Time's Echo

by Pamela Hartshorne

  A broken night hadn’t helped, either. Shreds of the nightmare lingered disturbingly in my mind, and I felt light-headed with lack of sleep.

  I’d never suffered badly from jet lag before, but now the feeling of dislocation was overpowering. I found I was walking carefully along a path beside the car park, but I kept starting at the sight of the high brick wall on my left and I slowed.

  Ahead, children were being hustled into school by harassed parents. Two girls overtook me. One of them was talking on a mobile phone. The jagged light was intensifying, making the whole scene waver, like a painted backdrop stirring in a draught. Behind it, I glimpsed a rough track between hedgerows lush with cow parsley and forget-me-not.

  I stumbled, blinked, and it was gone, but the smell of long grass and summer sunshine remained.

  My heart was beating hard and I put out a hand to steady myself against the wall, the brick rough beneath my fingers. I stared ahead, fixing my attention almost desperately on the two girls. The one on the phone switched it off and said something to her friend, and they both laughed, and then the colour was leaching from the world around me, and laughter rang in my ears.

  My laughter.

  I am breathless with it. Elizabeth and I are running along Shooter Lane, with Hap lopsided at our heels, his ears flying. Our skirts are fisted in our hands, our sides aching with suppressed giggles. We’re not supposed to run. We’re supposed to be modest and demure, to walk quietly with our eyes downcast, but it is a bright May day and the breeze that is stirring the trees seems to be stirring something inside me too. I want to run and dance, and spin round and round and round until I am dizzy.

  All day long we have both been giggly and skittish as horses with the wind up their tails. Exasperated, our mistress sent us off after dinner to gather salad herbs from our master’s garth in Paynley’s Crofts, and my apron is stained and grubby. Elizabeth’s, of course, still looks as if it is fresh back from the laundresses in St George’s Field.

  Our baskets were full and we were just closing the gate to the garth when we met Lancelot Sawthell. I tease Elizabeth about poor Lancelot, who turns red whenever he sees her, and coming face-to-face with him unexpectedly was almost too much for us. We had to press our lips together to stop giggling while he stammered a greeting, his Adam’s apple working frantically up and down, but oh, it was hard! We are cruel maids, I know, but not so cruel that we would laugh in his face, and we had to run as fast as we could so that we could explode with laughter out of his earshot.

  ‘Oh, Elizabeth, I told you so!’ I cry as we stop for breath at last. We drop our baskets into the long, sweet grass and collapse beside them, tugging at our bodices to ease our aching ribs. Hap flops beside me. He looks as if he is smiling too. His pink tongue lolls on one side of his mouth and his panting is loud in my ears. He can run fast, though he only has three good legs.

  ‘Lancelot is sweet on you!’ I insist to Elizabeth. ‘And now that he has seen how rosily you smile at him, he will be on his way to speak to your father, right now!’

  ‘Please, no!’ Elizabeth is almost weeping with laughter.

  We are laughing at nothing, the way silly girls do. We are laughing because we can.

  ‘I will miss you when you are married, Mistress Sawthell!’

  I will miss you. There is an odd moment when the words seem to hang in the air. The back of my neck prickles – someone is watching – but when I turn my head no one is there. The next moment I am toppling over as Elizabeth shoves me into the grass, and I am laughing again, the strangeness forgotten.

  My laughter fades as I sit up, and I pluck a sprig of rosemary from the basket. One day Elizabeth will marry, I realize for the first time, drawing the rosemary under my nose so that I can breathe in its fragrance. I love the smell of it, so clean, so true.

  Rosemary for remembrance. Strange to think that one day all this will be past, no more than a memory. No longer will we share the feather bed in the tiny chamber at the top of the Beckwith house in Goodramgate. There will be no more whispering and giggling until Dick, our master’s apprentice, bangs on the wall and begs us in God’s name to be quiet so that he can get some sleep.

  Of course Elizabeth will marry. She is a year older than me and she has a dowry. She is pretty, too, with bright-blue eyes and a sweet expression. Any young man would be glad to have her for a wife.

  I twiddle the rosemary round and round between my fingers. ‘I will miss you,’ I say again.

