Why couldn’t I stop thinking? After the tsunami I’d been able to shut down any thoughts I didn’t want. I put them in a box and didn’t look at them. I didn’t want to rehash the experience endlessly. What was the point in that? It was over. Sometimes, it was true, a memory would prod at the edge of my consciousness and my throat would close with apprehension, but I learnt to deal with the fear. The moment I felt myself start to remember, I would stop. I made myself breathe through it, deliberately blanking my mind until the memory subsided back into the darkness. I was good at it.
But lying there in Lucy’s bath, the thought of Francis felt too raw and too vicious to be pushed away easily. Still, I tried. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes and told myself to breathe.
Don’t think, I said to myself. Just breathe.
‘Breathe,’ says the widow as I gasp and retch in the grass. ‘Don’t think about what happened. Don’t think about anything. Just breathe.’
Her voice is strong and I do as I am told, closing my eyes and closing my mind to Francis, and concentrating instead on breathing laboriously – in and out, in and out – until the panic recedes and the awful tightness in my chest begins to relax. I have the strangest feeling that I have done this before, but how could I have done? I have never felt this fear and disgust before, this realization that, for Francis Bewley, I am not a person. I am not Hawise. I am just a thing.
I look up at Sybil Dent with a mixture of fear and gratitude. She must be a witch. I saw with my own eyes what she did to Francis, but if she hadn’t been there I would have been lost.
Trembling, I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. ‘Thank you.’
‘Are you hurt?’
I realize that my wrists are bleeding and that I’m scratched and bruised. My cheek is aching, and when I touch my throbbing mouth, my fingers come away bloody. Francis’s ring must have cut me.
‘Less than I would have been if you hadn’t come along,’ I say.
She nods. ‘You can’t go back like that. Can you get up?’
My legs are shaking so much I can barely stand, but I haul myself up using the tree for support. Shaking off the pieces of crushed apple staining my skirt, I pull my sleeves back into place as well as I can.
The widow studies me with those strange eyes that seem to know everything about me without me saying a word. ‘Come,’ she says in her odd, abrupt manner, and turns to shuffle off.
I am afraid to follow her, but afraid not to, and after a moment I follow her to her cottage. It’s a lonely place, tucked amongst some trees beyond the crofts, and I can’t help remembering all the stories I’ve heard about witches. Will she make me serve the Devil? I am trembling all over, but right now I think I would prefer Satan himself to Francis Bewley. I can hardly believe how quickly he changed, and when I think about the viciousness in his expression, I could almost believe he was the Devil.
I hesitate in the doorway of the cottage. It’s a single room, dark and smoky, with just a rough plank table, a couple of stools and a pallet of straw, but the mud floor is swept and tidy.
At a gesture from the widow, I sink down on one of the stools and she fetches a bowl of water with some herbs floating in it: lady’s mantle, mint, pennyroyal and rosemary. It smells good, it smells clean, the way rosemary always does, and it comforts me.
The widow’s gnarled hands are gentle, a strange contrast to her manner, as she sponges the blood from my hands and face. Afterwards she helps me retie my sleeves and brings me some spiced ale. I drink it under the unblinking yellow gaze of a cat with dark, striking markings.
She is a beautiful creature, and I rub my fingers to beckon her, the way I do to Hap sometimes. After a moment’s consideration she comes and inclines her head to let me scratch her chin.
The widow watches me as the cat strops herself against my skirts and I stroke her soft fur. ‘What is her name?’ I ask.
‘Mog.’
‘She is very fine.’
‘So she thinks.’ The widow’s unnerving gaze rests on my face. ‘You’re not frightened of her.’
I shake my head. ‘I like cats.’ Then I pause, wondering if she is trying to tell me that Mog is her familiar. ‘She’s not . . . ’
Widow Dent smiles mirthlessly. ‘She’s just a cat,’ she says, reading my mind without difficulty. ‘Though there’s many as would say different.’
I bite my lip. ‘I am afraid Francis might try and do you some mischief, if he can.’
‘He won’t be the first to try. What were you doing with a man like that, girl?’
