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beach towards her, waving his Monmouth cap, his curly dark hair disordered, his eyes alight. “Phebe—Phebe—make haste—the shallop’s leaving. I couldn’t find you.”
    Warmth and gladness at the sight of him rushed through her body; she held out her arms and he caught her hard against him, kissing her on the mouth. “A fair welcome, sweetheart. But hurry.” She ran with him down the beach, his arm around her waist. Those already waiting in the shallop eyed them sourly as they arrived laughing, their cheeks flushed, and about them the glow of warm love.
    Mistress Bagby, the midwife from London, made grudging room for Phebe on the after seat. “You pleasured yourself in Yarmouth?” she sniffed. “At a pothouse maybe?”
    Phebe shrugged, indifferent in this moment of new courage to the spiteful fat face beside her. “Nay, mistress. I only walked up the Yar a way, and there I met the Lady Arbella.”
    Mrs. Bagby stared, then masked her envy with another sniff. “And being noticed by quality has gone to your head, I see. I’ve heard she’s but a meaching, mincing thing.”
    “She is very fair, and winsome and brave,” said Phebe, and turning her back looked over the other heads to the bow where Mark pulled on a larboard oar. He caught her eye and they smiled at each other.
    This sureness and warmth between them sustained her that night through their first quarrel. As they lay cramped together in their bunk, she tried to tell of her meeting with the Lady Arbella, and he would not listen, speaking to her roughly and telling her that she was fool indeed to think that the daughter of an earl had shown true good will. It was then that she remembered that he had cause to hate the lady’s class. Once as a boy of eight he had snared a rabbit on lands belonging to the Earl of Dorset. He had been caught and punished by the Earl’s order, cruelly beaten, and his left ear cropped. Of this he had never spoken but once. His abundant hair hid the jagged wedge space cut from his ear, and she had forgotten.
    She soothed him with soft murmurs and the tenderness of her body, but their disagreement was not yet ended. Mark too had something to tell of their stay in Yarmouth, and she felt sharp dismay when she found that he had spent some of their small horde of silver for a strange purchase.
    He pulled his prize from under the straw at their feet and made her feel sundry bumpy objects in the darkness.
    “What are they?” she whispered, though the snoring of their cabin mates, the creaking of the ship, and the rush of water made secrecy needless.
    “Lemons,” he answered triumphantly, stuffing them back beneath the straw.
    “Whatever for?” she cried. She had hoped at least for sugar plums to vary the dreadful sameness of their food.
    “I met an old sailor in Yarmouth, he’s been fifty years at sea, to Cathay and back. He says if we suck one every day we’ll not get ship fever. He sold them to me for eleven shillings.”
    “Oh Mark—and you believed him! He was but diddling you to get the profit.”
    He drew his arm from under her. “They’ve come from Spain,” he said with anger. “Lemons are always dear. You must not question my judgment, Phebe.”
    “No, Mark, I won’t—” she said after a minute, hurt that he had turned from her again. “Forgive me.”
    And she hid her worry. For it seemed to her ordered mind that his buying of the lemons touched things in him that her love would rather forget, a recklessness and improvidence.
    But after they had at last bade final farewell to England, and the journey became a plodding, ever recurrent nightmare of storm and sickness, it did seem that she and Mark were stronger than many of the others.
    All over the ship the passengers complained of sharp pains in their bones, of swollen mouths and tongues, and teeth so weak they could not chew upon the hard salt meat the cabin boy flung into the wooden trenchers. She and Mark had none of this, and now that her young body had