Time's Echo

by Pamela Hartshorne

  Francis, I can see, is growing impatient. ‘I know nothing of the Ampleforth woman, but there are others, I assure you. Two witches were arrested last week, and I trust will suffer the punishment they deserve at the Assizes, but there are others still practising unhindered. The Widow Dent, for instance – why is she not taken in for questioning? Everyone knows she is a witch.’

  ‘She is not a witch,’ I say clearly. I am the only one who knows how much he fears and hates Sybil. And why. ‘She is a cunning woman, who makes salves for cuts and bruises – that’s all. You are new to the city. You do not know folk as we do.’

  ‘I make it my business to know about evil-doers.’ Francis’s response is smooth, unfazed by my tartness. ‘It is God’s work.’

  ‘Most so-called witches are but poor witless women,’ Ned says. ‘They are scapegoats for every misfortune and every grudge.’

  ‘You are too tolerant,’ says Francis thinly. He is unimpressed by Ned’s lack of fervour, that is clear. ‘It is not enough to be ardent in religion ourselves. We must seek out those who have renounced Christ and entered into a bargain with the Devil, or we will none of us be safe.’

  ‘We should look to our own souls before we meddle in others’,’ Ned says and changes the subject.

  Francis subsides then, and I realize that my husband, quiet as he is, has a presence that Francis can never match. I can see that the other men respect Ned, and it is not just for his wealth. There is a steadiness about him, an unobtrusive strength, which means that he does not need to raise his voice or flaunt his prosperity for men to listen to what he has to say.

  My husband is a good man. I haven’t realized this until now. I have been too taken up with my own feelings of strangeness and loneliness to think about his, but now I watch him and marvel that I haven’t seen him properly before. I have never noticed the creases at the edges of his eyes, or the line of his jaw and throat. His linen is always very clean. So are his hands. I have noticed that.

  I don’t realize that I am studying him until Ned looks down the table and our eyes meet. He doesn’t do anything as obvious as smile at me, but something happens. A shortening of the air, a crisping of the senses. Something that leaves me feeling startled and hot. Flustered, I look away, and as I do, I catch Francis’s glance. His is dark with malice, but suddenly I don’t care. Tonight I will lie with my husband, and my pulse jumps at the thought.

  ‘Alison.’ I beckon to the maid. ‘Bring Mr Bewley more wine. His cup is quite empty.’

  I was holding the knife, and my eyes were stinging still from the onions that lay half-chopped on the board. My lips were curved in a smile, but it faded as I saw what was sitting beside the onions.

  An apple, brown and loathsome, and putrid with mould.

  My pulse roared in my ears at the return to reality. Very carefully I set the knife down and groped my way to a chair in the dining room, where I dropped my head between my knees. The faintness passed after a minute or so, but the fear remained, and I sat with the back of my hand pressed against my mouth, trying to summon up the courage to go back into the kitchen.

  When I did, the apple was still there. I made myself touch it. It was real. And it hadn’t been there when I started chopping the onions – I was certain of it.

  Hawise had put it there.

  She was real.

  This was not post-traumatic stress disorder. I faced it for the first time, hacking my way through every rational instinct that told me it was impossible. Hawise was a ghost, trapped somehow between the past and the present, and she was using me. But what did she want? And why me? I thought wildly. What had I ever done to be possessed by a girl four centuries dead? And what was I supposed to do about it?

  Fear fluttered frantically in my throat, but I swallowed it down. I was not going to panic. I was not going to fall apart. I was not going to let Hawise use me any more.

  I hadn’t tried hard enough to resist her, I could see that now. Part of me had been frightened, but I had been fascinated too. But now I felt as if I had stepped onto a train that was going in quite the wrong direction; I was unable to open the doors or jump out, and there was no one to see me waving frantically for attention. No one to help me.

  I wasn’t imagining things. That apple had been real; Hawise was real. There was no point in going back to Sarah or trying to persuade Drew about what was happening to me. I didn’t know what Hawise wanted from me, but I was determined not to give it. I didn’t like not being the one in control. Somehow I was going to have to wrest control back from Hawise, and I was going to have to do it by myself.

