Time's Echo

by Pamela Hartshorne

  Miles Fell lumbers towards us, still cursing, followed by his shambling dog, and we all fall back hastily to clear a path for them both. Few folk are brave enough to make him walk round them, even when he is in the best of moods.

  There is a sense of anticlimax. The fight many were hoping for hasn’t materialized, and the crowd disperses as quickly as it gathered, back to buying and selling and trading gossip and insults. Nicholas Ellis is left to limp off alone, muttering about speaking to my Lord Mayor.

  The notary’s assistant has drifted off with the others, it seems, and I turn, disappointed, only to find that Alice has vanished and he is standing right there. He smiles at my expression and sweeps off his hat to bow, as if I were the Queen’s Majesty herself.

  ‘Francis Bewley, at your service, Mistress . . . ?’ He darts a beseeching look up at me. Close to, he is less handsome than he seemed at first, but there is a sleekness to him that fits with his southern accent. He has a very red mouth, small, plump hands and those strange, intense eyes are like the Ouse on a bright day, reflecting back the light so that it is impossible to tell what colour they are.

  I know I should lower my gaze and walk away. I know how important my reputation is. I know that however much people seem busy about their own affairs, there will be someone watching me. There will be a woman who will tell her gossip, who will tell her gossip, who will tell Mistress Beckwith that I stood in the middle of Thursday Market and was bold with a stranger.

  But I cannot help myself. How can I walk away when a handsome young man is bowing before me, when his eyes are fixed on mine and he doesn’t seem to have noticed that I am dark and plain? How can I not smile back at him? I forget that if Alice is right, he is dissembling and already knows my name.

  ‘Hawise Aske,’ I admit. I follow his gaze as it drops to the dog in my arms. ‘And this is Hap.’

  To my surprise, Hap’s ears are fattened and I can feel his entire body vibrating with a low growl. It’s not like him. Normally he is the most sweet-tempered of dogs.

  I set my basket on the ground and lay my free hand reassuringly on his head. ‘Quiet, Hap,’ I say. ‘Friend.’

  Sensing someone at my shoulder, I turned to see two women, strangely dressed, watching me with a concerned expression.

  ‘Are you lost, dear?’

  ‘Lost?’ I said blankly. Why should I be lost in Thursday Market?

  ‘You’ve just been standing in the middle of the pavement, staring.’

  I looked slowly around me. The stalls had vanished. There were no carts laden with cabbages, no women crouching by their baskets of fruit, no jabbering throng of people, laughing and gossiping and bargaining. My eyes dropped to my hand. No small dog, growling softly.

  And no Francis Bewley. In his place stood two elderly women pulling shopping trolleys behind them.

  I was blocking their way. The realization was a slap, jarring me into the present, and I drew an unsteady breath as I remembered where I was. Who I was.

  ‘Sorry. I . . . I was just . . . ’ I couldn’t think of an excuse to explain my odd behaviour until I remembered Alice and her accusing expression. ‘. . . just daydreaming,’ I said as I stepped aside and they trundled their trolleys past me.

  My mind scrabbled with the shock of the abrupt return to reality, and my heart was banging painfully under my ribs. I felt sick and very frightened as I crossed the square and cut through the narrow alleyways that riddled the city centre, too preoccupied by what had happened to think about how I knew the way.

  I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t. I held onto the thought of Drew Dyer, who had treated me as if I were perfectly normal. He had said that I should eat, I remembered, but all I could find near Monk Bar were charity shops. I didn’t want to go back to the market—

  My thoughts broke off. What was I thinking? There had been no market. I had imagined it.

  I made myself stop and take a deep breath. I needed to eat, that was all. I asked a newsagent where I could buy food, and eventually found a Sainsbury’s, where I bought some basics. The ordinariness of the task was calming, and I was feeling steadier as I let myself back into the house.

  There had to be an explanation for this. I couldn’t be slipping back in time and reliving another life. The whole idea was absurd.

  But I kept thinking about that nightmare, about being Hawise and drowning, and I thought about the voice I’d heard whispering for Bess, when I hadn’t been dreaming at all.

