“You’ve been strange,” he muttered. “The doctor’s been a hundred times but he couldn’t understand what it was. In the end he said it was stress and I suppose it was. You’ve slept for days. Then you’d wake up and act crazy and then you’d sleep again. Sometimes it seemed like more of a coma.”
“I was dreaming.”
“At least now you sound like your old self. I’ve been so worried. We all have.”
Oh Hell. “All? You mean you called other people. Don’t tell me you called Sammie?” He stared back at me, silent and a little pink. I squeaked, “Don’t tell me she’s here?”
“I’ll make some tea,” said Bertie.
I leaned back against my own familiar pink pillows and closed my eyes. I could hear the rustle of distant voices again, distant voices from a distant world. They were worried about Richard. “I shall go.” Vespasian’s voice seemed only a whisper in the dark. “Don’t leave us, please.” It was Tilda. Me. I had begged him not to go. I wasn’t there, but I spoke the words that now I heard echoed back to me. “Send me,” said Gerald. “No,” said Vespasian. “I will not.” We would all obey him of course. He would ride out and we would be left with memories of Isabel and fears for Richard. “At night,” continued Vespasian into the space behind my eyes, “you will bar the doors and open them for none but Richard or myself.” “If it’s so dangerous, you may never come back,” I mumbled. “If I do not,” said Vespasian, “you will be well rid of me.”
I doubled over, stomach churning, shaking my head to bring me into focus with Tilda’s world. Then a bright voice said loudly, “Well, well, so you’re awake at last. And how are you feeling today?” Sammie was wearing a miniscule orange mini skirt and wedges of her hips overlapped the waistband. I presumed it had to be summer.
She held the tea cup as if I might be feeble and spill it. “Put the damned cup down, idiot,” I said. “Tell me, what’s the date?”
“Oh dear,” she wavered. “So you’re still not entirely yourself love? Well, it’s June the twenty eighth. The sun’s shining, and hopefully, all’s right with the world.”
“It isn’t,” I said. “Not with you here to crow over me. I’m fine anyway. I suppose you think I ought to thank you for being concerned and coming all the way up from London to pat my fevered forehead.”
“You could try being nice for once,” she nodded. “Though I suppose that would worry us all even more. Then we’d really know you weren’t acting normally.”
She leaned over and hugged me and I kissed her plump pretty cheek. I hoped my breath didn’t smell of puke.
My lovely cousin had already moved in. She had taken the spare bedroom and Bertie had moved onto the sofa again which meant that there was no nice private place anymore to stretch out and watch the telly. Instead I went outside and sat on the hammock in the gentle sun. Sammie joined me there, bringing wine, an improvement on Bertie’s piss awful tea. Even though I just wanted to be left alone, I was actually extremely fond of Sammie.
She said, “I’m not leaving until I’m sure you’re OK. What you’ve been through, well, it must have been hell.” It was an expensive Burgundy and glittered like rubies turning amber with the faint gleam of sunshine through the goblet. “I’ve never known you to crack up before. This must really have got to you.”
“It’s poor Bertie who deserves the nervous breakdown,” I said. “Not me. I hardly knew the girl.” Tilda didn’t like the light, sweet medieval wine. I hadn’t either. This was a whole lot better. “Thanks for the booze and the care, pet. Don’t let me moan at you. You’re a darling and unbelievably patient. How long have I been off my head, anyway?”
“Ages. Bertie phoned me ten days ago. He left it to the last minute because he knew you’d winge if I came bustling down to look after you.”
“Poor Bertie.”
“You keep saying that. Actually, it’s been good for him having you fall to pieces. Mothering you stopped him thinking about himself. It’s made him stronger. He even lost his appetite and he looks a lot better for it.”
The late summer evening was soft on my face and I closed my eyes as the rays slanted down behind the hills, the sky suddenly more vivid in contrast to the long shadows. My chestnut tree, supporting my hammock, blackened into Rackham silhouette. “Sammie, you’re sweet. I love you really. You’re my favourite cousin.”
“Your only cousin.”
“There’s frigid Fred.”
