The Phantom Tree

by Nicola Cornick

  ‘I was so stupid,’ she said now, feeling the thud of that moment’s horrible disbelief as an echo through her body. ‘So bloody stupid to assume it would always be easy to trip backwards and forwards through time.’

  ‘Why?’ Diana said. They had had this conversation before. ‘Why were you stupid? It was a natural assumption to make. You had found a gateway to the past.’

  ‘And gateways can be closed.’

  It had never opened again and that had been close to ten years before.

  There was silence. The handsome mahogany clock on the sideboard ticked time away. The cat rolled over and purred.

  Diana hesitated. ‘What I wanted to tell you… It wasn’t just that I could empathise with you about Arthur.’ She seemed uncharacteristically at a loss. ‘What I wanted to say…’ She cleared her throat. ‘Well, I had another client like you once.’

  Alison stared at her. ‘You mean… You knew someone else who claimed to have travelled through time?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Diana said.

  Alison put her cup down very gently in the saucer. Even the click of china sounded loud in her ears.

  ‘Did you think you were the only one?’ Diana said. She was smiling a little at Alison’s stupefaction.

  ‘Yes.’ Alison said. She felt her mind seize on the idea like a vice. ‘Yes, I did,’ she said, more strongly. ‘Of course I did. I mean, what are the chances of there being two of us?’ She realised that what she was feeling was jealousy as much as shock. She had thought herself unique. It was astonishing to hear that she was not.

  ‘That’s what I thought when you came to see me,’ Diana said. ‘What were the chances of there being two of you?’

  Alison looked at her sharply. ‘That was why you were so open to what I had to say,’ she said. She felt the memories click into place in her head. ‘It wasn’t because you believed I really was a time traveller,’ she said. ‘You were so accepting because you had already gone through the same experience with someone else.’

  ‘I am always accepting of what a client says.’ Diana’s tone was slightly reproving. ‘What I believe is not important. It’s what the client believes that matters.’

  ‘Even so, you must have thought I was delusional,’ Alison said.

  Diana shook her head. ‘That was what I thought when it happened the first time,’ she said. Regret laced her voice. ‘I’d learned to handle it better by the time I met you.’

  ‘What happened?’ Alison leaned forward. She knew that Diana was breaking client confidentiality in telling her this, which was something any good counsellor always scrupulously avoided. Whatever Diana had to tell must be so important that now, when she had so little lifespan left, she had decided to break the tenets that had ruled her entire career.

  ‘It was three years before you came to see me.’ Diana said. ‘I’d only been working in Marlborough for six months.’ She stroked Hector’s head absentmindedly and the cat purred all the louder, opening his mouth wide to yawn and showing sharp white teeth. ‘A man stumbled into the grounds of the college one day in a state of distress. Security was going to call the police but I persuaded them to let me talk to him first, to try to calm him down.’ She was not looking at Alison now, but at some fixed point across the room, as though she was seeing the events of that day run past her eyes like a film.

  ‘He was filthy and hungry and dressed in rags,’ Diana said. ‘He kept repeating that his name was Reginald De Morven and that he had stumbled into hell.’

  The name meant nothing to Alison. She sat back a little, feeling disappointment, though she was not sure why. Perhaps she had imagined she would have recognised the name from her own time. But the past was a vast country.

  ‘I thought he was delirious,’ Diana said. ‘That, or psychotic. I could barely understand him he had such a thick accent. He said he was a knight, the Duke of Gloucester’s man, and that he had been riding from Oxford to join the duke at Salisbury when he had fallen from his horse. When he woke he had found himself in this unknown place full of noise and evil spirits.’

  ‘Modern-day Marlborough’s not that bad,’ Alison said.

  A smile twitched Diana’s lips. ‘You can imagine why I thought he was delusional, all the same,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Alison said. ‘How could he possibly be telling the truth? It would be ridiculous, fantastical.’ She took a sip of her coffee. It was cold now and she put the cup down again, grimacing. She had been lucky in comparison, she thought. She had planned her escape from the past and so she had been spared the shock Reginald De Morven had clearly suffered when he had tumbled from one time into another.

