Time's Echo

by Pamela Hartshorne

  I heard the unhurried glugging from the bottle, saw the leisurely swirl of the wine in the glasses, the rich ruby colour of it. I could smell the wine and garlic and feel the weight of the knife in my hand. When I looked down, I was dazzled by the purple shininess of the aubergines, the redness of the tomatoes, the greenness of the courgettes, piled like jewels on the chopping board. It was as if I’d never seen vegetables before, and I stared at them, feeling time begin to spiral.

  ‘Here.’ Drew’s voice startled me back to the present. He was holding out one of the glasses, and my hand was unsteady as I put my smile back in place and accepted it.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Drew didn’t let go immediately. ‘You okay?’ He looked at me searchingly and I automatically brightened my smile.

  ‘Yes, sure. Why?’

  ‘You looked a bit strange there for a moment.’

  ‘Did I? I’m just spaced out, I guess, with the funeral and everything.’

  I picked up the knife once more. The strangeness of the aubergines had evaporated and they were once more ordinary vegetables that I’d cooked with a thousand times.

  ‘At least it’s over now,’ I said, ‘and I feel as if I’ve done right by Lucy, which is the main thing. She would have approved, don’t you think, Sophie?’

  Sophie nodded. Her head was bent over the peppers, which she was cutting up very slowly and precisely. ‘I still miss her,’ she said, and her voice cracked. Hers had been the only tears at the ceremony. ‘I still don’t understand why Lucy went to the river,’ she burst out. ‘If she hadn’t done that, she wouldn’t have died. What was she doing down there?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, feeling helpless. Feeling as if I ought to know. ‘Lucy’s solicitor told me there’d been an inquest and that it had returned an open verdict.’ Knife in one hand, I lifted my glass with the other and took a sip as I looked at Drew. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘That the police found no evidence to suggest either that it was suicide or that foul play was involved.’

  ‘Basically, nobody knows?’

  ‘There isn’t always an answer, Grace. You both have to accept that you’re never going to know exactly what happened to Lucy.’

  I frowned down into my glass. ‘That feels wrong.’

  ‘You were the one who said the other day that the past is past,’ Drew said. ‘You can’t change it.’

  ‘And you said that we should try and understand it,’ I countered, and his expression relaxed into one of those tantalizing almost-smiles.

  ‘Touché. I was thinking about history generally. Look, it’s not as if Lucy’s death was brushed under the carpet. The police investigated. They will have talked to her friends. They talked to us.’

  ‘I told them Lucy would never have gone near the river on her own,’ said Sophie, ‘but they didn’t listen to me.’

  ‘Because there’s no evidence that her death was anything but a tragic accident,’ said Drew firmly. ‘Lucy’s dead, and nothing’s going to change that.’

  ‘She’s not really dead, anyway,’ said Sophie.

  My mind twitched so violently that I actually flinched. I put down my glass.

  ‘What do you mean, she’s not really dead?’

  ‘She’ll be reborn sometime, somewhere. It’s part of the cycle. Lucy had lived before.’ Sophie sounded absolutely certain. ‘She told me about it. That’s why I know she wouldn’t have committed suicide. She was afraid of water,’ she said. ‘She said she had drowned in her past life. She wasn’t afraid of dying, but she didn’t want to drown. She said it’s a horrible way to die.’

  I pulled a tomato towards me. ‘Yes,’ I said, thinking of the tsunami. Of the agonizing pain in the lungs, the pressure in the ears. Of not being able to breathe, and of the horror clogging the mind. ‘Yes, it is.’

  Quickly I chopped up the tomatoes and scraped all the vegetables into a roasting tray. Slugging olive oil over it all, I stirred them around and thought about what Sophie had told me. Lucy, she said, had drowned in a past life. Was it possible that Lucy had dreamt of Hawise too? My mind tiptoed up to the idea, only to veer away at the last minute like a horse spooked at the edge of an abyss.

  ‘I don’t suppose historians have much time for the idea of past lives?’ I said to Drew. ‘It would be interesting if accounts of regression were true, though, don’t you think? You’d think historians, of all people, would want to know what life was really like in the past.’

