The sun was setting on the right of the Avery carriage as it jolted down the Birdham Straight, the long straight lane, hedged on either side, that led due south on the Manhood Peninsula. Alinor, who had been dozing for much of the journey, woke as if she knew that she was entering the landscape of her dreams. She opened her gray eyes and smiled at Matthew as she recognized the fields and hedgerows that they were passing through.
“Are we here?” Matthew asked, as impatient as a child.
“Nearly.” She leaned forward to look out of the window, as if to greet a friend.
Matthew, seeing the radiance of her face, followed her gaze and wondered at her joy in the low flat fields of stubble straw, and beyond them the rising slopes of dried-out meadowland. He was struck most by the wideness of the horizon and the lightness of the sky, which arched above them like a great bowl.
“It goes on forever,” he said.
“I used to think I’d never get away,” Alys said grimly.
Matthew had been raised in a town, his view always blocked by buildings and walls and chimneys. This was a landscape with nothing higher than a twisted wind-bent tree: marshland, tidal land from sea to sea. Through the dusty window he could see for miles.
“Are we nearly here?” he asked. “Is this it?”
Alinor’s slate-gray eyes flicked to his face. “Not long now. Your lands start at Sidlesham. The next village down this road.”
“It’s very flat,” he said. “Not what I expected.” He tried to sound judicious, a landowner surveying his fields, but he could not keep the excitement from his voice. The road, now little more than a track, wound through a small village of old cottages, some with thatchedroofs slipping down over the poky windows, some with gardens of vegetables and some late-blooming flowers, some in a mess of mud and rubble.
“Nearly there.” Alinor took a little breath to steady herself. “That is Mill Farm, and the tide mill.”
Matthew looked at the cluster of buildings and the tall granary behind them.
“We worked there,” Alys said, and her mouth shut tight as if she would never speak another word.
Matthew felt the carriage slow to a walk and then stop. “Is something wrong?” He leaned forward to see out of the window.
“It’s the Broad Rife,” Alinor said, as if she were naming a great stretch of water, instead of a sluggish river between muddy banks.
“There’s a wadeway,” Alys told him. “And a ferry for high tide. It was our ferry—my uncle Ned’s ferry. But it’s low tide now, the carriage can go through the water. The coachman’s probably having a look at it.”
“If it’s not washed away,” Alinor reminded her. “It’s been a long time since we crossed it.”
“At dawn,” Alys said with a sudden secretive smile. “In a stolen wagon.”
“I’ll get out,” Matthew said. He opened the carriage door and, without waiting for the steps, jumped the few feet down to the ground. The footmen swung down from the back of the carriage as soon as they saw him, and then paused, uncertain what to do in what was, to them, the middle of nowhere.
It was the middle of nowhere to Matthew too. The sweating coach horses had halted before a track that sloped gradually down to disappear into a riverbed of oozing mud and puddles of briny water. Thick cobblestones marked the route, green with weed and half-covered with flotsam of stalks and straw. On both his right and his left, the water ran away into a sea of shoals, reed beds, lagoons, and waterways, busy with little ducks and wading birds. A heron stood motionless, looking at its own reflection in a deep pool. A constant babble of sound from the birds was overlaid with the loud crying of wheeling seagulls.
On the far side of the causeway was an old house with a lopsidedroof and an ancient plum tree bowed over the wall. The bee skep and the vegetable patch showed that someone was still living in the house, and a hanging bell showed that the ferry, nothing more than a raft with an overhead rope on a pulley, could be summoned when the tide was too high to splash across the wadeway. As Matthew stood, smelling the rich smell of warm mud, rotting seaweed, and brine, feeling the heat of the setting sun on his cheek, the door to the ferry-house opened and a man came out, pulling a hat off his head.
“Your honor!” he said on sight of Matthew. “Welcome to—er—your lands, sir. You’re very welcome.” He spoke with the strong accent of Sussex, a low, slow, country drawl that Matthew—accustomed to the rapid patter of London speech—could hardly make out.
“Thank you,” said Matthew, painfully alive to the absurdity of being one side of a river of mud and his tenant bowing on the other.
“You’re safe to cross, your honor. Just tell your driver to stay on the cobbles and he’ll be over in no time. The horses’ll come to no harm. They’ll get used to it. I can lead them if he wants. We haven’t had a coach cross for months, not for all this year. Not since the royal inspection when the king was crowned and they came all the way from London to see that we were here and not floated away—”
He broke off with a laugh at the folly of Londoners, and then turned it into a cough when the London servants and the London-bred Matthew looked at him, uncomprehendingly. “The wagons go over every Saturday to Chichester market and back again, sir, never fear. I’ll come across to lead the horses if you like. We were glad to hear you were coming, sir.”
Matthew nodded. He glanced up at the driver. “Did you hear that?”
“Just about,” said the coach driver, disdainfully.
“Do you want him to lead them over?”
“No, sir. I reckon I can drive my horses up and down a ditch, sir.”
“Drive on then,” Matthew said and clambered back into the coach. The footmen closed the door and swung back into their places.