  ‘What happened to him?’ She asked.

  ‘They took him to hospital,’ Diana said. Her hands moved sharply in the cat’s fur and Hector flexed his claws, disturbed.

  ‘Sorry,’ Diana said, to the cat. She looked up and met Alison’s eyes. ‘I felt as though I had failed him in some way,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t been able to help. It preyed on my mind. So I went to the hospital to visit him, to see if there was anything I could do. But…’ She hesitated. ‘When I got there they said he had gone.’

  ‘Gone?’ Alison repeated. Her throat was dry. ‘Gone where? You mean he had vanished?’

  ‘No one knew,’ Diana said. ‘He simply disappeared. I think he found a way home.’

  Tick tock. They sat in silence again whilst Alison thought about it and the clock marked time.

  ‘Whereabouts was the hospital?’ Alison asked.

  ‘Swindon,’ Diana said. ‘But Reginald De Morven originally came from Kingston Parva. It’s a village about ten miles north of here and a few miles east of Swindon. I looked him up,’ she added, in response to Alison’s silent question. ‘He was real. He lived in the fifteenth century.’

  ‘So somewhere around here there is another place where the past and the present meet,’ Alison said slowly, ‘the way that they used to do in the White Hart Inn. Either that, or there is some means of connecting to the past that I don’t understand and, until I do, I’ll never be able to make that journey.’

  Her mind felt engulfed in a blizzard, thoughts and facts falling so hard and fast she could not see clearly through them. There had been another traveller in time, from another place and another past. Unlike her, he had found his way back. And if he could do it, if he could find the way, then so might she…

  Diana was watching her. ‘If you could,’ she said, ‘would you still go back?’

  ‘Always,’ Alison said. ‘In a heartbeat.’ She did not need to think about it. ‘I would do anything I could,’ she said, ‘to find Arthur again.’

  *

  Alison stood in the churchyard at Kingston Parva, hands deep in the pockets of her coat, fingers clenched. Generally, she avoided churches. The older ones were amongst a small number of buildings that were familiar to her in the modern, alien landscape, but she had found early on that they did not give her comfort. On the contrary, they only served to emphasise how far she was from home. She had reasoned that as she had made a new life for herself it made sense to distance that life from the old one so she stayed away from anything that was the same age she was.

  Now though, she had come to find Reginald De Morven. Diana had told her that the slender information she had found about him had revealed a man who had apparently died in 1436 and was buried here on what had been his family estate. He was not, however, in the well-kept churchyard. He had a memorial in the Lady Chapel as befitted a knight who had been in the service of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester.

  Alison walked briskly up the uneven path to the main door, her boots tapping on the flagstones. Inside the church had none of the musty dampness she had come to associate with modern-day religion. It smelled instead of polish and flowers, and the winter sun cut through the sparkling diamond-paned windows to scatter shards of coloured light on the floor. There was a low hum of a Hoover coming from the vestry on the north side. Alison paused to pick up a leaflet about the history of the church a
nd put a pound in the honesty box. It made her smile; that was something that changed from the old life to the new; in the past she would not have hesitated to take anything she could without paying for it. She was not entirely sure why and how that had changed, except that now she had money she made for herself and that had given her much more than disposable income. Self-respect was something she now realised could be neither taught nor bought.

  Reginald De Morven’s memorial was not hard to find. It was a great stone edifice, crumbling a little, but still a handsome piece of sculpture. On the carved panel above his head was engraved a skull and three hourglasses in a row, presumably to depict the three decades of his life and the swiftness with which man’s allotted span ran out. The inscription was in Latin, which Alison could not read. Unlike boys, girls had not generally been taught Latin in her youth. Probably Mary Seymour had. She grimaced at the thought, wondering why the idea of Mary’s book learning still irritated her after so much time had passed.