“He doesn’t count. Listen love, you’ve got to start talking to people. Tell us what’s wrong with you. Stop bundling up all those feelings inside and let people help you.”
I wondered just what she might say if I did unburden all those stifled fears of mine and tell her exactly what was troubling me. I nearly laughed.
“That sounds better,” she said.
I drank her wine and lay back in the hammock until the last glimmering twilight sheen slunk behind the roof tops. There were thatched roofs in this village too, although not on my cottage. In this life my pitched roof over its snuggled eaves was all curly terracotta tiles. I had bought something easier and cheaper to maintain than thatch since I’d heard thatch was hard work. Now I knew how true that was.
Nearly ten o’clock and a polished moon peeped through the trees. I went back indoors and Sammie followed me. The small rooms and their big windows retained the day’s warmth and the place seemed still golden lit, echoes of sunshine. I curled on my sofa which was now Bertie’s bed. Bertie had escaped to the pub.
“I could tell you stories of the crusades and eastern slave markets that would make your toenails curl.” I watched her wonder if I had gone mad again. “I could tell you stories of ancient chivalry. Tristan and Isolde. Havelock the Dane. Arthur and Camelot. Perlesvaus and Parzival.”
“Molly darling,” sighed Sammie, “do remember that eccentricity is over-rated.”
“Can’t I tell stories around the camp fire? I’m a writer, after all.”
“Wait until we have a camp fire.”
The police had made no noticeable development into solving Wattle’s murder. The threat of witchcraft, the blackest of magicks and the insanity of sadism still mist swathed our little village but it had not deterred the tourists. This year there were more of them. The big inn on the edge of the stream by the bridge was booked up for six months ahead. Bertie stopped going there for his evening pint, aware that whispers and hurried glances pointed him out as a prime suspect.
Bertie was telling me about the discomfort of it when I shifted into a different consciousness. He said he’d been sitting at one of the small umbrellared tables in the garden outside the hotel. “Cold beer in the sunshine,” he said. “Nothing better. Best summer weather for weeks. Well, then this beady old dear sidled up. Brummy accent. Kept muttering; ‘Is that the one? He’s the one that did it.’ Honestly Mol, I had to leave my pint on the table and go.”
I was in the middle of sympathising when the other voice came through on the wind, low and soft. I had to strain to hear the words but I had to listen. It was hypnotic and I was tugged into its orbit.
“When I am gone, you must put mugwort, dill and betony around the door and the window sills. Cover the doorstep in vervain and the hearth beneath the open chimney too. You will not need to light fires except for cooking, but if you do, cut no living wood. Remember, at night you answer the door to none except myself.”
“Or Richard.” It was Stephen, whose voice was shaking.
“Indeed, or Richard. But I no longer believe that Richard will return on his own.”
The voices began to fade and I was desperate to hang onto the echoes. I knew there was something else I had to hear.
Vespasian continued, “Hang henbane and chervil from the window shutters. Do not forget what I tell you. It is important as few matters have been important before.” I knew he had turned to me. “Tilda, listen.” At first I couldn’t answer. I wasn’t there. Only the very edges of my consciousness caught the rustle of his words.
“Yes, go on. I’m
listening,” I whispered.
“You must not return to the pool,” Vespasian said. “Do you understand? You must not go back to the water where you bathe.”
“I’ll do whatever you say,” I nodded. “You know I’m obedient. But you have to come back to us.”
“This time, I may not,” said Vespasian.
The shadows flew and I was back with Bertie who was plainly unhappy. “What the devil is it now Mol? You’ll do whatever I say? That’ll be the day! You don’t know the meaning of the word obedient.”
“Sorry.” Indeed, I was sorry. Vespasian had much more to tell me and I could no longer hear him. I had a terrible headache and my temples thudded. “I think I’ll go to bed.”
But the visions did not return and I dreamed of nonsense and the irrelevance of a modern life.
