“I’m sorry, James, but you’re too late,” she said quietly. “This is my home, and there is no child of yours here.”

“I’m not too late. I am not too late, Alinor. I never ceased to love you, I wrote to you every year on Midsummer Eve, I never forgot you. Not even when I was married did I ever forget you. I swore I would come for you as soon as I was free.”

Her dark gray eyes gleamed with inner laughter. “Then you cannot be surprised that your wife took no pleasure in her life with you,” she observed.

He gasped at the sharpness of her wit. “Yes, I failed her too,” he admitted. “I am a failure: as a lover to you, and as a husband to her. I have been wrong since the day I denied you. I was like Saint Peter: I did not own you when I should have done. The cock crowed and I did not hear.”

She made a little tutting noise. “It was not the Garden of Gethsemane! I was not crucified! My heart broke; but now it’s healed. Go and live your life, James. You owe me nothing.”

“But the king is restored,” he tried to explain. “I want to be restored too! I want our victory. It won’t be a victory for me until I am back in my house with you at my side.”

She shook her head. “It’s no victory for us, remember? Not for people like us. Ned left England rather than be subject to this king. He left his home rather than live with my shame. And Rob went too, and now his widow comes to my door to tell me he’s drowned, and I can’t even make myself believe her. I can’t get back to my home. My brother can’t return, my son never will.”

He hesitated, driven to honesty. “Alinor—I must have my son. I have no one to continue my name, I have no one to inherit my house, my land. I can’t bear to have a son raised in poverty when I should endow him.”

“We’re not poor,” she snapped.

“I own hundreds of acres.”

She was silent.

“They are rightfully his.”

She sighed as if she were very weary. “You’ve imagined this boy,” she said gently. “All these years. You’ve got no son, no more have I. There’s no one here to inherit your fortune nor continue your name. You didn’t want the baby when he was in the womb, you denied him then. He was lost to you the very day that you said that you didn’t want him. Those words can’t be unsaid. You didn’t want him then, and now you don’t have him. You are, as you wanted to be: childless.” She put her hand to her throat. “I can’t say more.”

He leapt to his feet and reached for her. “Can I help you? Shall I call someone?”

She leaned back against the hard leather padding of the high-backed chair, her face as white as ice. She shook her head and closed her eyes. “Just go.”

He dropped to his knees beside her chair, he took up her still hand and put the cold fingers to his lips; but when she did not open her eyes or even stir, he realized that he could say nothing, do nothing but obey her. “I’ll go,” he whispered. “Please do not be distressed. Forgive me—love. I’ll speak to Alys on my way out. Forgive me… forgive me.”

He glanced back at her ashen face as he took two steps to reach the door, closed it behind him, and all but stumbled down the stairs. Tabs, the maid, was arduously climbing up with a tray of small ale.

“D’you not want it now?” she demanded with a sigh.

He brushed past her without an answer. Alys was waiting at the foot of the stairs, standing like a statue, her face like stone. The door to the parlor was ajar; he guessed that Livia was inside, eavesdropping.

“She’s ill,” he exclaimed.

Alys nodded. “I know it.”

“She refuses me,” he said.

“What else?”

“I will come back,” he said. “I can’t leave it like this.”

She said nothing but gestured to the front door and he could do nothing but bow to her, his face flushed and angry. He had to open the front door himself, and step out onto the wharf, ignoring the stevedores loading another cargo into a ship bobbing at midtide, and walk beside the river to Horsleydown Stairs to hail a wherry to take him back to the north side, to his beautiful London house on the Strand.

He thought for a wild moment that he should plunge into the muddy tide and drown before her house, that nothing else would wash his honor clean, that nothing else would free him from this pain. He heard the clink of chains from the bones hanging at the gibbet at the edge of the River Neckinger and thought how hateful this place was. He hated Alys with a hot murderous fury, and for a moment, he even hated Alinor too. She had been his inferior in every way, his for the taking, but somehow she had slipped away from him, like a mermaid in dark tides, and his son had gone too, like a changeling stolen by faeries. He wheeled and looked back at the house. The shabby little door was tight closed.

He looked up at her window and thought he could see the pale outline of her gown as she looked down at him. At once, his hand went to his hat; he swept it from his head and stood looking up, at her, bareheaded. “Alinor!” he whispered, as if she would throw open the window and call down to him.

He bowed with what dignity he could find, put his hat on his head, and turned to walk to the water stairs to hail a waterman, but there were no craft plying the incoming tide and he stood for a lifetime, looking at the dazzle of the sunlight on the dancing ripples, wondering if he could have said anything that would have persuaded her. The day was hot and exhausting, and he felt old and defeated, marooned among the poor on the wrong side of the river.

“Sir James?”

It was the widow, with a black lace shawl over her head, as if she had run down the stairs to bring him a message. At once he turned from the edge of the quay and went towards her.

“Tomorrow is Saturday,” she said briefly. “The children come home after they have finished their work in the afternoon. If you were to come to take me for a walk at, say, four o’clock, we could come back at five. You would see the grandchildren. And perhaps they will invite you for dinner.”

“She refuses to see me ever again.”

“But you will see your boy, despite them both, if you meet me at four.”

“He’s my boy?” he said with a surge of longing. “He is?”

She spread her hands. “Only she can say. But you can at least see him.”

“You are kind to me…” he said awkwardly.

“I have no friend in England but these…” She gestured at the mean little warehouse. “And perhaps you?”

JUNE 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

Ned walked up the broad grazing lane that ran through the center of Hadley village with a big basket loaded with the fat red strawberries grown in his garden on one arm, and on the other a basket of wild leeks and mushrooms that he had gathered from the forest. Horses, cows, sheep, and even pigs cropped the wide track that ran through the center of town. Later in summer the cows would be released to graze with a cowherd to watch over them, the pigs would run freely in the forest to root for nuts and mushrooms, tearing up the earth with their sharp little hooves and their rooting tusks, and the horses would be released to run free and only brought in to work.

The weave of the basket on Ned’s arm was the signature of the maker, a woman from the Pocumtuc who lived a few miles upriver of Ned’s ferry and had given him a basket in return for free crossings. He had taught her some English words earlier in spring, when he was digging his plot, and the women used to call his ferry over to the north bank to bring them into the little town. She had come into his garden one evening at dusk and shown him the Seven Sister stars, just visible in the evening sky, and told him that their coming was a sign that it was time to plant beneath them.