“Then it will be all right,” he tried to reassure her, though it was he who looked panicked. She was as cool as the sickle moon.
“It will be all right,” she agreed through pale lips, and she closed the gate on him and turned back to the frozen garden. As he walked away he heard her speak softly to her hens, in the same gentle tones as she had used to soothe him.
Alys wanted to walk to Chichester with her mother and Rob, see Rob’s new employer, collect some more wool for spinning, and perhaps even buy a ribbon to trim her wedding dress.
“It’s only the Monday market,” Alinor said discouragingly. “The ribbon stall is far better on Saturday. And the wool merchant is bringing wool and leaving it here, when he comes next week.”
Alys made a face. “Anyway, I suppose I should go to work at the mill,” she said.
“You should,” Alinor agreed.
“I’d almost rather work the ferry than spend the day with Mrs. Miller.”
“You could ask your uncle Ned to take his turn in the dairy?”
Unwillingly, Alys laughed.
“Ah, she’s not so bad,” Alinor told her daughter. “And it’s baking day today. The other women will be there for the firing of the oven and you can bake us a loaf.”
Alys wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and tightened her apron at her broad waist. “I’ll go to Stoney Farm when I’ve finished work. I’ll have my dinner there, and walk back here later,” she said.
“Yes, yes,” Alinor said absently. She went to the foot of the stairs and called Rob and heard his answering shout.
“Help me with the copper into the scullery for Rob.”
The two women slid the pole through the carry rings and lifted the copper filled with hot water to the center of the room, then Alinor kissed her daughter and saw her out of the front door, turned to the foot of the stairs, and shouted for Rob again.
He came downstairs in his shirt and stripped naked, and washed himself, using the gray soap as Alinor poured jugs of hot water over his shoulders and over his head.
He stepped, long-legged as a calf, out of the water onto a little mat that Alinor put before him, and rubbed himself down with a linen sheet. He sat, wrapped in the sheet on a stool before the fire, as Alinor trimmed his thick brown hair and rubbed it dry with her own mixture of olive oil and apple vinegar and then combed it through with a lice comb. Rob dressed himself in the clean linen that they had given him at the Priory, and a pair of breeches belonging to Walter Peachey.
“Eat some breakfast,” Alinor urged him, and put some bread and small ale before him on the kitchen table.
When he had finished, he lifted the copper with her and carried it back to the scullery. “Shall I pour it away?” he asked her. “It’s heavy for you.”
“I’ll wash down the floors with it later,” she said. “Leave it there.”
Alinor had bought him good secondhand hose in Chichester market and he could still get into the shoes they had given him for Christmas at the Priory, though they were tight across the toes. He had a secondhand jacket which once belonged to Walter.
Alinor stroked the thick wool of the sleeve. “It’s very fine,” she said.
“It’s nothing. It’s his old one, his second-best. He wore velvet to go to university.”
“I am sorry . . .” she started to say.
Rob grinned at her. “Sorry that I don’t have a velvet jacket? Sorry that I can’t eat my dinners at Cambridge? Ma, it is me that’s sorry that my earnings are stopped from the Priory, and Alys can’t get enough for her dowry, and you have to work all the hours of daylight. I know how lucky I am. I know how blessed we’ve been. And as soon as I earn my first wages you shall have them all.”
Alinor reached for him and he bowed his head and allowed her to embrace him, but he no longer clung to her as he used to do, when he was her little boy.
“You’re growing up,” she said mournfully.
“I’m an apprentice lad!” he said proudly.
“I feel like I’m losing you,” she said. “Like you’re slipping away.”
“It’s Chichester,” he reminded her. “I’m not going to sea.”
“No, and I thank God for that at least,” she said. “I’ll look in to see you when I come to market, and you’ll come home for Alys’s wedding on Sunday, and then Lady Day.”
Gently he detached himself from her embrace. “Of course. You’ll see me within the week.”
“Are you ready to go?” she asked him, half hoping he would say no and they would have more time together.
“I’ll get my sack,” he said.
He ran up the ladder to his loft bedroom and came down again carrying his little sack with some clean linen, his spoon, his cup, his knife, a change of hose and—a gift from Sir William—a notebook with blank pages for him to start his own book of recipes and remedies that he would learn from the apothecary. He had his own pen, a knife to trim it, and a small pot of ink from the Priory schoolroom.
“Everything?” Alinor asked him.
“Yes.”
“Well, if you need something, you can always send a message.”
They went out of the house, closing the door carefully behind them. Ned was rehanging the horseshoe that served as a chiming bell on the far side of the mire, but when he saw them he pulled the ferry over and held it steady as Alinor got on board.
“All ready?” he asked Rob. “You’re the first of us Ferrymans to have an apprenticeship. The first to be headed to clean work. The first to work indoors.”
“I’m ready,” Rob said.
“Our mother would have died of pride,” Ned said to Alinor. “Just shows you what study can do . . . and favor,” he added.
“Rob was always bright, even as a baby,” Alinor said. “Mother saw that in him, though she would never have dreamed of today. And he’s earned the favor of the Peacheys, fair and square. He learned enough at school to be able to study alongside Master Walter. And they made friends, real friends.”
“Born to be a lord?” Ned teased her, as he made the ferry fast and took her hand to help her out.
“Of course not,” she said. “But it tells you something that he and Master Walter were studying side by side and now Walter is fit to be a lawyer, or at any rate a gentleman.”
“It tells you that there are always places for placemen, and nothing changes,” Ned said.
“Everything is changing,” Rob said surprisingly, leaping from ferry to pier and helping Alinor to dry land. “Everything is changing. We have a parliament instead of a king. We can speak to our masters on our own two feet, we don’t have to kneel. I am going to earn a wage, not be paid in pennies. We’re never going to go hungry again.” He turned to his uncle and the two men embraced. “Thank you, Uncle Ned,” Rob said. “I’ll be back on Sunday.”
“Have this in the meantime,” his uncle said, pressing a sixpence into his hand. “Take it, you might need it. They might not feed you well and then you can buy yourself a pie or a loaf of bread. And if they don’t treat you well, you must tell us, you know. You’re right: we aren’t so poor that anyone can do anything to us. And we don’t take a beating from anyone.”