‘I’d like to be friends,’ I said. I looked at him doubtfully. ‘If you want to, of course.’
Drew put his glasses back on. He looked at me for a moment, then blew out a long breath of frustration. ‘Of course,’ he said, resigned. ‘Of course we can be friends.’
There was an awkward pause. I cleared my throat. ‘I think I left my other necklace here last night. I don’t suppose you found it?’
‘It’s by my bed. I’ll get it for you.’
He came back into the kitchen, the pendant that Vivien had given me dangling from his hand. ‘I haven’t seen you wearing this before. Is it new?’
‘It was a present.’
I got up from the stool and held out my hand for the necklace, but Drew spread the cord between his hands and slipped it round my neck, lifting my hair and smoothing it back into place. We were standing very close. I could feel the rough cord scratching at the nape of my neck, and the stone pulsing between my breasts. Drew’s hands lingered on my hair, and when he bent his head to touch my lips with his, I closed my eyes.
His palms slid round to cup my face, and for a moment I let myself lean into the solid security of his chest, let myself feel safe. Let myself remember the breathless slide of skin on skin, the heat and the hunger and the wild, wicked pleasure. Why not? I remember thinking.
Bess. The whisper was gurgled through a lungful of river water. Drew didn’t hear it, but I did. My eyes snapped open and I stepped back without thinking. Bess was why not. How could I have forgotten her?
Drew’s hands dropped. There was a questioning look in his eyes, and I felt my colour rise.
‘Friends?’ I asked. I couldn’t explain, not now.
An infinitesimal pause, then he nodded slowly. ‘Friends,’ he agreed. ‘If that’s what you want.’
The house felt very empty when I let myself back in. I wasn’t hungry, but I made myself some noodles for something to do, then pushed them listlessly around my plate. I wished I’d said yes when Drew asked if I wanted to stay, but the thought of Bess was clamouring at the back of my mind and I knew I wouldn’t be able to settle.
I thought about Skyping Mel, but I couldn’t get an Internet connection, and anyway, I knew that the moment she heard my voice, she would demand to know what was wrong. And what would I say? I miss my baby? Mel was like me. She had no interest in motherhood. She wouldn’t understand that I was aching for Bess, for a baby I had never had. For the baby I never would have. Mel would be horrified, I knew. She would tell me to get a grip and get help. And if I told her I was desperate to get back to the past, she would tell me not to be a fool.
But I wanted to see Bess again. I needed to see her, to hold her in my arms again.
Maybe I could. I thought about the time I had slipped back to Hawise’s life in Vivien’s garden. ‘Try to control her,’ Vivien had said. Maybe I didn’t need to wait for Hawise to come for me. Maybe I could go back by myself again. Take control.
The cool, clear-headed part of my brain protested that it was madness, but the longing for Bess was ballooning inside me, blotting out all rational thought. Just once, I told myself. Just to see that she was all right.
I felt calm and strangely detached as I drew the curtains in the bedroom and lit one of Lucy’s candles. Watching a candle flame had worked once before, I remembered. I would try and regress myself.
Deliberately I took off Vivien’s pendant and sat cross-legged on the floor while I tried to focus on the flame, but the harder I tried to reach the past, the more aware I became of the present. My legs were uncomfortable, a stray hair was tickling my nose, and from next door I could hear that Drew was working to music. All at once I was remembering the night before and the pleasure that had shivered through me when he smiled against my skin.
I began to feel a little foolish. Exasperated with myself, I climbed stiffly to my feet, blew out the candle and pulled the curtains back. What had I been thinking?
Outside, the golden evening light was slanting across the street. A posse of students passed below, talking and laughing, elated by the prospect of a warm summer night. I should be out enjoying it myself, not stuck in a stuffy bedroom with the curtains drawn. I opened the window and leant out to breathe in the fresh air.
‘Come away from there!’ Margery pulls me back from the window and slams it closed, turning on me with a ferocious scowl. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
The last few weeks have turned her tyrant. While I have been confined to childbed, she has been running the household again and has let everyone know it, in no uncertain terms. But her brusqueness doesn’t fool me now. I have seen her tenderness as she lifts Bess from the cradle. I know that she has made the delicacies that she plonks ungraciously on the bed especially to tempt my appetite.
It is Margery who has laboured in the kitchen to produce endless dainties to serve the gossips who have come, as is the custom, to keep me company and give me good cheer. She has grumbled mightily about it, of course, but I know she has been determined to impress the women so that they will go home and tell their husbands that Ned Hilliard has the finest house in the city.
‘Don’t you be giving them that best wine,’ she scolds Ned. ‘That parcel of busybodies’ll guzzle the barrel dry, if you let them. Why do you think they keep atrooping in?’
But she makes sure the cups are gleaming, and poor Isobel and Alison have been kept busy, running up and down the stairs with jugs of wine and plates piled high with pastries and seedcake.
For a time I was content to lie there and watch my baby while the gossips chattered over me, exchanging gruesome childbed stories, grumbling about their servants and complaining about their husbands. I was shocked and delighted to discover that these women, so modest and demure if you meet them in the street, have an earthy frankness that would startle their menfolk if they could hear how they talk of them.