  Elizabeth sits up and hugs her knees. ‘I don’t even have a sweetheart yet,’ she reminds me. ‘Nor am I likely to have one, when the Beckwiths keep us so close.’

  We brood for a moment on the strictness of the household.

  ‘Perhaps you will have to settle for Lancelot Sawthell after all,’ I say.

  ‘I think I’d rather stay with the Beckwiths.’ Elizabeth flops back into the grass. ‘You can have Lancelot.’

  ‘I thank you for your kindness, but I cannot look so high for a husband, I fear.’

  I am smiling, but it is true. It is common knowledge that my dowry has gone to dice and I do not even have any beauty to tempt a husband. I am dark and scrawny and sallow-skinned, and my eyes are a strange, pale grey. Sometimes Elizabeth tries to comfort me by telling me they are beautiful, like silver, but I’ve seen how folk cross themselves surreptitiously sometimes when I pass. Even Lancelot Sawthell could do better than me.

  I cannot see anyone wanting to marry me. But I don’t want to think about the future. I want to stay in this moment, with my friend beside me and the sun in my eyes, and the smell of rosemary on my fingers and my ribs aching with laughter.

  Hap is still panting. ‘I shouldn’t have made you run so far,’ I say to him. ‘It must be hard with only three legs.’ He rolls over so that he is lying against my leg, and when I rub his chest in apology, he closes his eyes with a little sigh of pleasure.

  I smile at the sight of him. Hap is not a handsome creature, even I can see that, but his expression is alert and he is clever, much cleverer than Mistress Beckwith’s pretty spaniel or our master’s blundering hounds. I hardly notice any longer the withered paw he holds tucked into him.

  My hand resting on Hap’s warm body, I lie back and look up at the sky. It is blue and bright and the air is soft with summer. In the thorn tree behind us I can hear two blackbirds chittering at each other.

  Above us, a flock of pigeons are swooping through the air. They turn as one, their wings flashing in the sunlight. I watch them enviously.

  ‘Don’t you wish you could fly?’

  ‘No,’ Elizabeth says lazily.

  ‘I do. Imagine what it would be like, to be up in the sky looking down on everyone!’

  A billowy cloud drifts past. It blocks out the sun for a moment, and for some reason the shadow passing over my face makes me shiver. But then it is gone and the sudden chill with it.

  ‘I’d be terrified,’ Elizabeth says without opening her eyes.

  ‘I think it would be wonderful.’ My fingers are still absently caressing Hap’s sleek coat, and he huffs out a sigh and wriggles into a more comfortable position against me. ‘You could see everything that’s going on, but there would be no one to see you, or tell you to walk slowly or speak quietly, or fetch more wine or . . . or do anything.’

  ‘And nowhere warm to sleep and nothing to eat but worms.’ Elizabeth is nothing if not practical. ‘You’d hate it.’

  I make a face at the idea of worms. ‘But if I could fly, I could go wherever I wanted,’ I say. ‘I could fly far, far away. I could go to London!’

  I have never been further than the white stone cross on Heworth Moor. Mr Beckwith went to London once, but even though I teased him to tell us all about it, he just said it was a godless place. I suspect they made fun of his northern ways.

  ‘You’d like to see London, wouldn’t you, Elizabeth?’ I poke her and she bats my hand away.

  ‘Not if I have to eat worms,’ she says. ‘Why can’t you just be happy to stay in Yo
rk?’

  ‘It’s just . . . don’t you ever want more, Elizabeth?’

  ‘More what?’

  I pluck discontentedly at the grass. ‘I don’t know . . . more something.’

  ‘Oh, more something!’ she mocks. ‘Now all is clear!’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Hawise, you want too much.’ She sits up properly, serious now. ‘Why can’t you want what everyone else wants?’

  ‘I do!’

  ‘You don’t. You don’t think like everyone else. You want to fly like a bird and see the Queen and go on a ship and travel to Cathay . . . ’ Elizabeth rolls her eyes at the impossibility of my dreams. ‘You know what our mistress says. You must be careful.’

  I do know. Careful, careful, careful. The word has been dinned into me for years. I have no looks, no dowry, few kin. And I am different. My father brought me back from his adventuring when I was but a babe. All anybody knows about my mother is that she was French, and my father is close-mouthed on the subject. For years I told myself it was because he was broken-hearted, but now I think that too much ale has addled his memory and he doesn’t remember. For all anyone in York knows, I’m not even baptized.