  The house was very quiet. I shut the door behind me and braced myself for that creepy whisper – Bess – but heard nothing. A faint suggestion of putrid apples lurked in the air. I told myself I was imagining it. There had been no apples in the bin that morning, so I must have dreamt them.

  Still, the smell lingered unpleasantly as I carried my bags through to the kitchen and made myself a sandwich. Cheese and chutney, sliced brown bread. The rush of sugar from the brownie had long since evaporated and I’d been too tired to think about cooking a proper meal as I wandered around Sainsbury’s. Too tired, and overwhelmed by the choice and the amount of packaging on the shelves.

  And afraid to wonder whether it was remembering the pasars in Jakarta or the markets in sixteenth-century York that made the supermarket feel so alien.

  I ate my sandwich standing up, looking out at Lucy’s back yard. I didn’t want to think about what had happened that morning. The earlier promise of the day had clouded over and the garden looked huddled down, as if reluctant to believe that it really was spring. Lucy had clearly made an effort with it. I’m not very good with plants, but I could identify clumps of woody lavender and rosemary, and in spite of myself I found myself thinking about Hawise. Found myself remembering the smell of the rosemary that she – I? – plucked from the basket, and how its pungency filled her – my? – nostrils.

  Rosemary for remembrance. I could have heard that anywhere, I reasoned to myself. It was the kind of thing Lucy used to say all the time.

  I looked away from the rosemary to where a stiff breeze bullied some cheery daffodils in a tub by the back gate. I’d never thought of Lucy as a gardener, but then I’d never thought of her as a witch, either.

  I’d never thought she would die and leave me her house.

  I hadn’t known her at all.

  I sighed, brushing crumbs from my fingers, and was turning back to the kitchen when something caught my eye. For a moment I could have sworn I saw a gnarled apple tree in the corner of the yard, but when I swung back to stare, it was just a straggly rose being buffeted by the wind.

  I made a mug of coffee and took it through to the sitting room along with my laptop and the envelope of Lucy’s effects that John Burnand had given me. It was cold in the house and I put on the gas fire, huddling in front of it while I drank the coffee and tried to get warm.

  The air felt spongy and sour. Lucy had painted the walls a dark, disturbing red, and they seemed to be leaning in, crushing the light from the room. I wriggled my shoulders uneasily. My imagination had been working overtime since I arrived in York.

  In one corner Lucy had laid a cloth over a round table, and set it with two tall candles. A pewter goblet was placed carefully between them, with a carved wooden wand and a ritual knife on either side. Crystals were laid in a circle around the edge.

  It was an altar, I realized with distaste, and I remembered what Sophie had told me about Lucy being a witch. I studied the table while I nibbled at my thumbnail. It’s a bad habit of mine when I’m unsure of myself. Outside, in the bright morning air, the notion of witchcraft had seemed just one more of Lucy’s mad ideas, but here in this oppressive room it was harder to roll my eyes at the image of her dabbling in the occult. It felt more real, more dangerous, and I found myself thinking about the apple that I had found on the mantelpiece the night before and thrown away. The apple there was no sign of in the bin.

  All at once my pulse was thudding in my ears, and I realized that I was crouched in front of the fire, holding myself tense and still like an animal deciding whe
ther or not to flee. My eyes were bulging with exhaustion.

  Jet lag catching up on me, I told myself firmly. All I needed was a nap.

  I lay down on the sofa and closed my eyes, but I couldn’t relax. My mind careened between Lucy and the nightmare that had wrenched me out of sleep in the early hours of the morning.

  I could pass that off as a dream, but what about those other experiences? I didn’t even know what to call them. Hallucinations? They weren’t dreams, that was for sure. They had been too consistent for that. Besides, who fell asleep walking along a street?

  I abandoned my efforts to ignore what had happened and deliberately opened my mind to the memories. Surely I could look at them rationally? In each, I had been Hawise, and I could see some parallels with myself. I was small-boned and dark-haired, and I had the same silvery-grey eyes.