  I put on rubber gloves and picked up the apple, gagging at the feel of it, saggy and squelchy, between my fingers. Opening the kitchen door, I threw the apple out, disgust propelling it in a high arch out into the garden. And as it sailed through the air I saw the orchard, with its gnarled apple trees and unkempt grass – a snapshot – and then the apple plopped behind the laurel bush and the picture was gone.

  This was where it had happened, I realized. This was the neglected orchard where Francis Bewley had forced himself on Hawise. Was that why she was here now, and not in the fine house in Coney Street?

  I remembered that scrap of paper I’d found on the desk upstairs. Lucy had lived here. She had known about Hawise too.

  And Lucy was dead.

  My face was grim as I stripped off the gloves.

  Oddly, I was less frightened now that I accepted the reality of what was happening than I had been before. My greatest fear had been that I was losing my mind, that I would be diagnosed insane and shut up somewhere and pumped full of drugs. I would rather believe in ghosts than that.

  By the time Drew arrived I had myself under control, but it wasn’t a successful evening. My fault. I was distracted. I tried to shut Hawise out of my mind, but I kept thinking about Ned and how I had looked at him and suddenly seen him for the first time. Now I couldn’t take my eyes off Drew, couldn’t stop noticing how solid his body was, how firm the line of his jaw, how competent his hands. Couldn’t stop wishing he would smile at me.

  I didn’t like it. That was Hawise’s fault, I knew. If it wasn’t for Ned, I would never have dreamt of looking at Drew like that. It left me feeling edgy and uneasy and unable to concentrate. The opor ayam was pretty good, but the conversation kept sticking uncomfortably. Drew didn’t seem bothered. He was better at silence than me.

  ‘Am I allowed to ask how you got on with Sarah?’ he asked. And by that point I was so grateful for a neutral topic of conversation that I told him about post-traumatic stress disorder, which meant telling him something about the tsunami too, but it wasn’t so hard once I started. I told him about Matt. I told him about being swept out to sea. I told him I was scared.

  But I didn’t tell him about Lucas. I did think about it, but the words jammed in my throat. I would have had to vomit them out, and I couldn’t face Drew’s disgust. I wanted him to think of me as calm and capable, rational – the way I was. I couldn’t talk calmly about Lucas. At one level I knew that Sarah was right. The longer I locked that away, the more I feared it, but knowing that I should talk about it and actually letting the words out were two very different things. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I was afraid of what Drew would think of me, afraid of what I would have to face about myself.

  I wanted to be normal, and for Drew to think of me as normal too. Was that so much to ask?

  So I didn’t tell him about Lucas, and I didn’t tell him about Hawise, either. I would have to deal with her myself.

  ‘So, there you go,’ I finished lightly. ‘You’ll be glad to know that they’re not going to cart me off to the funny farm after all.’

  I thought Drew would appreciate a rational explanation, but he frowned. ‘That doesn’t explain your bruises,’ he said. ‘Why would you hurt yourself?’

  I got up to clear away the plates. There was no way I was going to tell him what I really believed. ‘It made sense, the way Sarah explained it,’ I said. I pinned on a smile.
‘Now, would you like some pudding?’

  ‘Hey, Sophie!’ I spotted her trudging off to school the following Tuesday and on an impulse trotted to catch her up.

  She turned at the sound of her name. ‘Oh, hello,’ she said as I joined her, but not with any great enthusiasm, and I wondered if Drew could possibly be right about her admiring me.

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  She gave me a duh look. ‘School.’

  ‘Mind if I walk with you?’

  ‘It’s the wrong way for you, isn’t it?’

  No, Drew was definitely mistaken, I decided, but I wasn’t going to let her put me off. I remembered what it was like to be a teenager, to be surly and graceless, to be terrified that someone was going to pay attention to you and even more terrified that they weren’t.

  ‘I’m not teaching till this afternoon,’ I said breezily. ‘I fancy a walk. Besides, I wanted to ask you something.’

  ‘Oh?’ Sophie looked wary as we began walking.

  ‘Do you remember Vivien, who came to Lucy’s funeral?’

  ‘Of course. They don’t call her the leader, but she’s the one in charge of Lucy’s coven.’