‘I didn’t know he was like that.’ I keep my eyes on the cat, which is purring now as I run my hand rhythmically along her spine and up to the end of her tail. ‘I was a fool.’
‘You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last.’
The widow is shuffling around the little room, poking the fire and stirring a set of little pots that are lined up on the table. I watch her curiously. This isn’t how I expected a witch’s house to look. I expected demonic figures lurking in the shadows, toads and birds, and piles of terrible entrails. Only the cat, vibrating throatily at every stroke, is as it should be. Widow Dent moves around her home just like my mistress in her dairy.
‘Are you really a witch?’ I blurt out before I realize what I am saying, and she turns a beady look on me.
‘What do you think, girl?’
‘I think,’ I say slowly, ‘that you would be wise not to say.’ I hesitate. ‘But if you were a witch, would you . . . could you make me a spell?’
‘If I was, that would depend, wouldn’t it?’
‘I am frightened of what Francis will do now,’ I tell her. ‘I thought perhaps you could cast a spell to make him forget.’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing I could do would work on one such as him.’
‘But you made his . . . his thing disappear. I saw it!’
‘That wasn’t me. That was his fear, and his body. You want to change what’s in his head.’ She tapped her hood. ‘There are some as aren’t put together in the head the same as the rest of us, and he’s one. He can only see one thing, and if that one thing is you, you’ll have to be careful. I can give you a potion to help heal those cuts,’ she said, nodding at my wrists, ‘but a man like that – no, there’s a wrongness to him. I’m not powerful enough to change that. Ask your priest and see if God can change him. The Devil wouldn’t want to.’
The cut on my face throbs as I make my way unsteadily along the paths to Monk Bar. I will have to find some way to explain it, but I can’t think about anything but the shame roiling in my belly.
It hurts to walk, but somehow I keep my shoulders back and my spine straight. My thighs are bruised where he forced them apart with his knees, and the privy place between my legs is sore, but worse is the way I can still feel his tongue pushing into my mouth, still feel his hands on me and the scrape of bark against my back as he pushed me against the tree. My gown is stained with grass, and the stench of rotten apples that clings to it is making me feel sick. I want to tear the dress off and scour my skin until my hands are as red and as rough as the laundresses in St George’s Field. I want to beat and bleach everywhere he touched me – the way they beat and bleach the linen until it is clean.
I am not sure I will ever feel clean again.
The clang of the Minster bell rings out over the crofts and garths. I lift my skirts higher and try to hurry. I am late, and Mistress Beckwith will frown and want to know where I have been, why my bodice is stained and split. I cannot tell her the truth: that I am shamed.
And it is all my own fault.
The bell clangs insistently on, louder and louder, until the ringing fills my head and presses against the back of my eyes. Wincing at the pain, I lift my hands to my temples, only to see my fingers turning white and grotesquely wrinkled in front of my eyes, and horror sends my heart lurching into my throat and pushes out a scream.
Screaming, I jerked upright, sending water sloshing over the edge of the bath. The h
ot-water tap was still running, straight into the overflow. Shakily I leant forward to turn it off and reached for the plug.
Somehow I managed to get out of the bath and wrap myself in a towel. I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth as I slid to the floor and dropped my head between my knees. My hair dripped down my neck and I was shaking. The Minster bells were still ringing in my head, on and on. Why wouldn’t they stop?
I don’t remember at what point I realized that the ringing came from the doorbell. I tried to ignore it, burying my head under my arms, but whoever was there had their finger on the bell and clearly had no intention of going away, and in the end I struggled to my feet. I was aching all over, and it was all I could do to make it to the front door. Clutching the towel around me, I put it on the safety chain and opened it a crack.
‘Who is it?’ I croaked.
‘It’s me, Drew. Open your door! I’ve been knocking and knocking. There’s water pouring down my kitchen wall and you’ve been screaming . . . What’s going on in there?’
I didn’t understand what he was talking about. ‘Water?’ I repeated blankly.
‘For Christ’s sake, Grace, hurry up!’