When the gossips grow bawdy, Agnes gets up. ‘I am going to pray, Sister,’ she says, or ‘I have the headache, I will go and lie quietly’. There is always an uncomfortable little silence after she has gone before the cackling starts again.
I don’t mind the bawdiness. I love to listen to them laughing, but I don’t join in. I have no complaint to make of Ned. I miss him. Our chamber has been taken over by women, and there is no place for him here.
But now the gossips are gone. Today I will be purified, and tonight Ned and I will be husband and wife again.
‘It’s such a beautiful day,’ I tell Margery, who is grimly stripping the sheets from my bed. I am practically dancing around the chamber, giddy with relief that the day of my churching has come at last. ‘I can’t wait to go outside again! It’s so stuffy in here.’
‘That’s as may be, but that baby needs warmth,’ she says, yanking the coverlet aside. Margery doesn’t believe in fresh air. She thinks it’s dangerous.
‘I can’t believe a bit of sunshine will harm her!’
‘Oh, and you’d know, having had so many babies, I suppose?’ Margery snaps.
It is on the tip of my tongue to retort that I have had more than her, but I don’t want to hurt her feelings. I go over to help her instead, but she swats me away. ‘You sit down. I’ve got enough to do without you getting gripes.’
‘I haven’t had any pains,’ I protest, forgetting those long hours of giving birth to Bess. ‘I’ve been lying down long enough. I’m sick of it! I want to go out and be able to breathe again.’
Margery only sniffs. ‘Why can’t you be like your sister and sit still for a change? You should be at your prayers, not capering around the chamber.’
I should be more like Agnes, I know. She is so good, so devout, and if she doesn’t seem to care overmuch for Bess, well, I can understand that. I know how much it hurts to hold a babe when you long for one of your own. I have been lucky again. Every time I see my sister, I feel that familiar mixture of pity and guilt. No wonder she prays.
Margery is right. I should pray too, in thanks for my good fortune.
&n
bsp; It is not far to the church, but I savour every step when the time comes for me to be churched. The smells and sounds of the street beat at me as if I am in a strange country, as if I have never heard the signs creaking in the breeze; and the cries of hawkers that I have heard all my life might almost be a different language, so odd do they sound.
As we leave the courtyard I pause by the door of the apothecary shop and sniff. I can smell cloves and cinnamon and sacks of peppers. It should be familiar to me, but all at once it is as if I am standing outside myself again, marvelling at the strangeness of it all. Coney Street is athrong in the sunshine. The women sit in their doorways, minding their husbands’ stalls, while from the workshops comes banging and snipping and clattering to mingle with the sound of banter and barter. I have only been abed one month, but I stand agog. The street is colour and noise and smell. My skirts are redder than red, my gloves silkier than silk. I brush my hand over the velvet trimming of my gown, and the nap is so plush that I am certain I can feel it in every tiny loop in the pile. It is extraordinary.
The feeling fades when I go into the church. It is dim and cool, and the new pews smell of fresh wood still. Eliza Skelton is there, and Margery and Mrs Beckwith. And Agnes is there, with Francis. My joyfulness falters at the sight of him.
He shouldn’t be here. This is women’s work. But Francis is always in church nowadays, making a great show of his piety. I don’t know how he ever has time for his business, he is so busy at his devotions.
‘I have come to pray for you, Sister,’ he says, and I can tell from the approving glances of the other women that I am supposed to fall down with gratitude for the honour he does me. It is a great thing, his smile seems to suggest, for so godly a man to offer up thanks on my behalf.
‘I thank you.’ For Agnes’s sake I keep up the pretence of civility, but every time I see him, I feel Hap’s weight in my arms, I remember his tongue pushing wetly into my mouth and I shudder.
Francis has not forgotten, either. I know this as surely as I know that the cream in my dairy will curdle in the heat.
I do my best to ignore him, and move with Eliza to the front of the nave.
Head bent, I kneel and listen to the psalm. The minister’s sonorous voice rolls around the church. Sir John is a stout man, fond of good living, but he suits the church. He has the voice for it.
Together we say the Lord’s Prayer, and again it feels like the first time for me, the first time since Bess. Everything, it seems, is fresh and new because of her. The words have a meaning I never understood before.
‘Save this woman thy servant,’ says Sir John. ‘Be thou to her a strong tower.’
‘From the face of her enemy,’ we answer, and I can feel Francis’s eyes on me.
I am here to thank God for delivering me from the pain and great peril of childbirth. I am well and Bess is thriving. I am thankful. I pray fervently, asking Him to keep my daughter safe. I can bear anything as long as she is well and happy, I think.
Francis cannot touch her, I comfort myself. He cannot touch me any more. I have my husband and my daughter, and the gossips in the street have sat around my bed and treated me as one of their own. I don’t like the sly heat in his eyes, but it cannot hurt me. He cannot hurt me.
Purified by God’s grace, I rise to my feet at the end of the service. My breasts are heavy with milk, and my heart leaps at the thought of my sweet Bess. I will cradle her as she suckles, and stroke her downy head. I will kiss the tiny fist that lies against my breast and give thanks again for what I have.