  It was fortunate for me that Mistress Beckwith had a fondness for my father when he was young and charming, in a way he still can be when he tries. When he wants something. The Beckwiths took me on as a servant when I was twelve and I have been learning how to run a household ever since, although unless I marry I will never be able to put all I now know to good use.

  There is no use wishing that I could fly or stand by the ocean or see where peppers grow. My life is here, in York, and little comfort it will be unless I have a husband. I know that. I want to be like everyone else, I do, but it isn’t that easy to stop thinking thoughts. But I need to. I need to have a care for my reputation, just as Mistress Beckwith says, just as Elizabeth says.

  ‘You’re right,’ I tell Elizabeth. ‘I will try harder.’

  Over the city walls the Minster bell is ringing the hour. Elizabeth gets reluctantly to her feet and brushes down her skirts. ‘We’d better go. Hawise, your cap is all crooked. Mistress Beckwith will skelp you if you go back looking like that!’

  She will too. Our mistress has a kind heart, but a firm hand. I scramble up. My hair is dark and fine, and no matter how carefully I bind it, my cap is always slipping and sliding. I straighten it on my head. ‘Better?’

  She studies me critically. ‘Better,’ she agrees and hands me my basket. The lettuce and parsley have already wilted in the afternoon sun, but the rosemary is stronger and its smell is a shimmer in the air. ‘Come on, we’ll be late.’

  Hap follows with his skewed gait as we hurry along the lane, but as we turn the corner at Mr Frankland’s orchard, he stops with a whimper.

  ‘Hap?’ I look back at him in surprise.

  Elizabeth grips my arm. ‘Hawise, look!’ She points round the corner to where an old woman, bent and buckled as a bow, is standing in the middle of the path, muttering to herself.

  I suck in a breath of consternation and exchange a glance with Elizabeth. Mother Dent is a poor widow, a cunning woman by some accounts, but my sister Agnes told us once that she has heard Sybil Dent is a witch. She had a familiar, Agnes said, a cat she called after the Devil himself, and then she lowered her voice so that we shivered. ‘It sucks the blood from her cheek.’

  Mistress Beckwith says that such stories are nonsense, but still, I falter, and instinctively I reach for Elizabeth’s hand.

  ‘Let’s go back,’ she whispers.

  ‘It will take too long. We’re late. Besides,’ I add valiantly, ‘she won’t hurt us. She is just an old woman.’

  I call urgently to Hap, but he won’t come any closer to the widow and in the end I have to pick him up. He whines as we edge past Sybil, mumbling, ‘Good day to you.’

  We are almost past when Sybil swings round and fixes us both with a fathomless gaze.

  ‘Take heed,’ she says, her voice old and cracked, and we hesitate. I can feel Hap trembling in the crook of my arm.

  ‘Take heed of what?’ I ask, more boldly than I feel.

  Sybil’s eyes seem to look into us and through us. It is as if she sees something we cannot, and the hairs on the back of my neck lift. ‘Ware the iron,’ she says. ‘Ware the water.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Elizabeth’s voice is high and thin, but the Widow Dent just turns away, hunching her shoulders.

  ‘Take heed,’ is all she will say.

  I tug Elizabeth away. ‘Leave her,’ I say. ‘She knows not what she says.’

  When we are past her, I put Hap down. We walk quickly away, and then faster and faster until we are running, running back to Monk Bar and the city, giggling with relief, and the breeze against our cheeks blows the widow’s warning from our minds.

  The touch on my arm jarred me back to reality so abruptly that I gasped with fright. I felt sick and faint, as if I had fallen down a step in the dark.

  ‘Grace? Are you all right?’ Drew Dyer took his hand away, eyeing me warily. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.’

  ‘I’m . . . It’s . . . ’

  Desperately I tried to pull myself together. I clutched at the chain around my neck, feeling its silver warm from my skin. Its braiding was reassuringly familiar beneath my fingertips. I was Grace Trewe, I remembered that straight away, but I had been that girl – Hawise, her friend had called her – too. She was still there, in my head. I could feel her frustration as she faded, unwilling to let me go.