  ‘Historians are only interested in evidence,’ said Drew, bringing the bottle over to top up my glass. ‘There’s no evidence that any of the cases of people supposedly remembering past lives actually took place.’

  ‘Then how do you explain the detail they recall?’ Sophie hunched a truculent shoulder. ‘They know things they couldn’t possibly have known otherwise.’

  ‘If you look at documented cases of so-called regression, you can nearly always make an argument for recovered memory,’ said Drew, and I looked up from the roasting tray.

  ‘Recovered memory? What’s that?’

  ‘The brain is an extraordinary thing. It takes in a huge amount of information every day. The mind can’t cope with it all at once, so it files it away. Those details you talk about, Sophie, usually turn out to have been in a play heard on the radio, or read in a book, that the person has long forgotten. Or they remember a place they think they’ve been to before, but in fact were taken as a small child.’

  Was that why York was so familiar? I wondered. Was it possible that my parents had brought me here, before Lucy ever thought about moving to York? My father had remarried and was living in New Zealand. I could email and ask him. He might remember.

  ‘If you think about it,’ said Drew, ‘the mind’s capacity to recall details it learnt years ago is just as incredible as the idea of reliving a past life.’

  I could see that Sophie wasn’t impressed by that argument, but I was ready to be convinced. It did make sense. A lot more sense than messages circulating through time. I could easily have seen a film or a television programme set in Elizabethan York featuring a maidservant called Hawise and a missing child called Bess. I’d obviously just forgotten about it.

  What about the apples? Doubt niggled in my mind, but I brushed it aside. Lucy had had a fondness for apples and had left them in odd places around the house – that was all.

  ‘That was a lot better than anything I could ever cook,’ said Drew later. He tipped the dregs of the bottle into my glass. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to give up teaching English and come and cook for us instead?’

  ‘Oh, yes, please,’ said Sophie with such a heartfelt look that I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Dad’s so crap at cooking. He even makes a mess of ready-made meals.’

  ‘Hey!’ Drew hooked an arm around her neck and rubbed her hair until she squealed. ‘I’m not that bad.’

  I liked seeing Sophie lose her sullenness. ‘I love cooking,’ I said, resting my arms on the table, while she made a big to-do about straightening her hair. She was smiling, though. ‘In my next life I’ll be a chef, I think.’

  ‘Why not in this one?’

  ‘Oh . . . because having a restaurant of your own means settling down, and I don’t do that. My feet are too itchy.’

  Drew tipped back in his chair and regarded me thoughtfully. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of travelling?’

  ‘Honestly? Sometimes,’ I said, ‘but when I think about stopping, about making a home and acquiring more stuff than I can carry, I get all panicky.’

  ‘So you won’t be staying in York?’ Sophie looked disappointed.

  ‘No,’ I said after a tiny pause. ‘Just until I’ve sold Lucy’s house.’

  Sophie looked at me, then at her father. ‘Pity,’ she said.

  I didn’t want to leave, but we’d drunk the wine and cleared up. Sophie went upstairs to do her homework. ‘Fancy some coffee?’ Drew asked.

  I really wanted to say yes. I wanted to sit on at his table, listening to him talk about
his research and watching his face, but because I wanted it so badly, I said no.

  There was no point in getting involved. Getting involved meant getting close and talking about your emotions and sharing how you felt. The very idea of it seemed like standing on the edge of a crumbling cliff. The moment I felt the urge to look over the top and see what it would be like, I would scuttle backwards.

  I said an abrupt goodbye and told myself I’d made the right decision, but when I got back to Lucy’s house I couldn’t settle. At Drew’s I had been relaxed, but the moment I walked through the door of Lucy’s house my nerves started jangling.

  I kept thinking about Vivien Price and the look in her eyes. There is violence here, and hate and fear.

  Irritably I pushed the memory away. Vivien was just playing up to her priestess role. Drew was right – those hallucinations were simply recovered memory, a private rerunning of some film I had once seen and had forgotten. Nothing else made sense.

