Time's Echo

by Pamela Hartshorne

  I swallowed and eased myself further away. ‘I saw Sophie today,’ I said, to distract myself.

  I told Drew about Ash and Mara, and he pulled his mouth down at the corners. ‘I didn’t like Ash,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t anything he said or did. I just felt that he was . . . dangerous.’

  Drew sighed and rubbed a hand over his face in a gesture that was already unsettlingly familiar. ‘I know what you mean. I never trusted him. Ash was the sort of student who would cheat, but get away with it. Nasty things happen around them, but somehow it’s never their fault. I wouldn’t be surprised myself if he was a sociopath,’ he said as he took a sip of his beer. ‘But you can’t go around making allegations like that against students without proof.’

  Realizing that I was watching the muscles work in his throat, I tore my gaze away. ‘What does that mean exactly, a sociopath?’

  ‘Sociopaths can be superficially charming, but in fact they’re manipulative and cold,’ said Drew. ‘They’ve got no empathy and are often pathological liars.’

  ‘Did Sarah tell you that?’ I moved my glass around the table, making patterns with the wet rings that it left on the wood. I felt crabby in a way I couldn’t quite analyse.

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact. I talked to her about Ash when Sophie first met him. She thinks he fits the profile perfectly.’

  Oh, well, if Sarah thought it, it must be right. I was beginning to irritate myself with the wet glass. I pushed it away with a scowl.

  ‘Apparently sociopaths have a grandiose sense of self, and a disproportionate belief in their own abilities,’ Drew went on. ‘Sarah said they’re often driven by a deep-seated anger, which means they see other people as tools to be used for their own ends. They feel no remorse for their actions, she said. The only thing that matters to a sociopath is getting his or her own way. They don’t care what anyone else thinks or feels.’

  It sounded a perfect description of Francis.

  ‘But unless they commit a crime, there’s nothing you can do,’ Drew said. ‘You can’t arrest someone for being selfish and manipulative, more’s the pity.’

  ‘I can see why you’re so worried about Sophie,’ I said.

  ‘I’m just hoping she’ll get bored, or see through all the hocus-pocus eventually. She’s a bright kid – but then my mother was clever too,’ he said, and although he spoke lightly I could hear the bitterness running as deep as a tide. ‘Not that it did her much good. All those brains and she still couldn’t see what was right in front of her. She didn’t like the real, my mother. Where was the fun, where was the magic, in caring for your family? In washing socks and cooking meals and talking to teachers?’

  He stopped, clearly afraid that he had revealed too much. I watched him pick up his beer and drink, and although I tried not to look, I couldn’t help noticing the strength of his hand around the glass. I could see the creases in his finger joints, the bumpiness of his knuckles, the broad wrists and the flat hairs beneath his watch, and I found myself remembering Ned again, and the warmth of his hands on my skin.

  Swallowing, I looked away.

  ‘Do you think that’s why you became a historian? So that you could fix on the real – things you could prove and back up with evidence?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said slowly. ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that before, but . . . yes, perhaps.’

  I picked up my beer mat and began refining the patterns I’d made with the bottom of my glass. I drew the edge of the mat through the wet rings, pulling out the circles and pushing the droplets in different directions. I was thinking about evidence, and how I might find out whatever it was that Hawise was so anxious to know. Perhaps if I did that, I could go back to my ordinary life.

  Whatever that was – it was hard to remember when life had been ordinary.

  ‘You know those records you’re using? The ones about ordinary people mending streets and stuff?’

  I could tell by Drew’s pained expression that he was unimpressed by my grasp of his research. ‘The wardmote-court returns?’

  ‘Yes.’ I wasn’t going to tell him that I knew all about the wardmotes. I remembered the jurors setting off to inspect the wards, the grumbles in the street, the abuse (not all of it good-natured) as they noted blocked gutters and potholes or heard complaints about noisy neighbours. ‘I wondered if I could look at them sometime,’ I said, super-casual, but Drew’s brows drew together.

  ‘Is this still about the servant you wanted to track down? What did you call her?’

  ‘Hawise.’