  And the one who had decided that Sophie herself was too young to join, I remembered.

  ‘You don’t happen to know how to get in touch with her, do you?’

  Lucy had left instructions for her funeral with John Burnand, and he had made all the arrangements. I had never contacted Vivien directly, but now I wanted to talk to her. Ever since coming round in the kitchen with the knife in my hand and that smile of anticipation on my lips, I had been grappling with how to deal with Hawise. A sense of unease nagged at the back of my mind. Oh, I was worried about what was happening to me, of course I was, but beyond that I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I needed to do something about what was happening to Hawise too.

  But how could I? I couldn’t change the past, I knew that, but still the feeling persisted all weekend. I didn’t want to go back to Sarah. She was a scientist. She had offered an explanation that made sense as long as Hawise wasn’t there in my head, but now she was back, tugging insistently at my mind, impossible to ignore, impossible to deny.

  Several times I had considered confiding in Drew again, but he was like Sarah. He was a historian – an historian, he would have said, I was sure – and while I thought he would want to help, I didn’t see how he could. He would need to believe in Hawise, and I didn’t think he could do that.

  Then I had remembered Vivien – Vivien who had sensed what had happened in the orchard. There is violence here, she had said. Violence and hate and fear. Vivien would believe in Hawise.

  I could have gone to John Burnand, I supposed, but I didn’t want to tell him why I wanted to speak to Vivien, and Sophie seemed a better bet.

  ‘I don’t have a phone number or anything, but I know where she lives,’ said Sophie. ‘I went there once with Lucy. It’s not that far from here. I could show you, if you like.’

  ‘I don’t want to make you late for school.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘I haven’t seen you for a while,’ I said, uncomfortably aware of my relentless cheeriness as she led me down a side street. But it was hard not to sound cheery in comparison. ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Your dad says you go out quite a bit,’ I persisted.

  For the first time a trace of animation warmed her face. ‘I go to the Temple of the Waters. I’m training to be an initiate.’

  ‘What does that involve?’

  Sophie cast me a sidelong glance, obviously wondering why I was being so nosy, but just as obviously she couldn’t think of a reason not to answer.

  ‘I go to gatherings. We meditate.’ Enthusiasm warmed her voice in spite of herself. ‘Ash – that’s our leader – is so charismatic. He’s taught me how to see Gaia in everything.’

  Forgetting her reluctance to confide, Sophie plunged into an involved description of what the Temple of the Waters believed in. I nodded along. It sounded to me like a rehash of any other pagan mythology – not that I knew much about it. Sophie talked about worshipping Mother Earth, and acknowledging the power of the elements and our place in nature, and while it all sounded rather silly and self-important, I could sort of see why it appealed to her. I wasn’t entirely sure where the waters came into it, but it all seemed fairly harmless. I wondered if Drew was worrying unnecessarily. I could think of worse things for Sophie to get into.

  I couldn’t see that having coffee with me was going to hold much appeal for her, but I had promised to offer, and I was wondering how to introduce it into the conversation when we rounded a corner and ran slap into a couple of goths coming in the opposite direction. I was in the middle of the whole sidestepping and apologizing thing when I realized that Sophie had stopped dead and the colour had rushed into her face.

  My first impression, it was clear, had been based on little more than the fact that both were wearing black leather jackets. On closer inspection they had a gloss that I had never seen on any goth I’d met before. He was tall, with beautiful cheekbones and a wide, sensuous mouth, and had long, silky ringlets that should have looked girly, but which somehow emphasized the dark masculine beauty of his face instead. The girl with him was two or three years older than Sophie, with piercings in her brow and nose and a sexy, sullen expression.

  Sophie was looking bedazzled. ‘Ash, hi,’ she stammered. ‘Hi, Mara.’

  So this was the allegedly charismatic leader of her temple. I could see that there was a certain glamour about both of them, but they were very young. I was amused more than impressed as I glanced back at Ash, only to find myself caught by the intense, shiny green of his eyes.

  Francis Bewley’s eyes.

  My heart stuttered in shock, every instinct in me recoiling from him as from a slap. I wanted to grab Sophie’s hand and run, but I just stood there, churning with revulsion and confusion while Sophie gazed worshipfully at him.