  I drew the curtains against the dreary night. It was cold, but not cold enough to put the heating on, so I lit the candles on the mantelpiece to make the room look cosy. I wanted company, but when I opened the laptop and tried to Skype Mel, the screen kept going blank and the connection would cut. I tried switching it on and off a couple of times, but it didn’t make any difference, and in the end I gave up and threw myself back on the sofa. Holding onto my pendant, I stared morosely at the candle flames as they dipped and swayed in a perfect synchronized dance with their reflections.

  The spell of fine weather has broken at last. It is warm still, but it has been raining for three days and the hall is dark and gloomy as I carry a jug of spiced wine through to the parlour. This is my favourite room, especially like it is now, when it is ablaze with the best wax candles, and I pause in the doorway, my eye caught by their flickering light. I love the rich colours of the carpets on the cupboards, of the embroidered silk cushions and the painted cloths hanging against the wainscot. They make the room cheerful even on an evening like this. There is a flowerpot full of daisies on the cupboard under the window, and the silver plate on the other chest gleams in the candlelight.

  It’s not nearly cold enough for a fire, but Mr Beckwith and his guests are clustered in front of the empty fireplace, as if wishing they could lift their robes and warm their backsides as they do in the winter.

  The jug in my hand jerks in surprise when I see my father standing there with Mr Hilliard, and the warm wine slops over the rim onto the rushes. My mistress is sitting on the turned chair and she sucks in her teeth at my carelessness. Biting my lip, I carry the jug over to the table where the goblets are waiting.

  Mr Beckwith, a choleric man, is holding forth about his favourite topic of the moment, the worrying increase in the number of carriages trying to enter the city.

  ‘The world runs on wheels these days,’ he grumbles as I pour the wine. ‘I saw it in London and now it’s the same here. Any upstart, it seems, can set himself up as a gentleman and ride in a carriage, though his parents were glad to go on foot. And what is the result?’ he demands, taking the goblet that I hand him with a grunt of acknowledgement. ‘The pavement ruined by carriage wheels, and we have to knock down our stalls and posts so they can pass!’

  I have heard all this before. I suspect Ned Hilliard has too, but he is listening courteously and saying little, as is his wont. Standing next to my father, the contrast between the two men is startling. Mr Hilliard is serious and quiet-faced, while my father is swaying slightly and has a bibulous nose and resentful eyes. Mr Hilliard looks sober and discreet in his velvet gown, while my father’s padded doublet is stained and the band at his neck is distinctly grubby. He is making no attempt to hide his boredom at my master’s discourse, but he manages a smile for me as I bob a curtsey and hand him his wine.

  Mr Beckwith has a red, meaty face like the slabs of beef that hang in the Shambles. ‘Where will it end?’ he asks. ‘They’ll be asking us to knock down the bar walls next! Change with the times, they say . . . ’ He snorts. ‘In my day, I thought myself lucky to have a horse!’

  I would never have thought my mistress had anything at all in common with my father, but like him she is doing a poor job of containing her impatience.

  ‘Indeed, Husband, but perhaps we can get back to the matter in hand?’ she says, tight-voiced.

  The jug is almost empty. I will go and warm some more wine, but as I turn for the door, Mistress Beckwith gets to her feet and beckons to me.

  ‘Leave that, Hawise, and come here. We have been talking about you.’

  ‘Me?’ I gape at her until she frowns at me. Recollecting myself, I set the jug on the table and fold my hands at my waist.

  ‘Yes, Mistress,’ I try again, eyes demurely downcast.

  ‘We have been discussing your marriage, Daughter,’ my father says.

  ‘Marriage?’ I can’t help it. Certain that I must have misheard him, my eyes fly back up to meet his. I wonder if he is mocking me, but he has his thumbs stuck in his belt and is regarding me with a mixture of complacency and speculation as he rocks back on his heels. ‘Marriage?’ I say again in disbelief. There is no money, I know that, and who would take me without a dowry?

  There is only one person I can imagine who would want me, and the sudden sinking of my heart tells me everything I need to know about what I feel for Francis Bewley.

  My mind works feverishly. Surely Francis hasn’t taken matters into his own hands and sought out my father?