  I wished I’d never said anything to Drew about what I was experiencing. If I hadn’t been so shaken by Francis’s attempted rape, I wouldn’t have told him what had happened, but it was too late to take it back now.

  ‘I thought Sarah had explained all that as post-traumatic stress disorder?’

  ‘She did.’ It was easier to let him believe that was all it was. He would never accept the idea of possession, I knew. ‘I’m just interested. I wanted to put some names into your database and see if any of them come up.’

  I’ve never been very good at flirting, but I wanted to distract Drew from asking too many questions. I looked him straight in the eyes and gave him my most winning smile. ‘Would you mind?’

  There was a tiny pause. Drew’s eyes dropped briefly to my mouth and then he was looking back at me, and even though his expression was unreadable, I felt the colour swoosh up into my face.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t mind,’ he said.

  ‘Great!’ I was mortified at the strangled sound of my own voice. I cleared my throat. ‘When would suit you?’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Sure. Why not?’ My heart was pounding ridiculously.

  Drew drained his beer and set his glass back on the table. ‘Drink up then,’ he said.

  I had to hug my arms together when we left the pub, frightened that if I didn’t, my hands would take on a life of their own. I was lfustered by how badly I wanted to touch Drew. It was a long time since I felt that jab of lust, that twitchy craving to press skin against skin, to feel that aching slide of bone and muscle.

  It was just because I’d been thinking of Ned earlier, I tried to excuse myself. With Hawise’s memories running through my head like a private erotic show, it wasn’t surprising that I was muddling the two men up. Drew and Ned didn’t look alike, but they had the same contained air, the same cool mouths, the same capable hands.

  Drew was talking as we headed back to Monk Bar, but I hardly heard him. I couldn’t think clearly. I was dizzy with lust, fizzy with it. I was like a balloon tethered by a single strand, billowing up, ready to float out of control. I kept telling myself that it was wrong – that he was wrong – but it didn’t do any good. I couldn’t drag my eyes from his mouth, his hands. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like to spread my hands over his shoulders, to press my lips to the pulse that beat in his throat and breathe in the scent of his skin.

  Who are you going to see the film with? The words hovered on my tongue, but I swallowed them. I didn’t want to know the answer. I didn’t want him to wonder why I cared.

  It was just the mood I was in, I told myself, with an edge of desperation. I’d been like this all day, ever since Vivien had given me the amulet that pressed hot against my skin. I just wanted to anchor myself in the present – that was all it was.

  I tried thinking about Drew as a small boy instead, hoping that it would sober me up. I’d hardly drunk anything, but I was reeling with lust and needed to give myself a mental slap in the face. What had it been like for him to realize that his mother didn’t care about him? I made myself wonder, while we waited for the pedestrian-crossing lights outside the bar. How could she have left him like that?

  I was just trying to distract myself, but at that thought a wave of desolation barrelled out of nowhere and smashed through me, pushing the air from my lungs and making me suck in a breath at the misery of it. I knew straight away what was happening, but I didn’t want to slip back to Hawise in
front of Drew. Desperately I dug my fingers into my arms, hoping the pain would keep me fixed in the present. My knuckles were white, I remember that, and I remember thinking that if I were lucky enough to conceive, I would never abandon my child. Never.

  ‘Hello?’ The Widow Dent’s cottage looks just as it did a year ago. I am drawn to it and repelled at the same time. It stands in the clearing, misshapen and leaning, as old and bent as the widow herself. It is barely a hovel, and yet it seems to me that this place resonates with a power greater than the Common Hall, greater even than the Lord President’s place where they do the Queen’s business. The air is shiftier here, the silence deeper. There is a thudding in my ears.

  The door is ajar, but I do not dare push it open and step inside. My knuckles are white against the handle of my basket, and I make myself relax my grip. Shifting the basket to my other arm, I call again.

  ‘No need to shout.’

  Sybil’s voice behind me makes my heart lurch, and I spin round, clutching my throat. I have been straining for a sound in the silence. How could she have come up right behind me without me hearing her? Unless she appeared by magic. My mouth dries.

  What am I doing here? This is no place for a young wife. But I want a child, and I can’t think of anywhere else to go.

