Alys plaited her hair and put on her cap in the counting house before going into the kitchen where Tabs was blowing the embers into life. “Give me a small ale, please,” she said.

“Thirsty?” Tabs demanded cheerfully. “I’m thirsty. It’s that hot in my attic you’d never think it.”

“Yes,” Alys said repressively. “Can you lay the table for breakfast, Tabs? We’ll just be us four. Mrs. Alinor won’t be down. I’ll take up her tray.”

“Getting it done now,” the young woman confirmed. “Will you take her a small ale now?”

Alys took a cup and went up the stairs, although she did not turn to the right to her mother’s door but went to her own bedroom.

Livia was sitting up, leaning against the plain pillows, her embroidered cap framing her dark beautiful face, her nightgown pulled low to show her olive-skinned shoulders. She smiled as Alys came in.

“Ah, there you are!” she said. “I was lonely the moment that I woke, and found you gone.”

“Here I am,” Alys agreed uncertainly, proffering the drink. “I brought you this.”

* * *

The family attended St. Olave’s Church and there were special prayers for Rob. They all walked back with the minister who came to pray with Alinor. He wore a smart dark suit, but no vestments and no outward sign of his calling. Alinor had raised Alys during the puritan years of the Commonwealth and they still preferred their religion plain, with nothing of church ritual, even though times had changed. The new king was restoring the surplices and ceremonies at every altar, decking them with gold and silver. His papist wife had her own chapel and half of London genuflected behind her and dizzily inhaled incense at Mass. Alys, and all the old reformers, now had to accept the new rules which had once been called heresy. Anyone who could not stomach it had no choice but to leave the country, as Alinor’s brother Ned had done.

“Will you stay for your dinner, Mr. Forth?” Alys asked politely, as he came down the narrow stairs after his visit to Alinor’s room.

“I have to make other visits,” he replied. “I cannot be seen to fail in my duties for a moment. The previous minister wants his parish back, his rectory, and especially his tithes. The communion expelled him for being a monarchist and half-papist and now the fashion is for monarchy and papistry again. He will return and all my work here will be overset.”

“What will you do?” Sarah asked him.

“If I am forced out, I will sail to the Americas,” he told her. “If I cannot serve the Lord here, I will go where the Saved want to hear my word.”

“My uncle Ned is in the town of Hadley in New England,” Alys remarked. “It’s a new settlement, led into the wilderness by the minister, so they are a godly town with much preaching. He thinks as you do.”

“Does he trade in furs?” he asked. “He could make a fortune.”

“He wants to make a sufficiency, not to be the bane of any other.”

“I pray that a godly man can do that,” he agreed. “But I fear that one man’s wealth is always another man’s loss.”

“Here, yes, but perhaps not in a new world?” Alys challenged. “Where land is free? It was his hope that he could live of his own, without hurting another.”

“I pray that it does not come to it for me; but if I am forced to leave, I will come to you and ask for his direction.”

“He’d be glad to see you.” Alys bowed and Johnnie opened the front door and let the preacher out into the glaring light of the quay. Sarah was alone with her mother in the parlor.

“Did Uncle Ned know that man—Sir James?”

“No!” Alys lied at once. “Why d’you ask?”

“So how did Sir James know you and Grandma at Foulmire? How did he not meet Uncle Ned?”

“I meant that they were not friends,” Alys corrected herself. “Your uncle Ned was the ferryman, of course he knew everyone.”

“Before we were born.”

“Yes, as you know.”

“So did we all leave at once? Great-Uncle Ned, and Sir James and Grandma and you? Were we all in the wagon altogether?”

“No, it was just your grandma and me,” Alys said unwillingly. “I must have told you a dozen times. Just you babies and Grandma and me—after a quarrel with the Millers at the tide mill over my wages. Ned didn’t come till long after that. And then when the king was restored, he left for the Americas. Surely you remember! Now, I have to see what Tab is doing. I can smell burning.”

“So why did they leave? Uncle Ned and Sir James?” Johnnie echoed his sister, coming in at the end of this conversation. “Together? But not with us? It can’t have been about your wages, surely?”

“Oh really!” Alys hurried away. “What does it matter? It’s so long ago! We left because we wanted a better life for you than we could have had on the mire, Uncle Ned left for conscience, when the king came in; and Sir James was only ever passing through. We weren’t friends, we hardly knew him.”

“Then why does he come here every day and see Grandma?” Johnnie joined with his sister.

“He doesn’t come every day. He’s only seen her twice,” Alys said irritably.

“But why?” Johnnie asked.

“What?”

“Why does he come?”

“I don’t know!” Alys blustered, breaking away from the two of them and opening the kitchen door. A haze of fatty smoke rolled into the hall. “Tabs! What are you doing in there?”

“Surely you must know,” Johnnie said reasonably.

“I know that it’s none of my business nor yours. And I don’t want either of you talking to him. D’you hear?”

Alys closed the kitchen door on them. Sarah and Johnnie exchanged brief glances of complete understanding. “Something’s not right,” Sarah said.

“I know. I feel it.”

“We’ll find out,” she decided.

* * *

After dinner Sarah sat with her grandmother upstairs in her room, sewing black ribbons for Alinor and Alys’s mourning caps.

“Not for me, I won’t wear it,” Alinor said.

The girl hesitated. “Grandma, why not?”

“Sarah, I don’t believe it, I can’t feel that he’s dead. I won’t wear black for him.”

The girl laid down her work. “Grandma, you wouldn’t want to be disrespectful?”

“I won’t lie.”

“What does Ma say?”

“Nothing. I’ve not said anything to her.”

Sarah scrutinized her grandmother. “You cannot doubt the word of his widow. It’s not just a letter now, she has come all that long way, with her son, and now you know what happened?”

Alinor looked out of the window where a mist was uncoiling along the incoming tide. Sarah felt a chill in the room as if the hairs on the nape of her neck were standing up, one by one. She shivered.

Alinor glanced at her. “Yes,” she said, as if it were a commonplace. “Something’s not right. You feel it too.”

Sarah got up to close the half door to the balcony outside.