There was a dove nesting in the pigeonhole; she did not move as Alinor climbed up within reach. Gently, Alinor put her hand under the warm soft breast. “I’m sorry, Goody Dove,” she said quietly. “But I am sent to get these. You lay more for yourself.”

Ignoring the bird’s indignant pecks to her cold hands, she lifted all the eggs but one from the nest, and put them carefully in the basket. They were small white eggs, warm from the mother’s breast feathers. Alinor climbed carefully down the ladder and looked upwards to see if another bird was nesting. Four times she moved the ladder and went up and down for eggs, and then she walked carefully back to the house with a dozen eggs in her basket. Mrs. Miller opened the door to her and managed a thin smile.

“I’d have thought you’d have sent Alys to do the work on a cold day like this,” she said. “Too grand for dove eggs now, is she? Now that she’s planning to marry so well? Playing the lady?”

“Oh, no,” Alinor said pleasantly. “But she’s still keeping the ferry for Ned.”

“Who’s going to cross in this cold weather? I hear the river has frozen in London and they’re walking from one side to another. You won’t get any fees if that happens here!”

“It feels cold enough to freeze,” Alinor agreed. “And the freshwater in the rife is frozen hard; but the tide still comes in.”

“And Ned still not home? I’m surprised he has the time and the money to go jauntering off to London.”

“It matters so much to him.”

“None of his business,” Mrs. Miller said sourly.

Alinor smiled. “Certainly, none of mine,” she said.

Mrs. Miller recovered a little good humor, unpacking the eggs from the basket and putting them in the crock. “Aye, I suppose so. You don’t take an interest in it?”

“I’m interested,” Alinor said carefully. “But I don’t take sides.”

“There’s not many that don’t think the king should be punished for his sins,” Mrs. Miller declared. “Making war on his own people! And the taxes! Would you like two eggs for your dinner?”

“Thank you,” Alinor replied, thinking that now there was no handsome stranger and noble party from the Priory, Mrs. Miller had reverted to being an envious roundhead. “Thank you very much for the eggs,” she said.

When she got to the rife, walking companionably with a Sealsea Island farmer’s wife, the ferry was waiting for her.

“Red’s missing,” Alys said as Alinor climbed cautiously aboard, the ferry rocking on the ebbing tide. “He didn’t come out to the pier this morning and he wasn’t in his corner at noon.”

“Yes, I know,” Alinor spoke unguardedly. “Poor Red. I said good-bye to him this morning.”

“You knew the dog would go missing?” the farmer’s wife demanded. “How did you know?”

“She didn’t know,” Alys interrupted rudely. “It’s just an old dog and he was lazy getting up this morning. She didn’t know.”

Alinor looked up, surprised at Alys’s harsh tone.

“Nobody could know such a thing,” Alys ruled.

The farmer’s wife remarked that sometimes she had premonitions herself, and her mother had been a terrible one for dreaming. “And of course your grandma had the sight,” she reminded Alys.

“Not us,” Alys declared roundly, bringing the ferry to the pier as Alinor got off, and turned to help the woman off the ferry. “We don’t believe in stuff like that. Good night!” she called. “See you tomorrow.”

“I did know about Red,” Alinor remarked mildly as Alys tied the ferry up and came up the steps.

“I know you did; but we can’t say things like that,” Alys said abruptly. “Not even to Mrs. Bellman. Anyway, I suppose he’s under a hedge somewhere,” she said.

“We’ll look,” Alinor promised her. “And I have an egg for your tea. A dove egg.”

“Lord, she exceeded herself!” Alys exclaimed. “How lucky are we? Two tiny eggs! She’s spoiling us. You go that way, I’ll go this. We’ll find him.”

The dog was not far from the house. He had gone quietly, as wise old dogs do, to die alone. It was Alinor who found him, as she knew she would, curled as if he was asleep; but his coat was cool and his nose was cold and his eyes were shut.

“The ground’s too hard for us to bury him,” Alys said. “What’ll we do? It doesn’t seem right to burn him, or put him on the midden.”

“I’ll dig a hole in the soft mud of the mire,” Alinor said. “You go and start dinner. I won’t be long.”

She took a shovel from the lean-to in the fruit garden and went out on one of the little shingle paths that led out into the deep mire. It would be flooded at high tide, but now, as the moon came up and the cold wind blew across the water, it was dry enough for her to walk along and to dig a deep hole in the soft mud at the side of the track.

When the pit was broad enough and deep enough she took the stiffening body, which now seemed so small and light, and laid it in the bottom of the hole. She knew that Ned would ask her if his dog had been properly buried, and that he would trust her. She filled the grave with shingle from the path to keep the body deep under the moving silt of the harbor floor. “Good-bye, Red,” she said gently. “You’re a very good dog.”

She shoveled a pile of silt and went to tamp it down when a glint of silver caught her eye, bright as a star in the dark night sky. She knelt down and found a tiny coin, shaved and thin but twinkling brightly in the mud. It was faerie gold, a coin from the old people, from the old days, with a crest on one side and a crown on the other, too rubbed and worn to be deciphered, too old to be recognized, too light to be valuable.

“Thank you,” Alinor said to Red. She accepted without a second thought that this was his burial fee, which he had sent to her from the other side, a country as far away and as misty as the distant side of the mire. “God bless, good dog. Godspeed.”

She put the coin in her pocket and the shovel over her shoulder, and she went heavily up the freezing shingle path to where the lights of the ferry-house gleamed over the cold waters.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, JANUARY 1649

The two men went through the crowded streets, stepping over the dirty gutters in the cobbled ways, picking their way down muddy lanes till the great walls of the palace were before them and they could see the soldiers of the New Model Army on guard before the gates. There was a small crowd outside the gates, looking towards the gray carved stone walls and the snow on the slate roof.

“Where is the king housed now?” James asked, keeping his voice down.

“In St. James’s Palace. They’ve called a hundred and thirty-five judges to London to sit in a high court to try him. But I swear half of them won’t dare to come. And even if they do, he won’t answer to them. How are they even going to get him into court?”

“But if they come, and if he answers—”

The nameless man interrupted him. “He won’t,” he insisted. “By what rights can they summon him? You can’t summon a king. Nobody’s ever summoned a king. Would his father, King James, have come to the parliament whistle? Would Queen Elizabeth have trotted obediently along? No country in the world has ever called their king into a court. No English monarch has ever obeyed parliament.”