  I looked down, half-expecting to see a little black dog under my arm. I was sure I could feel the warm weight of him, his shiver as we passed Widow Dent. But Hap had gone. I was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved top under my cardigan, not an apron over my kirtle, but I could still feel the linen frill at my neck, the tightness of the bodice laced over my red petticoat.

  Cautiously I looked around. This path was Shooter Lane. The patchwork of small enclosed fields and orchards was sealed now with tarmac, and houses and cars stood where once the wildflowers frothed in the hedgerows. When I reached out to touch the wall beside me again, the brick was rough and real beneath my fingertips.

  ‘Grace?’ said Drew again. He was watching me in concern. ‘You were just standing there as I came up behind you. Are you sure you’re okay?’

  I shook my head to clear it. I’d had a peculiarly vivid hallucination – that was all. It had to have been. Clearly only moments had passed while I lay in the long grass with Hap pressed into my leg and my friend by my side.

  ‘Yes . . . Yes, I’m fine,’ I managed. I couldn’t tell Drew that in my mind I’d been another girl, in another time. He would think I was mad. I would think I was mad. ‘I just didn’t sleep very well, that’s all. And I’m still jet-lagged.’ I even mustered a smile of sorts. ‘It’s not a good combination. I blanked out completely there for a moment.’

  ‘You’re very white. Perhaps you should go back and lie down?’

  ‘No!’ My recoil was instinctive. I didn’t want to go back there. ‘I mean . . . no, I’m okay, honestly,’ I said, even while a part of my mind was asking: Back where?

  To prove the point I started walking again, but very gingerly. I found myself watching the pavement, afraid that it might disappear again. My mind was still jerking with the immediacy of the scene, and I could feel Hawise clamouring to be let back in, a weird dragging sensation at the edges of my consciousness that made me think of the wave, and the inexorable swirl and suck of the water pulling me back, back, back . . .

  ‘Where have you come from?’ asked Drew after a moment.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said you were jet-lagged.’

  ‘Oh . . . yes – Indonesia.’ All at once I longed to be back in Jakarta, where I knew where I was and what I was doing. Where I never doubted the pavement beneath my feet. ‘I’ve been teaching English there.’

  ‘Must be a bit of a change arriving in York.’

  A bubble o
f hysterical laughter lodged in my throat and I had to bite down on the inside of my cheeks to stop it erupting. I thought of my nightmare, of the strange, rotting apples that disappeared overnight, of that extraordinarily vivid scene I had just imagined.

  ‘You could say that.’

  Drew was wearing a shabby tweed jacket and carrying a briefcase bulging with papers and books. He was blessedly ordinary. He was solid, real, and I noticed that, as I fixed my attention on him, the tugging sensation in my head faded.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Are you going into town too?’ That was it, I congratulated myself. Make conversation, be normal.

  ‘To the city archives,’ he said. ‘I’m working on local court records there at the moment.’

  ‘Did you finish your paper?’

  ‘I wish. No, I’m taking a break from it. There are only so many dung heaps and clogged gutters that I can write about at one time.’

  ‘It must have smelt a bit like the canals in Jakarta,’ I said. Odd that, right then, Indonesia seemed more knowable and familiar than York, with its jarring light and its wavering air. I felt giddy again, remembering how reality had slipped sideways.

  I must have imagined it. I must have.

  ‘Maybe,’ Drew was saying. ‘I expect we’d have found the streets of Tudor York pretty whiffy, but they had their own notions of cleanliness and they were pretty good at enforcing them.’

  ‘So what are you going to be looking at in the archives?’ I asked, anxious not to let the conversation lapse. I wished I could hold Drew’s hand, but the poor man would have a fit if I grabbed him. I would have to hang on to his words instead. ‘More nosy neighbours?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact. I’m on research leave at the moment and I’ve a book to finish. I’m working on social identity, in a nutshell, but the chapter I’m writing now is about misbehaviour.’

  I nodded along as he talked, interested, but increasingly frustrated by that insistent itch of familiarity. I studied him under my lashes. He had one of those quiet, restrained faces that are almost impossible to describe, but I couldn’t imagine where I would have come across Drew Dyer in the past.