James flushed with anger. “I can’t agree with you,” he said shortly. “I think we’ll have to differ.”

Ned rose from the table. “Have done,” he advised James. “It’s as I thought. You’re what I thought. If you weren’t on cavalier business, or papist business, it was secret business and bad business. As for me, I don’t care what you did, as long as you cease doing it now.”

“Mr. Summer was my tutor,” Rob spoke up for him. “I’d not have had a chance at an apprenticeship without his teaching.”

Ned nodded, and put his hand on the seated boy’s shoulder. “I know. I know he did well by you.” He paused. “I’m going to bed,” he said. “Some of us have to work early in the morning. And this lad has to start at Chichester tomorrow morning, and that’s a great beginning for him. He should be early to bed and early to rise.”

“Yes.” James got to his feet. “I’m going. I just came for some herbs, for fever. I’m sorry we can’t agree.”

“I’ll see you out,” Alinor said, quickly going to the front door. “I’ll walk you round to the road.”

“Don’t let him fall in the rife and drown,” Ned remarked with such a bitter smile that his words seemed more of a threat than a joke. “That’d be a loss to the future government. Good night, Mr. Summer. Or will you go by another name when you take up your lands? Was that ever your name at all?”

James turned back towards Ned and stretched out his hand. “I will have another name, and I am sorry to have sailed under false colors with you. I lost my faith some time ago, and we were both a witness to the death of my king. I have been waiting to make my peace with all my countrymen and with you. I hope you will, one day, forgive me for my sins as I forgive those you have done unto me.”

Ned was surprised into taking the man’s hand and shaking it. “Aye, very well,” he said. “And no false dealing in future?”

“None,” James said. “The war is over for both of us, and for the king.”

“Aye,” Ned said with quiet satisfaction. “It’s surely over for him.”

Alinor was waiting at the front door with a shawl over her head. “I’ll shut up the hens,” she called back to the firelit room.

As they stepped out into the still cold air James could see the pale outline of her face and her dark eyes in the light of the sickle moon. He thought that he had never seen anything more beautiful in his life than this woman in this bleached and blackened landscape, with the harbor water shining like a sheet of pewter behind her, and the sliver of an ice-white moon in the sky above her.

“Aren’t you cold?” he asked, and put his arms around her as if he would straighten her shawl, but found himself holding her, as easily and naturally as if they had never been parted. She came into his arms but at once he felt a difference in her. Through the layers of homespun he could feel her body but it was strange to him. Something about her touch horrified him, as if she was a shape-changer in a frightening story, and he flinched, stepped back, and looked at her. He saw that the pallor of her face was not just moonlight.

“J-James,” she said, stumbling over his name.

“My love?”

“You came back for me?”

“As I promised, the minute that I could.”

She sighed, and he realized she had been holding her breath from the moment he had stepped over the threshold. Her anxiety only alarmed him more. He glanced back at the darkened doorway, and she took him by the hand and led him around the corner of the house and through a gate into the vegetable garden that ran alongside the deserted road.

“I have to tell you something,” she said.

At the sound of her voice, the hens, warm in their house, clucked sleepily to her. She bent, and latched the door of their house, bolting it at the top and at the bottom.

“I have to tell you something first,” he said rapidly. “I met with my parents, with my mother and my father. I told them of you. I told them that I will pay my fine to parliament and regain our house. I will take you there, and in six years’ time, when you are declared a widow, we will marry.”

He saw her blanched lips tremble and he was afraid that she was about to argue. But, to his surprise, she consented at once: “Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, I will marry you and live wherever you wish. Yes. And I have something to tell you.”

“You will come with me?” He could hardly believe her words.

“I will. But I have to—”

“My love! My love! You will come with me!”

“I have to tell you something.”

“Anything! Anything!”

The hens clucked again at the voices. “Hush,” she said, drawing him away from the henhouse. “I have to tell you . . .”

He took her hand. “Of course. What is it, my love?”

She drew a breath again, as if she could not speak. Then her words were so soft he had to lean towards her to catch them. “I am with child,” she said.

For a moment he did not understand what she was saying; he could not hear the words. Each single word made sense, but together they made no sense at all and he could not understand it—coming from her, to him.

“What?”

“I am with child.”

“How?” he asked stupidly.

She found a ghost of a smile. “The way it usually happens. When we were in the hayloft together.”

“But how?” he asked again. “How could it be?”

“What should prevent it?”

“I thought you would prevent it!” he retorted, too loudly for caution.

“Hush,” she said again, and led him farther down the path to the bottom gate, so that they could not be heard from the house.

Irrelevantly, he suddenly thought how much he hated a winter vegetable garden, so dark and muddy and nothing growing. He thought how poor it was, and how ugly. He thought how much he disliked it that the hens recognized her voice and clucked back at her. The future Lady Avery should not pull turnips and feed her own hens; and her hand in his was rough. “Are you sure?”

Now she smiled. “Of course I am sure.”

Her smile infuriated him, as if she thought him a fool. “I do understand well enough,” he snapped. “It’s not that I know nothing. It’s just that I thought that you—a married woman, a wisewoman—would have made sure that it did not happen.”

She shook her head; she was maddeningly serene. “I don’t do that sort of work.”

“It’s not work when it is for yourself!” he argued like a Jesuit. “It would be work, and a sin, if you were preventing the child of another: a sinful woman, or an adulteress. But for yourself there is no sin in a woman choosing to eat some herbs, or drink some drink, as soon as you knew. Or better still, before you did the act!”

“Did the act?” she repeated, as if she could not understand his words.

“Then it would be no sin at all as there would be no intent. D’you see? If there is no evil intent then there is no sin. Why did you not take the herbs the morning that we parted?”

“I was thinking of nothing but us, nothing but us and the hayloft as if it were a time outside time,” she admitted. “I was longing for the evening when I would see you again. Then you were gone, and I was just longing.”