Still dazed, I managed to get the door open. Drew stepped inside and I shrank back, remembering Francis, remembering what an angry man could do to me.
‘Is that tap still running?’ He was about to push past me to the bathroom when he caught sight of my face and stopped in shock. ‘Jesus, what happened to you?’
Disorientated, I could do little more than stare at him. ‘What . . . ?’
‘Your face . . . ’
My mouth was sore, I realized, and I lifted a hand to it.
‘Grace, what’s happened?’ said Drew in concern, but I didn’t answer him. I turned to look into the mirror above the narrow hall stand. My cheek was bruised and swollen, my lip bleeding where Francis’s ring had split it.
There was a great roaring in my head then. My eyes rolled up, and for the first time in my life I fainted dead away.
‘Drink that.’ Drew thrust a glass into my hand, and it rattled against my teeth as I lifted it obediently to my mouth. I was wrapped in Sophie’s bathrobe, a silky purple affair emblazoned with moons and stars, and sitting on Drew’s sofa, doing my best to stop shaking.
Drew sat down opposite me. I noticed he had poured himself a stiff brandy too. He probably needed it, after dealing with a flooded kitchen and a naked, bleeding neighbour who had passed out at the sight of her own face. He hadn’t been quick enough to catch me as I fell, and I had a nasty graze on my forehead where I had smashed into the radiator on my way down. My head was thumping, my body battered and bruised, and my mind was swirling frantically between that terrible scene in the orchard, the disgusting stench of apples in the bath and the sick realization that I had lost control.
The brandy burnt my throat and settled steadyingly in my stomach.
‘Can you talk about it yet?’ Drew was watching me, a furrow of anxiety between his brows. ‘Did someone attack you?’
In spite of myself, I flinched at the memory of Francis’s jabbing fingers. Of the brutal flat of his hand, the smothering weight of his body, the revolting thrust of his tongue. If Widow Dent hadn’t come, he would have raped me there amongst the rotting apples.
My horror must have shown in my expression. ‘I think we should call the police,’ said Drew gently.
I shook my head as he made to reach for his phone. ‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s no point.’
‘But you’re hurt. They can stop whoever it is doing this to someone else.’
I almost laughed. ‘They won’t be able to stop Francis, that’s for sure.’
‘Francis?’ His brows snapped together. ‘Is this someone you know?’
How did I answer that? I took another slug of brandy. ‘In a way.’
‘There’ll be evidence.’ Drew was still convinced that we should call the police.
I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t even begin to imagine trying to explain Hawise to a stolid policeman, but I couldn’t cope by myself any more, either.
‘I’m frightened.’ The words were out before I could stop them. I leant forward and put my glass very carefully on the coffee table in front of me. ‘Something’s happening to me.’
‘I can see that, Grace. Who is it? Who’s doing this to you?’
‘You won’t believe me.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
So I did. I told him everything, right up until the overflow pipe had leaked into his kitchen, sending him storming out to bang on Lucy’s door. My appearance had shocked him out of his anger, but I could tell that he had been pretty pissed off and, when I saw the state of his kitchen wall later, I didn’t blame him.
The more I talked, the more unlikely it all sounded. Drew’s expression was unreadable, but by the time I reached that desperate scene in the orchard, I was stumbling over my words.
‘You don’t believe me,’ I said flatly at last. I had known that he wouldn’t.
‘I don’t believe you’ve been reliving the experience of someone who died hundreds of years ago, no,’ he said. ‘The past is over, Grace. We can’t recover it, we can’t change it. It’s the same for five minutes ago as for five hundred years ago. The past is past.’
‘Then how do you explain this?’ I asked, touching my puffy lip. My fingers went to the bruise that still throbbed, and I remembered the lash of Francis’s hand. ‘And this?’
Drew’s hesitation was answer enough.
‘You think I did it to myself, don’t you?’
‘You don’t think that’s a more likely explanation than you slipping between the centuries?’
Of course it was. But how could I make him understand? ‘Look, I know how it sounds,’ I said with a touch of desperation. ‘I’ve been through all the arguments myself, but it’s so real, Drew. The smells, the tastes, the textures of things – it’s not like a dream.’