  I didn’t think it would be as hard as this. I conceived not long after Francis and Agnes’s wedding, and for a while I was so happy I didn’t even mind about Francis any more. Even Agnes seemed pleased when I told her of my conviction that I was with child. We grew closer, and for a while it was how I always imagined it would be: two sisters, both wed, talking about women’s business. I told Agnes even before I told Ned. I wanted to be sure, before I got his hopes up. And Agnes was kinder than she has ever been. She made me rest and brewed special possets to make the baby strong, which she made me drink, scolding me when I made a face at the taste.

  And then one day, just after I whispered the truth to Ned, I started to bleed. I was with Agnes when the cramps hit me, wrenching and racking and jerking at my belly, turning my body inside out until I hollered like a beast.

  Ned was in London, and Agnes was all I had. She let me hang onto her hand, and she prayed for me, and she stayed with me until the desolate end. I was grateful to her for that.

  Dear God, the pain was terrible, but I fought it all the way. I wanted that baby. But the screaming didn’t help, and the prayers didn’t help, and the yearning and the hoping didn’t help, either. A last desperate convulsion and through a red haze I felt my child slip out of me and away, leaving me with only loss and loneliness.

  I turned my face into the pillow while Agnes dealt with everything. She sent the maids for rags and hot water, and she cleared up the mess which was all that was left of my baby. ‘It is God’s will, Sister,’ she said, smoothing the sheet down around me. ‘There will be other chances.’

  My eyelids were leaden with grief. I didn’t want other chances, I wished I could shout. I wanted that baby. But I couldn’t say that to Agnes, who had stayed by my side. All I could do was thank her. My head was so heavy on the pillow that it was a huge effort to move it, but I made myself turn, only to surprise an expression in her eyes – a gleam of something I couldn’t read, something elusively familiar.

  A blink later and the look was gone. I might have imagined it. I probably did. My mind was clouded with pain and grief. But sometimes the memory is like a sliver of ice in my head, and I puzzle over what it was and what it meant. Then the other day I watched John Acclam’s mastiff chase a tomcat across the street. Swarming up a wall, the tom stopped to wash its paws, and the look it gave the raging dog below was replete with insolence and something that reminded me of the way Agnes looked that day: satisfaction.

  I must be wrong.

  There has not been another baby. ‘Give it time,’ says Ned, even though I know he longs for a child as much as I do. Agnes hasn’t conceived, either. When I asked her if she yearns for a baby in the same way, a strange look crossed her face.

  ‘I have Francis,’ she said, as if that is an answer.

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘You should not talk of such things, Hawise,’ she said curtly. ‘It is not seemly. Whether we conceive or no is God’s will.’

  Perhaps she is right. Margery and the maids didn’t know that I was with child, although I dare say they guessed. They will have heard my groans, will have seen the bloody rags, but no one ever says anything. It makes me feel as if have done something shameful, but how can it be shame to grieve for a babe lost?

  So I keep it balled up inside me, the sadness and the longing, like a knot of brambles, and I hold myself very carefully. I don’t cry and weep and wail. That would mean letting go, and even breathing too deep catches me on the thorns of my pain, tearing at me and making me flinch. I breathe shallowly and I don’t look inside or try to untangle it; and then the sadness recedes to a constant dull ache of emptiness and loss and I can live with that.

  My breath hangs in the iron-grey air as I stare at the cottage. The ground beneath my clogs is rigid and bumpy with ice, and my hands are very cold. It has been more than a year since Ned and I were wed. The neighbours, I know, suck in their teeth when they talk about me, and shake their heads at Ned’s foolishness in marrying me. I should have given Ned a son by now. There are mutterings about curses, about how they always knew that I was no fit wife for him.

  Agnes says I should ignore them. She is being very solicitous, and brings me her special spiced mead every day, which I drink obediently. I don’t really like it – it has a sour aftertaste – but she is eager to help and I don’t want to hurt her feelings by refusing, not now that we have grown closer.