The morning’s sunshine seemed incongruous. I walked down to the library and found a book on herbs and another on shamanism. Neither helped me in the least. The Anglo-Saxon dark ages were long over by the time of Tilda’s birth and the Druidic practises my book fumbled over, were quickly forbidden by Christian conversion. Vespasian’s Plantagenet society within the reign of the despised King John was truly Catholic with the zeal of the crusades and the tightly controlled ordinances of a fervently intelligent pope.
Sammie was amused by my choice of reading though Bertie was used to my odd interests; usually research for my own varied writings. They went off to the pub together while I sat by the window in the kitchen, read about the magic of trees and stirred the minestrone. I could hear pigeons cooing restlessly from the church spire and I thought about religion and witches and wondered what had happened to Richard. My Richard, the lost child who had admired me and brought me presents and been my troubadour and might have been buying something for me at the market when he was taken. Vespasian knew he had been taken. Vespasian did not believe it was the sheriff, though Tilda thought it might be. I wished I could go back to them.
I had put dandelion flowers and fennel in the minestrone and great handfuls of parsley. I was still thinking about the magic of herbs when the liquid splashed up and burned my hand. I jumped back, dropping the wooden spoon into the pot. I swore and went to put my palm under the cold water tap. It was then that the next vision flashed through, so blindingly that I fell against the sink, my head whirling, my eyes seeing fire. Someone else had been killed. I could see her, wrapped to a stone column, her head half way up, her feet even higher, her hands dragging on the mosaic tiled floor. She was held all around by barbed wire, a forest of spurs that cut and tore at her, across her face and her blinded eyes, ripping at her clothes, holding her tight to the pillar of her prison. She was quite dead. The shadows around her were cool and gentle but her death had not been that. Now her back was to the alter and her face to the font. She had been killed and gutted in the local church.
I was on the floor now, with the water running over the edge of the sink and flooding my kitchen floor. My hair was wet and I let it trickle down my neck, trying to wake me back into coherence. At least I knew which world I was in. I had no idea what had happened to Richard, but this woman had been killed in my own time and I was terrified that it was Sammie.
I was hysterical by the time I was interrupted, sobbing and hanging onto the cupboard door handle under the sink. My soup was boiling dry and there was water everywhere. Then I felt strong hands lifting me and I gasped, “Vespasian,” lost for a moment in the dark gap between worlds.
“Molly, darling, what in God’s name?”
Sammie’s voice. I was, at first, sufficiently incoherent to think it came from beyond the grave. Stephen had told stories of the churchyard and hands groping up into the air from their crumbled burial pits. Six foot down to protect the decaying body from flood and seepage, and where no wolves could come and dig up the ravaged flesh.
Then I clamped my mind back into Molly’s life, the smell of burning soup and the sound of Sammie’s voice. I grabbed her legs and clung on. “So it isn’t true,” I kept blubbing. “It isn’t true they killed you. You’re not dead. It isn’t true.”
She reached over my head and turned off the taps. “Dear God. What is happening to you? What is going on?” She helped me stagger upright and then upstairs to the bathroom where I sat on the loo. She held a wet sponge to my forehead and kept repeating, “Hang on to logic, Molly. No one’s been killed, no one at all. Stop driving yourself crazy. Everything’s alright. No one is dead. I’m here.”
So if Sammie was going to be murdered, it wasn’t yet. I lived half my life in the past so it was reasonable to think I could also have visions of the future.
“You and Bertie are right,” I told her. “I’m going mad. It was bound to happen, wasn’t it! Great family genes after all. One day I’ll join my wretched mother in the straight jacket and the loony bin.” Since I was crying all the time, the words must have seemed even more demented. I hoped she’d noticed the burning pot and turned the gas off. “But I saw something, Sammie. I thought I saw something, in the little church, another murder, like Wattle.”
“You never go to church,” Sammie pointed out.
“I mean in my head. I was making lunch and stirring the soup and it just came flooding in. The vision I mean.”
Then Bertie came rushing up the stairs two at a time, shouting and stamping, appearing pale faced and out of breath at the open bathroom door, gasping out the latest news.
It wasn’t Sammie that had been killed, it was the poor little woman who drove the school bus and had given astrology classes to some of the locals.