  I was flushed and breathless by the time I met Francis that first day, and shy once I had finished apologizing.

  He wasn’t as handsome or as charming as I had let myself remember. He was stouter, and shorter, but the sleekness was the same. There is something strange about his eyes too. They are shiny like a mirror, so that you can’t see anything when you look into them.

  After an awkward pause we agreed to go into the orchard and sat together under the apple tree. Hap didn’t like it. He kept snarling at Francis. In the end I made him sit on my other side, and I put my hand on him to keep him still, but I could feel him vibrating with tension. Every now and then he let out a low, warning growl, which didn’t help the atmosphere.

  I was disappointed, I admit it. I didn’t think it would be like that. There was an intensity about Francis that made me uneasy.

  ‘I’d better go,’ I said at last, and got to my feet, brushing down my skirts. ‘My mistress will wonder where I am.’

  Francis was on his feet too. ‘Say you’ll come again.’ He tried to take my hand, and Hap leapt for his arm with a snarl. Francis snatched it out of the way just in time, but I saw something shift in his eyes at last.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I stammered. ‘He’s not usually this protective.’

  ‘Leave him behind next time, hmm?’ Francis recovered his composure quickly and was smiling once more.

  I hesitated. Our meeting hadn’t been as exciting as I had imagined, but how much of that was Hap’s fault? Perhaps, I thought hopefully, it would be better next time, when we would be more comfortable together.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Next time I’ll come alone.’

  I did, but it wasn’t much better, although Francis kissed me when I was leaving.

  That wasn’t what I was hoping for, either. His lips were moist and very red, and it was over so soon that I scarcely had time to think that I was being kissed at last, before Francis had lifted his head and was begging my pardon. It wasn’t awful, it just didn’t make me want to smile, the way Alice had smiled when told me she and John Wightman were betrothed and had done it.

  But what do I know? Perhaps Francis was disappointed in me. I have so little experience, I don’t know what I am supposed to do. I assumed that it was my fault. If I had a bit more experience, I would know how to make him kiss me again, perhaps.

  The trouble is that I don’t really want him to kiss me. I realize that now. I don’t want him as my sweetheart. I wanted him to tell me about London, I wanted him to make me laugh and g
asp with stories of the places he had seen and the things he had done, but he just talked about himself instead. I wanted a friend.

  I was reluctant to go back for a third meeting, but Francis was so insistent, and I didn’t know how to refuse. I told myself that he would be going back to London, and that would save me from saying anything. Sick or not, surely his master must return soon?

  I have to face it: I was a fool. I wanted a sweetheart, and when Francis showed an interest in me, I thought it could be him. I made him up, and it turned out that he is not the way I invented him at all. My mistake.

  He is full of bombast, as puffed up as his doublet, and his stories make me uneasy. They don’t quite match up. Once he said that his master was cruel, the next time that he was sick and like to die, and had promised to bequeath Francis all his goods.

  ‘Then I will be able to marry,’ he said the last time we met, and he looked at me meaningfully.

  What if he has spoken to my father, to my master, already? And what if they have said yes?

  My throat is dry. ‘Marriage?’ I say again now, and my voice is thin and scratchy. ‘Who with?’

  There is an awkward pause. I see my father look to his right. My mistress smiles and inclines her head in the same direction. Still uncomprehending, I follow their gazes to where Edward Hilliard is standing next to my master. He meets my eyes gravely as my jaw sags.

  ‘If you are willing,’ he says.

  ‘Say I wanted to find out if someone existed in the past,’ I said to Drew, carefully casual. ‘How would I go about it?’

  My bare feet were tucked up beneath me as I balanced a glass of Pinot Grigio on the arm of a chair in his study. We had met at our front gates. I was laden with books, he with Sainsbury’s bags.

  ‘You look tired,’ Drew said.

  ‘I teach until seven on Tuesdays. It’s always a long day.’

  I didn’t tell him how badly I was sleeping. I was tense when I went to bed, afraid that if I gave up consciousness, Hawise would be back. I kept dropping off, then jerking myself awake, heart pounding with relief to find myself still in the twenty-first century.