  She and Francis live just around the corner now. My father, God rest his soul, died suddenly just after Lammas. He left everything he had to Agnes. What need had I of anything, with my rich husband? Francis argued. It is true that I lack for nothing, but I would have liked a keepsake.

  Francis sold the house in Hungate and bought one in Jubbergate. It grates with him, I can tell, that he cannot afford a house like Ned’s, but he has not done badly all the same. In a little over a year he has gone from a notary’s assistant to a man of property with connections to one of the wealthiest men of the city. Sometimes I remember how coldly he spoke of his master – I will see to him – and I think of how unexpectedly my father died, but there is no one I can share my fears with. To the rest of the world Francis is a godly man with a respectable wife, welcome in the neighbourhood.

  Unlike me.

  But it doesn’t matter what the neighbours say. Agnes is right. I can ignore them, but I cannot ignore the ache inside me. It will never go away until I hold my own baby in my arms.

  I have been patient, I have prayed, to no avail. Now I will see if Sybil can help.

  I didn’t tell Agnes I was coming. I don’t know why. I opened my mouth to ask if she wanted to come with me, but then I shut it again. Agnes will tell Francis, and I don’t want him to know. I have accepted that I cannot change the fact that he and Agnes are married, but I avoid him as much as I can. Agnes seems happy enough. Sometimes I wonder if I imagined what he said to me at their wedding. He has said nothing since, but still, I do not want to meet him out here again. I may have accepted his marriage, but I have not forgotten what he did to me, and what he did to Hap.

  ‘Come in then, as you’re here,’ says Sybil and pushes past me into the cottage. Inside it is as clean as I remembered.

  ‘This is for you.’ I hand over the basket of food I have made up: a pie, some cheese, a loaf of bread.

  The widow pulls back the cloth and inspects my offering before grunting in acknowledgement. She puts the food on the table and jerks her head at a stool.

  I sit obediently. The cat, Mog, appears and rubs her head against my skirts. Now that I am inside, I wonder why I was afraid. It is strangely restful in the dim light, just sitting and stroking the cat while the widow moves purposefully around, pulling dried herbs from the bunches that ha
ng from the ceiling and whose scent mingles with the woody smell of leaves and earth.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask at last.

  ‘Making you what you came for.’

  My hand stills on Mog’s fur. ‘How do you know what it is that I want?’ I say, and she snorts.

  ‘You want a child.’ Her strange eyes gleam at me. ‘What woman doesn’t?’

  It cannot be so hard to guess, after all. I moisten my lips. ‘Can you help me?’

  ‘Can’t promise,’ she says, ‘but this will make it easier for the baby to take hold.’

  ‘What is that?’ I’m not sure whether I really want to know the answer or not.

  ‘Nothing you couldn’t find yourself if you knew where to look.’

  Intrigued, I get up from the stool and go over to where she is picking over the herbs.

  ‘Nettles.’ I recognize one plant at least. ‘And this one?’ I ask, pointing.

  ‘Blossom of red clover,’ Sybil grunts.

  I lift a third bunch to my nose and sniff. The smell is familiar, but I can’t place it. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Raspberry leaves.’

  ‘Of course.’ I should have known that one. Mistress Beckwith made many of her own simple remedies, as I do in my kitchen, and raspberries have many uses.

  Sybil shakes the herbs into a square of old paper, mutters an incantation over it and twists it up with surprisingly deft fingers, for one so gnarled.

  ‘Make an infusion of this, and drink every day, but you must do it yourself. Drink nothing prepared by anyone else.’

  ‘My sister has been making me a drink that she says will help.’

  ‘And has it?’

  ‘No,’ I say slowly, ‘not yet.’

  ‘Drink hers or drink mine.’ The widow shrugs indifferently.

  I rise slowly to my feet, the twist in my hands. The thought of Agnes’s drink niggles in my brain. It hasn’t helped. But I cannot let myself believe that it has done more than that.

  I find a coin in my purse and give it to Sybil, who examines it carefully and nods. ‘Thank you,’ I say and then hesitate. ‘Will you be all right? There is much muttering in the city about witchcraft. Janet Walker was taken for trial the other day, and Mary Thomas too. They say that the city is rife with witches.’