army?”

“That’s finished,” he said certainly. “There’ll be no more wars, there’ll be no more uprisings. The king will have to swear on his life to live in peace, and all the poor men who marched on one side or the other will be able to go home, and the brave women who kept the houses against their enemies will be able to live in peace at last.”

“I ask you, because I have troubles that I haven’t told you,” Alinor said choosing her words with care. “I’m going to need you at home, Brother. I’m going to need your help.”

At once, he was alert. “Has Zachary come back? Have you heard from him?”

“No, God be praised, no,” she said quickly. “But I have to get Alys married and Rob into his work and I have a difficulty, a difficulty of my own. I’ll need your help.”

He put his broad rough hand over hers. “Alys is earning her dowry even now,” he reassured her. “No need to fear for her. And Rob has his place promised to him and the Peacheys are paying his entrance fee. I’ll come back, but you’ve nothing to fear. Are you ill? Is that it?”

She made herself smile at him. “I’ll tell you when you come back,” she said. “It’ll keep.”

Only his excitement would have made him overlook her pallor. “You’d better stay at Ferry-house while Alys is keeping the ferry.”

“Yes, we will.”

“Look after the dog. He’s getting old now. He feels the cold.”

“I’ll let him sleep by the fire.”

“And when I come home, you can stay on. There’s no point going back to your cottage alone when Alys is wed and Rob away. We’ll tell everyone that Zachary is never coming home, and you can keep house for me. You can come back to your old home.”

Like a vision, Alinor imagined her childhood home as her own home once again, and the man she loved riding down the road to the ferry, just as he had done before. She thought that he would see her, standing at the garden gate of the ferry-house, with the deep water before her, and know that she was a free woman, waiting for him. She thought that when he crossed on the ferry and took her hands she would tell him that she was carrying his child.

Ned was dazzled by her smile, as bright as the winter sun.

“Yes,” she said. “Very well.”

LONDON, DECEMBER 1648

James took ship from France on a cold December morning with a westerly wind filling the sails of the Thames barge that took him into the pool of London. He disembarked with papers that showed him to be a wine merchant, coming to trade with the Vintners’ Company of London. He was waved ashore by an exciseman whose main concern was to check the hold of the ship, and had no time for anyone who did not have gossip to tell from the extraordinary royal courts in exile in France and the Low Countries.

“No, I heard nothing,” James spoke with a slight French accent. “What matter, eh? Can you direct me to the Vintners’ Hall?”

“Behind the watergate, and Three Cranes Wharf.” The man waved his hand.

“And how may I know Three Cranes Wharf?”

“Because there are three cranes on it,” the man said with exaggerated patience.

James, satisfied the exciseman would remember the French wine merchant, hefted his bag over his shoulder and climbed the damp steps set into the quay wall of Queenhithe. The quayside was crowded with vendors of little goods, porters, hawkers, and pedlars. James disappeared among the people trying to sell him things that he did not want, and took Trinity Lane up the hill, and then a roundabout route to his destination: a small counting house off Bread Street. When he reached the door with the curiously wrought door knocker he tapped twice and let himself inside.

In the gloom he could see a middle-aged woman rise up from the table where she was weighing small coins in the dim light from the barred window. “Good day, sir. Can I help you?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “I am Simon de Porte.”

“You are welcome,” she said. “Are you sure that no one followed you from the docks?”

“I am sure,” he said. “I turned several corners and I stopped and doubled back twice. There was no one.”

She hesitated as if she was afraid to trust him. “Have you done this before?” she asked, and then she saw how weary he looked. His handsome young face was grooved with lines of fatigue. Clearly, he had done this before; clearly, he had done it too many times.

“Yes,” he said shortly.

“You can put your bag in the cellar,” she said, gesturing to a hatch in the floor under her chair. Together, they pushed her table to one side and she gave him a candle to light his way down the wooden ladder. At the foot was a small bed, a table, and another candle.

“If there’s a raid, bolt the hatch from the inside. There is a secret way into the cellar next door, behind that rack of wine,” she said. “And from there, in the opposite wall, there is a low delivery door out to the next lane. If someone comes, and you need to escape, then go that way quickly and quietly and you might get away.”

“Thank you,” he said looking up into her worn face framed with gray hair pinned back under her cap. “Is Master Clare at home?”

“I’ll fetch him,” she said. “He’s in his workshop.”

James climbed back up the stairs, she dropped the hatch, and together they pulled back the table. James saw that she was dressed very plainly in a gray gown with a rough apron, not at all like the wealthy cavalier supporters who had hidden him in the past.

“A cup of ale?” she offered him.

“I’d be glad of one.”

She poured the ale from a jug on the sideboard and then put her shawl around her head. “I’ll fetch the master,” she said. “You wait here.”

James sat at the table, feeling the odd sensation of the floor moving under his feet, as if he were still riding the horse to the coast, still rising and falling on the waves of the sea. It was only travel sickness, but he thought that it would last forever: never again would the ground be firm beneath his feet. Then the door opened and a slight man came in, dressed in the neat modest clothes of a London tradesman. He shook James’s hand with a steady grip.