  There was a pile of guidebooks by the church door and Alison picked up the top one. It told her that the De Morven family had been prominent in the local area since the time of the Norman Conquest, holding land from the Crown. They had died out in the seventeenth century when there were no male heirs left and the estates had passed to a distant cousin. Reginald had been a soldier and a courtier who had fought in the French Wars. He had gone missing and had been thought killed in 1435, but had returned to his family some time later, a broken man, and had died the following year. The monument commemorated his great exploits before that sad and ignominious end.

  Alison lowered the leaflet and looked thoughtfully at the memorial. She supposed that war was as good an excuse as any for disappearing for a couple of years. A man rode off to fight and returned years later, raving of strange experiences, to all intents and purposes insane. In the fifteenth century no one would have known differently.

  She reached out and touched the cold, carved cheek of Reginald De Morven. He had found a way back, but it seemed it had still been too late for him. He had been broken by his journey into the future, driven mad, unable to understand the world he had discovered. He had returned home only to die.

  She wondered how she would fare if she ever found her way home. She had changed out of all recognition in this new world. Adapting to the old would be beyond strange. Yet she knew she could survive it because she had no other choice. The memory of Arthur would always drive her on. She still intended to find him and to bring him back. The decision gave her strength and she would not waver.

  The drone of the Hoover cut off sharply and silence flowed back. Alison unfolded her brand-new Ordnance Survey map and laid it out on a pew. Kingston Parva was one of the ancient villages that lay at the foot of a line of chalk downs which bounded the Vale of the White Horse. A traveller from Oxford to Salisbury such as Reginald De Morven might well take a short cut across these hills, especially if he knew the landscape. She wondered where the roads had run in those days. She would need to check. There were plenty of paths and bridleways marked on the map that might be hundreds of years old. She traced them with a finger, the thieves’ way, the rogues’ way, the sugar road…

  ‘Can I help you?’ The vicar, a young woman with a smile and a very fashionably cut cassock, was heading down the aisle towards her. Behind her, Alison could see a man in a pinny putting the Hoover back in a cupboard. It reminded her of the many things she liked about the twenty-first century.

  ‘I was just making the acquaintance of Sir Reginald,’ she said lightly.

  ‘Oh, Reggie.’ The vicar smiled. ‘Our resident saint.’

  ‘Was he?’ Alison asked, startled.

  ‘Well, not officially,’ the vicar said. She patted the tomb affectionately. ‘Apparently, he was everything that a medieval knight was supposed to be: brave, chivalric, generous to the poor. When he came back from the wars speaking wildly of the extraordinary things he had seen, the villagers thought he had been touched by God.’

  ‘I suppose that would have been the most obvious explanation in those days,’ Alison said, ‘rather than that he had a mental-health issue?’

  The vicar nodded. ‘They thought he had seen miracles. Poor guy.’

  ‘What sort of miracles did he talk about?’ Alison asked.

  ‘Oh, metal birds and things spewing fire, or something,’ the vicar said vaguely. ‘You know, the usual stuff. Lights in the sky, and false suns in the dark of night and sounds like thunder. He must have had PTSD, only they wouldn’t have realised in those days. Instead, they thought he was a visionary and when he died they would come to his grave looking for cures.’ She pointed to the stone where it was worn smooth. ‘So many people touched the monument it’s surprising it’s still here. It was repaired in the eighteenth century, I think.’

  ‘Is the manor house near here?’ Alison asked. ‘The ancestral home of the De Morven family?’ She smoothed out the map, studying it closely. The manor and church were usually located close together but she did not remember seeing a house as she had driven through the village and there was no indication on the map.

  ‘It’s gone,’ the vicar said. ‘Gary—’ she called out to the man, who was untying the apron and wiping his hands on it. ‘Where was Morven Hall?’

