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“I’ve not got that sort of money,” Ned said. “Nowhere near.”
Johnnie scowled. “We might be able to bargain it down. Livia Avery is a favorite of the queen, if we could get her to intercede for us.”
“What sort of king enslaves his own people?” Ned demanded. “Why should we pay for our freedom?”
The coach went faster, swaying on the straps as they joined the highway, but neither man noticed.
“Your crime made you the property of the king,” Johnnie the merchant-trader asserted. “This is not tyranny but justice.”
Ned rested a hand on his shoulder. “Lad, I was fighting injustice before you were born, I will be against it until the day I die. If we have to pay a tyrant to free Rowan, I will. But I would free all slaves, if I could.”
“Slaves are property, it’s not about justice but about wealth. And you’ll never change that. Someone owns everything.”
Ned shook his head. “It’s the nature of the world that we’ve chosen to make,” he said stubbornly. “Because men like you want it that way. But I don’t want it that way, and there are men like me, and women, who would rather not own another, not profit off someone’s misery.”
“Then you’ll live and die a poor rebel in someone else’s coat,” Johnnie predicted. “Like you are now. Riding in my coach with a mouth full of treason but nothing in your pocket. The very food in your belly, I bought you.”
“It’s going to be a long, long journey for you if you’re counting the pennies at every stop,” Ned observed unruffled. “And I thank you for my coat, though it wasn’t your gift. The shoes I stand up in were stolen from you by a girl with a greater heart than yours. Her land was taken and her people enslaved by men who think—like you—that they have a right to everything. And sorry I am, to see a man of my own family—and we were a poor family ourselves—become one of them.”
“Being poor is the very reason we’re driven to make money and keep it!” Johnnie exclaimed. “I was raised by a mother who used to look in the cashbox every Sunday night to see if she could send me to school with a penny for my schooling the next day! She swore, and I swore, that the cashbox would never be empty. Her life’s work, and mine, is to make the fortune that you so despise.
“You’re playing an old song, Uncle! It’s not freedom from a king that matters now, it is the freedom to make money. You went to war to change the king but the king matters less than profit. The true kingof England is not Charles or James or whoever comes next. The true king of England is wealth. And we can all see the good of that. We’re all loyal to that.”
“Not me,” Ned said imperturbably. “Still not me.”
FOULMIRE PRIORY, SUSSEX, AUTUMN 1685
James, in the grand guest bedroom at Foulmire Priory, slept badly, listening, as he always did, to the thud of his heart, wondering if it was speeding or slowing or even missing a beat, and if this was the night when he would hear it stop. He woke late, got dressed, and slipped out of the front door to walk around the garden. The kitchen garden had been replanted with herbs and there was a new rose garden, but the door set into the wall leading to the hay meadow was the same. He remembered waiting in the meadow and letting her go in alone, because he served a cause that was greater than them both; and his moment of revelation when the door opened and she came out, her carefree smile, her confident stride telling him that she was safe—and his realization that there was no cause in the world greater to him than the turn of her head and the light in her gray eyes.
He heard the bell in St. Wilfrid’s church tower strike ten as he went back through the little door, across the garden, and into the front door. Alinor came down the stairs wearing a gown of slate gray with a white cap on her silver hair. She had a hand on the bannister and with her other hand she steadied herself with a black ebony cane. Seeing her in the morning light, her little grimace of discomfort at every step on the stair, reminded him that they were old. He told himself he should have put passion aside long ago, and that he only burned for her now like a young man because they had parted so abruptly,as such young lovers. They had longed only for the next day and the next night. There had been no familiarity to wear off passion, no daily life to erode desire. He could not see her as a woman of sixty-four, he could not imagine his death without her at his side.
He reached his hand to her. “You look like you did when I first saw you in the churchyard,” he said.
She smiled. “Doesn’t it sometimes feel like yesterday? Or even that it’ll all happen for the first time, tomorrow? I forget it was the past, I’ve lost the sense of time.”
She took his hand, and at her touch he was certain that she would come to him, that they would be lovers again. He knew he only had to draw her to him and she would yield, as she had always done before. He led her into the dining room, which was laid for breakfast. She offered him small ale or milk, and he took the small ale for the remembered taste.
“Is this your brewing?” he asked.
“Lizzie does the hard work. But I cut the herbs and taste the brew.”
He carved slices of ham and the maid brought boiled eggs in their brown shells. Alinor ate a little meat and a sliced apple. She drank a glass of milk as he reveled in the normality of sitting at a table with her and eating breakfast and seeing her smile. She said: “Shall we walk out? I think it’s going to rain later on, there’s a dark cloud out to sea, and the wind’s getting up.”
Together they went through the front door and without saying a word turned to the path through the herb garden.
“Do you remember…?” he began. He was thinking of the days when he had been sick with fever, isolated in the loft above the stables, and she had washed him with cool water and wrapped him in clean linen. He had longed for her with a mounting desire like a second fever, and she had laid her cool body against his, and they had lost all sense of themselves as a poor woman and a wealthy young man but become, somehow, one complete being.
She smiled. “Of course I do.”
They walked through the garden, brushing against the overgrown herbs. She ran her hand through the spikes of rosemary and gave him a twig for the sharp perfume. Without speaking again they went through the little door in the wall of knapped flints and out into the sea meadow.
She hesitated on the threshold. “I can almost see us here.”
“A woman like you, in a place like this,” he quoted himself, and she nodded.
He tucked her hand into his arm and she walked with him towards the plank that crossed the drainage ditch to the bank beyond. He helped her up the steps in the bank, and at the top they looked over the harbor at low tide. Ahead of them, the Broad Rife was running deep with brown river water, and in the distance she could hear the roar of the tide mill like receding thunder.
“I’ve thought about what you want,” she said, her eyes on the far horizon where she could see a darker line that meant rain.