‘Imagination is a very powerful thing.’
‘It’s not that powerful,’ I said shortly. ‘I don’t care what you say about recovered memory. There’s no way I could know so many details about the period just from reading some mythical book that I’ve now forgotten.’
I sat forward, cradling the glass in my hands. ‘There must be some way to check whether or not Hawise really existed.’
Drew looked tired. ‘Grace, we’ve been through this. It’s not possible. From what you’ve told me, I doubt very much you would find any trace of Hawise’ – I could practically hear him putting inverted commas around her name – ‘even if I believed that she existed.’
‘So you think she’s just in my mind?’
Drew hesitated, choosing his words carefully. ‘It’s obvious you’ve had a very strange and frightening experience,’ he began. ‘I’m not denying that for a moment, but—’
‘It’s not just me,’ I broke in, remembering the notes I had found just before I had slipped back to the orchard. ‘I think Lucy went through exactly the same thing. How can Hawise be in my head, if she was in Lucy’s too?’
‘Come on, Grace . . . ’
‘It’s true. I can prove it.’ Excited, I leapt to my feet. ‘Lucy wrote notes, all about Hawise.’
‘Grace—’
‘No, I want to show you.’ I ran back next door and up to Lucy’s study. Drew followed reluctantly. My laptop still sat on the desk, its screen blank and sullen. I scrabbled around the papers scattered around it for the page that I had seen. ‘It was here! I read it. It must be somewhere. There!’ I pounced on one of the pages that the wind had blown onto the floor. Even face-down, I recognized Lucy’s emphatic handwriting. ‘Look at that.’ I shoved it into Drew’s hand. ‘How do you explain that?’
He looked down at the page for a moment, and then his eyes lifted to mine. ‘Explain what?’
Snatching it back, I stared in disbelief. The rain through the window had splattered the page, making the ink run and turning the notes into a mass of grey blots. Where Lucy ha
d written Hawise’s name there was only a large smudge.
An unpleasant feeling uncoiled in the pit of my stomach. I looked at Drew, hating the concern in his expression. ‘It was here! She wrote it. She did.’
Drew didn’t say anything. He just took my arm and steered me back down into Lucy’s sitting room. I dropped heavily onto the sofa.
‘It was real,’ I said, but I could hear the uncertainty in my own voice.
‘You need some help, Grace.’
‘I’m not crazy!’
‘I’m not saying that you are.’ His calmness was more frightening than impatience would have been. ‘You’re the one who said you were frightened,’ he reminded me. ‘Don’t you think it would be a good idea to talk to someone qualified to deal with this kind of thing?’
‘You mean a psychiatrist?’
‘They might be able to help you.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ I said in frustration. ‘You’ve seen me. I’m a normal, functioning adult. This thing that’s happening – Hawise – it’s not in my mind. It isn’t. I’m not going to go to a doctor. Next thing I’d know I’d have a “mentally ill” label slapped on me, and no one would ever again believe anything I said. I don’t need help,’ I told Drew.
He sighed. ‘Why do I get the feeling that you say that a lot?’
‘Because it’s true,’ I said. ‘I’m thirty-two, I’m independent. I’ve dealt with worse things than this, and I can manage perfectly well by myself. I know how it must look, but I’m not making this up.’
‘And those bruises on your face? That cut?’ My eyes slid from his. ‘You’re hurting yourself, Grace. Wouldn’t it be better to get help, and face up to whatever it is that’s making you do that? I’ve got a friend,’ he went on when I said nothing. ‘A psychiatrist. I could ask her if she would talk to you, if you like. Keep it informal, without going down the GP route just yet.’
Yet. I fingered my sore lip. I was very tired, and battered by Drew’s relentless rationality. His explanation did make sense, I could see that, but he hadn’t been beaten and nearly raped under the old apple tree. I – Hawise – had been helpless then. I wasn’t going to be helpless now. I didn’t need Drew murmuring concern to his psychiatrist friend.
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