  Gary came up, long, lanky and grinning. ‘It was over to the west of the church,’ he said. ‘When it fell down the villagers took the stones to repair their cottages so there isn’t much left.’

  High above their heads the church clock chimed the hour. The sun had gone and twilight was falling softly in the church, filling the corners with shadows. Alison briefly considered looking for the site of the old manor but abandoned the idea. Her boots weren’t made for hiking across fields and if she found a pile of old stone it would not help her much. What she really needed was to know whereabouts Reginald De Morven had been when he had found his way across time. She wanted to see if she could replicate that experience.

  The thought made her heart race until she swallowed hard and deliberately repressed the excitement. In a way, Diana’s information had been a poisoned chalice. It had given her hope, more hope than she had had in ten years when she had tried to return to find Arthur and discovered that she was trapped in the present with no way back. Yet she was not really much further on from that. She knew that Reginald De Morven might have shared her experience and achieved what she had not, a return home, but she did not know where or how he had done it.

  Slowly, she folded up the OS map and stowed it in her bag.

  ‘We’re locking up,’ the vicar said apologetically. ‘If there’s anything else…’

  ‘No, that’s fine, thanks.’ Alison said. She glanced back at the towering mausoleum. Reginald De Morven lay safe in his stone chamber, untouched by the falling shadows.

  ‘What could you tell me?’ she said softly.

  ‘Sorry?’ The vicar was sounding slightly concerned now.

  ‘Nothing,’ Alison said, turning her back on the memorial and walking towards the door. ‘Nothing at all.’

  Chapter 7

  Mary, 1560

  The whispers started immediately after Dame Margery’s death.

  ‘Witch.’

  I did not realise to begin with. I was too shocked, stunned at what we had witnessed and even more appalled that I had seen Dame Margery’s headless corpse that day in the forest before it had happened. It was one thing, although disquieting enough, to see ghosts and spectres from the past. It was another entirely to foresee the future.

  It was Alison who told me what they were saying about me. We had returned to Wolf Hall, distressed, silent, to be bundled upstairs to our chambers. Liz was tight-lipped on what was happening. She brought me cold bread and meat much later than we would normally sup but I had no appetite anyway. All I seemed to be able to see was the whole terrifying scene replaying before my eyes; the slap of Whitney’s hand against Alison’s cheek echoed through my head and everything followed with agonising slowness – the horse bolting, Dame Marg
ery’s scream, the branch like the blade of an axe… They recurred again and again in front of my eyes by the light of the flickering candle flame.

  There was a knock at the door and Alison came in. On her pale cheek the mark of Whitney’s hand still stood out in a fierce red line.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I asked, scrambling to sit up and pushing the untidy hair back from my face. I had heard men’s voices raised below, the sound of argument, but Liz had refused to tell me anything and would not let me stir from my room. Somewhere, in the distance, a child was crying, the wail quickly hushed. The whole house seemed to be buckling under the weight of an extraordinary heaviness.

  Alison sat down on the bed beside me. Her expression was stunned too, inward-looking.

  ‘They have brought her body back,’ she said. ‘She is to be buried on the morrow.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘The sooner the better, they said.’

  ‘No more hunting then,’ I said, and saw a bitter smile light Alison’s eyes.

  ‘It has spoiled their games,’ she agreed.

  ‘And the wedding?’

  ‘Goes ahead on Friday as planned.’

  I looked up, startled. ‘But—’

  ‘Nothing has changed,’ she said.

  ‘He hit you,’ I said, stupid with shock and exhaustion.

  Her hand crept to her cheek. ‘Did you think that would make a difference?’ she said. ‘A man may chastise his wife just as he would a dog or a servant.’

  ‘It should not be so,’ I said. ‘Surely, Cousin Edward should stop it.’

  She raised her shoulders in a half-shrug. ‘He of all men is keen for the marriage to proceed.’ She shook the stupor from her eyes. ‘It was your future I came to discuss not mine. You are in mortal danger. They are calling you a witch and pressing for you to be tried.’