She had been discovered by the vicar, tied to a central pillar in his nave, bound upside down with bloody barbed wire, her throat cut and her hands flayed down to the bone.
Chapter Fifteen
I had struggled though less than a week of Molly before waking back in the forest with the boys.
Sammie was trying to drag me back to London with her, away from murder, rampaging fear and cold stark horror. Bertie said he would stay and look after the house. I refused vehemently and pushed them both away. Bertie wasn’t feeling strong either and it wouldn’t have been fair to leave him so alone. But my motives were also selfish. The foxgloves were up to the lower branches of the chestnut and the delphiniums were vibrant gentian against a gentian sky. I would stay with the beauty that nourished me, my home, and the troubled interweaving of the two lives I lived. I was pinned tight to the blackness of each and I was sure that trying to break away might break me.
Sammie told neither Bertie nor anyone else that I had foreseen the murder in the church so the police did not interview me. They spoke briefly to Bertie and then they left us alone. Sammie stayed. She was a comfort, but I was terrified of causing her harm. Then finally it was me who went. I went back to Tilda.
Without echoes of screaming or nauseas discomfort, without storm or dream, I slipped back and became Tilda again. So easily, as if I had become better practised, I underwent no trauma and was not even asleep. Late afternoon, alone for once, I was lounging in the faded old armchair, thinking about Tilda. And then I was her.
The light still danced in brilliance as the hot day seeped into warm evening. Tilda sat at the kitchen window watching the sun beams disappear one by one into evening shadows. A tall man was riding through those shadows, emerging from the forest density like a hunched crow from its nest. She thought it was Vespasian.
“He’s back,” shouted Tilda, grabbing Osbert and Gerald who were standing behind her, staring suspiciously into the gloom. “Has he brought Richard?”
“There’s someone slumped over the saddle in front of him,” said Gerald. “So yes, maybe. Perhaps he found Richard after all.”
“But look, I don’t know if he’s dead or alive. It’s just a sack, something just hanging there.” I was peering, wanting one second longer before rushing to open the door.
“It’s not Vespasian,” I said.
It wasn’t. The shape was not as tall, not as straight. It was a different horse, all pale mo
onsilver with a long mane. There was great pride in the horse which carried the man. It wasn’t Vespasian and it wasn’t Vespasian’s horse.
“Remember what he said,” Gerald grabbed me as I turned to go into the hall and approach the door. “Not to answer to anyone except him.”
“And Richard,” said Osbert. “And that’s Richard.”
“But it isn’t Richard,” I said, hesitating, frightened. “It’s just Richard’s body.”
Stephen pushed in between us. He’d heard horse’s hooves and came, all excited, to tell us Vespasian had come back to us. “How do you know it’s not him?” he demanded. “You can’t see anything in the dark. Wait until the rider’s a bit closer to be sure. I think it’s Vespasian and he’s carrying Richard home.”
There was a silence, everyone peering out, no one sure what to do. “I know it’s not Vespasian,” I said flat voiced, breaking the silence, “because I know who the man is. I know because I know.” I couldn’t explain it but I knew, so completely, remembering a tight black beard and breath like hot bile.
We stood in a little group and stared at each other, hovering in indecision; scared rabbits. Hugh came running in then, and Walter immediately behind him. “Is it Vespasian, or isn’t it? It’s not the same horse as last time.”
“Tilda says it’s someone else and Richard is dead.”
“Tilda’s right,” said Gerald. “Look, now you can see clearly. That’s an older man and the body lying over the saddle pummel is just a lump.”
“Then we don’t open the door,” said Osbert. “We’ve put all the herbs around the threshold and windows like Vespasian told us to. The door step’s two fingers thick with vervain. If we don’t open up, no one can get in.”
“I don’t believe in those silly old herbal myths,” said Hugh. “I was surprised when Vespasian told us to do it. It’s pagan. How about we make a cross out of twigs. That works against evil, doesn’t it? Herbs are just old witch’s tales.”
“Go on, make a cross then,” said Tilda. “But we keep the herbs too.”
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