  There were other similarities too. I was curious and restless, just like Hawise. That feeling of not belonging, of always being an outsider, was familiar to me, but unlike Hawise, I welcomed it. It meant I never had to get too close to anyone, and that suited me fine. It was easier that way.

  Hawise had to be some kind of projection, I decided, although why I had chosen to project myself as a servant in Elizabethan York was a mystery to me.

  The alternative was too bizarre to contemplate.

  I didn’t believe in reincarnation or ghosts or past lives, I reminded myself. I wasn’t like Lucy. I didn’t look for another world. I’d told Drew Dyer that I wasn’t interested in the past, and I’d meant it. I liked the here and the now. I liked the surface of things, tastes and textures. I entwined my fingers in the chain of my pendant. Things like that – things I could touch, things that were real. I wanted to make sense of things, not marvel at the mystery of them.

  So there had to be an explanation. There was nothing wrong with this house, nothing wrong with Lucy’s death. Nothing wrong with me.

  The explanation was simple: I was overtired and getting things out of proportion, and that meant it was time to get a grip. No more letting my imagination run away with me. No more freaking myself out.

  I still couldn’t relax enough to fall asleep, though, and in the end I gave up. Remembering the envelope with Lucy’s things, I sat back by the fire and shook the contents into my palm. Two rings fell out, along with a silver pentacle pendant on a leather cord. I held it up, half-mesmerized as it swung gently, the reflected flames from the fire shifting over its shiny surface. It wasn’t really my kind of thing, and besides I already had the jade pendant that I wore all the time. I wondered if Sophie would like it. She had known Lucy better than I had.

  I tried on the rings instead. One was a narrow silver band engraved with some kind of writing – runes? – while the other was engraved with Celtic knots. They looked pretty together, and I left them on my finger. I would wear them in memory of Lucy.

  For a while I sat by the fire, listening to the guttering hiss of the gas flames and turning my hand idly to admire the rings, but it wasn’t long before Hawise was back. I could feel her knocking on my mind, wanting to come in, wanting me to remember, and I found myself looking at Lucy’s altar. I found myself wondering what she had stirred up there.

  Hawise was persistent, but I was stubborn too. I didn’t want to remember.

  I settled myself back on the sofa, opened my laptop and logged onto Facebook. My friends had been on, leaving each other jokey messages, grinning in photos, the way I usually did, but that day I felt detached from it all. They seemed to belong to another world, one that had nothing to do with me any more. Right then, sixteenth-century York seemed more real to me than the cyberworld where we could all keep in touch, no matter how far-flung we were.

  For a while I sat with my fingers on the keyboard, wondering what to write, but in the end I just posted a short note saying that I was in York and that it was cold. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Staring at the screen, I thought about my message hurtling through space, bouncing off some satellite and then zooming back down to my friends’ computers around the world. At least, I assumed it went via a satellite. The truth was that I had no idea how the Internet worked. How was it that the words I had just typed could appear in Jakarta or Sydney or Mexico City at the same time as they popped up here in York? And when messages went astray, as they sometimes did, where did they go?

  I toyed with my pendant. When it came down to it, was slipping through time any more mysterious than the Internet? Could Hawise’s experiences be messages that had been lost in time, rather than cyberspace? I played with the idea, my lips pursed as my eyes rested unseeingly on my Facebook page. I imagined her memories circling endlessly like some strange video or jpeg, waiting for a mind that could download it.

  I could think of those experiences as mere blips on some weird circuit. I was on my own in a strange place. Perhaps that made me more susceptible than usual? I sat up straighter. Why not treat Hawise just as I would a computer virus that struck equally mysteriously, but which was ultimately controllable?

  I’ve always had a straightforward approach to computers. If it doesn’t work, I turn it off and hope the problem will go away by itself. It’s amazing how often ignoring it works. I would do the same now, I decided. All I had to do was keep busy, keep focused on the present, and I would be fine. I would sort out this creepy house, sell it to the first bidder and leave.

  Mel had a whole album of her Mexican photos on Facebook. I clicked through every one, needing the distraction. She was obviously having a great time.

