LONDON, FEBRUARY 1649

James waited a day and a night in case there were instructions for him, but when he heard nothing from either Paris or The Hague, from his spymaster, his professor, or his father, he concluded that his work was done and there was nothing more for him to do. Sourly, he thought that there had never been anything for him to do, except to bury the king and there were others to do that. Bitterly, he thought that someone might have told him at least that they had received the letters and that they were grateful for his service; but then he remembered his mother telling him that the king was a fool and the prince a rogue and royal service was a thankless task—but one that could not be avoided.

He walked through the silent city, which was like a town in mourning, like a family in shock. He took a ferry to the south side of the river, hired a horse in Lambeth, and headed down the long road to Chichester, and to Sealsea Island.

The horse was old and weary of the road, and James was happy to go at a shambling walk. He was glad to take time away from the terror of these unpredictable days, when words would not save the king, and words could not be spoken, and think in silence what his future might be, what his life might be in this new world into which all Englishmen had stumbled. He would be a man of words no more. He knew that everything had changed for him. Everything had changed from that day at Newport, when the king had refused to come away though there was a boat waiting for him and his son’s fleet at sea.

James pulled himself back from the daydream of a victory, a comforting reverie in days of defeat. He feared that dreaming would keep the royalists trapped in exile, forever hoping for better times, forever hashing over old mistakes. Instead, he tried to think what this new England might mean for him, for his parents, and for Alinor. He doubted that his parents would stay at the court of the queen now that she would never receive a message from her triumphant husband, now that she would never return home in victory. He doubted that they would transfer their loyalty to Prince Charles, who might call himself Charles II—though it was hard to see how he would ever be crowned in Westminster Abbey, so near to Westminster Hall where his father had been sentenced to death. Surely, England must be without a king forever. Would James’s parents know they were defeated? Would they come home instead of dreaming and hoping? James thought that they would. People who had sworn loyalty and risked their lives and fortunes for the king would not necessarily transfer their faith to his son, especially a man with nothing but the fading charm of a prince in exile, surrounded by favorites, corrupt advisors, and reckless women, scattering empty promises that he was certain never to repay. Now that he was king in waiting, his court would become even more desperate, even more fatalistic. Only those with hopes of nothing better would support him. Only the homeless would be fellow travelers.

There was little chance, James thought, that his mother, Lady Avery, would join such a court, to serve an uncrowned king. His father would never compete for office or duties with corrupt adventurers, and if they were not appointed by the king in exile, why would they stay in exile? They would come home, James thought. They must come home to Northallerton in Yorkshire and James would be able to return with them to his own fields, to his childhood home, and feel the cold winds blow off the moors again, and hear the cry of the peewit as it tumbled, spade-winged, in the clear sky.

He would present Alinor to his parents as the woman that he loved and intended to marry, and surely they would allow him to live with her, in a new house that he would build, perhaps in the fields below the great house: perhaps a small house, a manor house, set in a walled garden for her herbs, with a fruit orchard. He would present her to the village and the parish as his wife, acknowledging that they could not yet be legally married, but calling her his betrothed, and demanding for her the respect that an Avery commanded in the manor of Northside. And he was certain that, though people would gossip behind their hands, though his mother would disapprove, in a world of such momentous change in which everything was turned upside down, and a middling farmer from Cambridgeshire was running the country, the fact that the future Lady Avery was not yet married to the son and heir would quickly become old news.

All he had to do, James thought as the road wound over the height of the South Downs, so pale and gray and misty in the bitterly cold morning, was convince Alinor to leave her little fisherman’s cottage, her beloved daughter and her adored son, and come north with him. Confidently, James thought he could do that. She could bring her daughter and son, if she wanted, if that was the price of her coming. Or they could visit. Or anything, James thought passionately, any condition she wanted to make. If she would only come to him.

TIDELANDS, FEBRUARY 1649

Ned, Rob, Alinor, and Alys walked along the bank at the side of the harbor, past Alinor’s old cottage and net shed, through the quickthorn tunnel, dropping down to the shingle beach, bending their heads beneath the low boughs of the overhanging oak tree, then climbing up the rough steps cut out of the sea wall to the footpath to the church. The rumbling of the millstones across the mire and the rush of the millrace water sounded loud on the cold air, and Alinor glanced back as if she feared that the waters were rising up after them. Ned helped the two women over the stile into the churchyard and they went silently in single file along the path that wound through the gravestones. Ned and Alinor paused before the plain stone that marked their parents’ burial site.

“I wish he could have lived to see this day,” Ned said of his father. “He would never have believed it possible.”

Alinor bowed her head in silence. “I miss her,” was all she said.

The four of them turned and went into church, Alys and Alinor going up the stairs to the wooden gallery where the workingwomen of the parish stood in silence, Ned and Rob stood at the left of the nave where the men of the parish waited bare-headed for the Peachey household to enter and Sir William to take his seat. Only when the nobility arrived would the service to God take place. Ned muttered to Rob that nothing would ever change in the tidelands, no matter what took place elsewhere.

There was only one chair: his lordship’s, placed before the chancel steps like a throne. Walter was in Cambridge, and there were no guests at the Priory to sit in the Priory pews. The household stood behind the empty seats. Alinor, looking down from the gallery on his lordship’s beautiful dark felted hat trimmed with a dark feather and a silver pin, as he processed slowly into church, wondered if he missed his son, or if he had heard anything from his son’s former tutor. She knew that she could never ask him, nor anyone of his household. She tightened her thick winter shawl over her round belly, and watched the minister step towards the lectern, bow low to his lordship, and begin.

The service—the new service, as designed by the parliament and delivered by the Church that obeyed them—went through the usual prayers and readings. But when it came to the sermon the minister looked at the men at the back of the church and said, “Edward Ferryman, are you there?”

“Present!” Ned replied with the promptness of an old soldier at roll call.

“Would you tell us what you have witnessed in London, so that we may all know what has befallen the king who betrayed his people?”

The men either side of Ned parted to make him a path to the chancel steps. He came cautiously forward.