  ‘Little Moon,’ he said to Sophie, and he glanced at me and he smiled.

  He knew the effect he had on me, I was sure he knew. Struggling to mask my expression, I was certain I could see amusement in those horrible light eyes.

  My mind scrabbled uselessly. What was Francis doing here? It felt like longer, but it was probably no more than a few seconds of panic before reason reasserted itself. Francis couldn’t be here. Francis was dead.

  This wasn’t Francis. He was just an ex-student of Drew’s, who didn’t even look like Francis. I inhaled slowly, made myself calm. Francis hadn’t pursued me across the centuries. What a ridiculous idea! This boy, Ash, just had light eyes. It wasn’t a crime.

  Still, I understood now just why Drew mistrusted him.

  I pulled myself together. ‘Little Moon?’ I asked, looking between Sophie and Ash.

  ‘It’s our special name for her.’ Ash’s voice was low, caressing and, in spite of reason, loathing crawled between my shoulder blades. ‘Isn’t it, Moon?’

  Sophie nodded, the hectic flush still running under her skin. ‘It’s my spirit name.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Sophie?’ I knew I sounded taut, but I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘Moon does honour to the elements,’ said Ash gravely, and I could see Sophie lapping up his intensity. ‘The moon is a symbol of woman, the female. It is the moon that rules the tides as she waxes and wanes. Little Moon here has a power she does not yet know.’

  I only just stopped myself rolling my eyes. No wonder Drew was anxious! Sophie was drinking it all in, in thrall, and now I remembered something else Vivien had said: Watch out for Sophie.

  ‘Yes, I heard your group was something to do with water,’ I said, wanting Ash to know that I was unimpressed, and he smiled faintly, condescendingly.

  ‘That’s like saying light is something to do with the sun,’ he said, and beside him Mara closed her eyes. It was difficult to tell whether she was praying or plain bored. Either way, I had the dis
tinct impression that she had heard it all before. ‘Water is the source of all life, of all love,’ Ash went on fervently. ‘Open your mind, and all the power you need is at your disposal.’

  His mirror eyes rested on me for a moment and, looking into them, I felt a chill. Ash wasn’t Francis – he wasn’t anything like him really – but all I could think about was Francis and the mad gleam in his gaze.

  My mouth was dry. ‘I get all the power I need from clicking on a switch,’ I said.

  Sophie looked shocked by my flippancy, Mara openly contemptuous, while Ash only shook his head gently.

  ‘Get Little Moon to bring you along to one of our gatherings,’ he said. ‘I think we can teach you a better way.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said rudely. ‘I don’t like water.’ Then I caught sight of Sophie’s disappointed expression and wished I hadn’t been quite so abrupt. Ash might give me the creeps, but I didn’t want to hurt her. ‘I’m afraid of it,’ I found myself explaining.

  ‘Afraid of water?’ Mara’s expression was incredulous.

  ‘Yes,’ I said evenly.

  ‘A tragedy for you,’ said Ash, but I had seen the glint of satisfaction in his eyes. He might not be Francis, but there was something wrong about him all the same. ‘Come, Mara, we must go.’ He reached out and flicked Sophie’s nose lightly. ‘We will see you tomorrow, Little Moon?’

  She nodded eagerly, blushing with pleasure at a gesture that to me had reeked of contempt. ‘I’ll be there,’ she promised.

  Ash lifted his hand and gestured a graceful circle. ‘Blessings,’ he said to us both, and sauntered off with Mara.

  Sophie gazed after them with such naked longing in her face that I averted my eyes. I would have to be very careful.

  ‘Wow!’ I commented lightly as we started walking again. ‘So that’s Ash.’

  ‘I know.’ Sophie was still lit up by the encounter. ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’ Fortunately she didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘He’s so . . . so powerful and so spiritual,’ she sighed.

  And so cold and so calculating, I wanted to add, but didn’t. There was no point in alienating Sophie. Criticism would only push her further under Ash’s influence. I needed to find a way of puncturing the image she had of him, very carefully, so that all that so-called charisma leaked out of him and she saw the emptiness left behind.