  She’d left me a message. R u ok? Mel knew perfectly well that I had an old-fashioned loathing of abbreviations, and deliberately peppered any message to me with as many as possible. In return, mine were always perfectly punctuated. What r u up to?

  How could I tell Mel what it was like here? She couldn’t possibly understand about York, with its strange, shifting streets and the unnerving feeling that if you turned a corner or slipped down a little alley you’d find yourself in a different world. Mel wouldn’t understand if I tried to tell her about the dizzying sense that time was warped and buckling, about the feeling that was part-horror, part-fascination as the present tipped into the past and back again. She wouldn’t know what I meant if I told her how it felt when the present was siphoned away by a force stronger than reason. It made me think of standing on a beach in my bare feet, feeling the tide suck the sand from beneath my toes.

  Off to Yucatan @ weekend, Mel’s message continued. Check out pics! U should be here.

  She was right. I should be there, I thought wistfully. I should be dancing in bars until the small hours, then nursing a hangover in the shade with my friend, not teetering on the edges of time in this old, cold northern city. I clicked on the link Mel had sent and found myself looking at a screen full of beautiful white sand beaches, complete with the obligatory leaning palm tree.

  I’d been to beaches since Khao Lak. I’d got over the fear that the sea would rise up again. There was a tiny moment when I first saw the photos when my throat closed in panic, but it only lasted a second or two, and then I was fine again.

  I tried to concentrate on the images, but I kept looking up. The air had grown padded. It settled around me like a sigh, squeezing the energy out of me with every breath I took, while the silence thickened, broken only by the putter of the gas fire, the muffled click of the mouse.

  I was about to close the page when I saw it, and the breath stopped in my lungs. A beach like all the others, but this one showed a child. Barely more than a speck on the screen, he was digging alone on a beach.

  It wasn’t Lucas. I knew that, but my heart was beating high and hard. I swallowed, blinked and looked again.

  The child had gone. It was just a photo of a pristine beach fringed with palms.

  My palms were damp. I rubbed them on my jeans. I had seen it – I knew I had. Not Lucas, no, but there had been a child in one of the pictures. I was sure of it.

  Methodically I went through every single photo
, but none of them showed a small boy with a spade.

  So I’d imagined it.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, wanting to squeeze the image from my mind, but I couldn’t. Lucas was there, so clear that I could see every bump in his knobbly spine, every one of the fine, fair hairs at the nape of his neck. When I think of him, I think of his back, because that was mostly what I saw. Lucas didn’t like to make eye contact.

  He never played with the other children on the beach. He didn’t play at all. He spent Christmas Day digging a complex network of channels in the sand, and I was fascinated by his single-minded approach. When the channel he had planned cut across the bit of beach where Matt and I were lying, his parents tried to call him away. That’s how I knew he was called Lucas. They were Swedish and lifted their hands in helpless apology when he simply ignored them.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, digging Matt in the ribs. ‘We’ll move.’

  Lucas didn’t say thank you. His face was set and he carried on digging. Matt sighed and grumbled, but I picked up the spare spade and set it in the sand.

  ‘Here?’ I said to Lucas.

  He did look then – one quick, fierce look – then he nodded. We dug for hours, side by side, Lucas directing occasionally with a pointing finger. We didn’t say another word to each other.

  Just that once, that’s all it was, but whenever I thought about that afternoon, my chest grew so tight that I could hardly breathe. I sat in Lucy’s sitting room and I kept my eyes closed so that I wouldn’t have to look at the photos of all those beaches where Lucas wasn’t digging any more.

  ‘Hawise!’ My eyes snap open as my mistress bustles out into the yard and catches me with my face turned up to the sun, the tablecloth clutched to my chest. ‘What is the matter with you today?’ She looks at me narrowly. ‘You’ve been like a great gawby gawping at the moon all day!’

  ‘I was just thinking what a beautiful day it is,’ I say, hastily shaking the crumbs from the cloth. I don’t understand the sadness that welled up inside me when I closed my eyes. It is a beautiful day, and I should be excited, not sad.