I am lucky, I remind myself as I walk back down the aisle with Eliza, but barely have I thought it than I step into a pocket of cold air, and a premonition of such horror overwhelms me that I stumble. It is like a scuttle of foul water splashed over my face, like a bat’s wing wrapped tight around me. My scalp shrinks and my lungs shrivel in dread, and for a moment I cannot breathe with the terror of it.
‘Mistress Hilliard?’ Eliza’s homely face is puckered with concern. ‘What ails you? Are you sick?’
At her touch, the blackness unfurls and flaps away. I draw an unsteady breath, then another. I touch my nose, my mouth. I can breathe. The feeling has gone.
‘No, I am well,’ I manage. Over Eliza’s shoulder, my eyes meet Francis’s. Slowly he runs his tongue over his lips and he smiles. I could almost swear he knows what I felt just now, and rejoices in it. I lift my chin.
‘I am as well as I could be,’ I say, and when I give Sir John a fat purse as my offering, I know that it is true.
When I came to that day, I was still leaning out of the window. Time in the past – in Hawise’s past – seemed to be accelerated, so that when I returned to the present, it was almost always with that jarring sense of dislocation. I remember once being on a train, stopped on the track while we waited for a signal. An express blurred past so quickly that it felt as if we were moving too. Perhaps it was something to do with the eyes, or the brain, but when the last carriage passed my window and I realized that we were still stationary, I felt a great jolt, as if I had run into a wall at high speed.
That’s how it felt when I came back to the present, not slipping so much as plummeting. I ended up gasping with shock, my heart galloping in my chest. I drew my head back inside, my hands unsteady as I pulled down the sash window and let it rattle into place.
There on the narrow sill an apple balanced, decomposing into slush.
I opened the window again, took off my shoe and used it to flick the apple outside. I didn’t look where it landed. I knew it wouldn’t be there if I went outside.
The sense that time was out of joint did fade eventually. That evening it became an uncharacteristic wistfulness. Hawise was lucky, I found myself thinking. She had Bess, and she had Ned. No doubt, for Hawise; no wondering if Ned would go or stay. He was hers, and she was his, and there was nothing more to think about.
Nothing could be that certain in the present.
Anyway I didn’t want that, I reminded myself fiercely. I didn’t want to be tied down. I would suffocate if I couldn’t walk away whenever I liked, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t see the appeal. Sometimes. My mind flickered to Drew, and then away. Being physically compatible was one thing, but it was nonsense to think that we could have anything in common beyond that. I liked to keep my boundaries clear. There was work, there were friends, there was sex, and they worked perfectly well in their separate compartments.
But what about a baby? Could I fit one of those into a compartment?
I padded restlessly about the house all that night. I’d never wanted a baby before. Mel and I used to talk about it. No way, we’d decided. I’d heard horror stories about the body clock, of course, but I never thought it would happen to me.
Now my body was screaming at me that it was ready to conceive.
Of course, I rationalized it. It was just because of Bess. The feeling would pass, as this whole strange episode would pass, as soon as I left York. I just had to endure it and not do anything silly – like knocking on Drew’s door and asking him if he wanted to make love to me again. Then it would all be about a relationship, about commitment, about being sensible for the baby. I didn’t want a baby that much.
Did I?
All at once, there were babies everywhere. I went out of my door and a young girl was pushing a pram past the door. On the way into work I walked past a school and saw all the young mothers delivering their children. One of the other teachers announced her pregnancy. There were adverts for nappies on the television.
I took to wearing Vivien’s amulet again, and gradually the longing began to subside. I was relieved. I even began to think that I had gone through some kind of breakdown, I had been acting so out of character. But as the days passed, and summer slipped away, I stayed firmly in the present. I stopped looking for apples, stopped listening for that gurgly whisper.
I was glad to feel myself again, but there were times when I missed Hawise, if I’m honest. Only once did I dream about her. It was
a stuffy night and I had kicked off the duvet. I thrashed restlessly from side to side, turning to punch the pillow into shape, throwing myself onto my back with a sigh, then tossing the pillow aside altogether. I was hot, I was itchy. I was thinking about Drew, asleep on the other side of the wall. I was remembering his hands on me, his weight and his warmth, and the extraordinary, unexpected heat that had flared between us. And somewhere along the way I must have slept.
It is too hot in the bed. Usually I like it when Ned pulls the curtains around us, making a cosy island where there are just the two of us, and no one else to see what we do to each other, no one to think that I am immodest, that together we are lascivious and shameless about it. I like the way Ned turns and smiles at me when I slide down the pillows and hold out my arms to him. I like how he settles over me, how his hands and his lips leave me boneless with desire.
Usually, yes, but tonight we were both slick with sweat when we fell apart, and now the hangings trap the claggy air and the darkness slumps heavy on me.
I did sleep at first, but uneasily. I dreamt I was walking along a shore beside the sea I have never seen. I remember it very clearly. Ned tells me the sea is grey and turbulent; he says I wouldn’t like it, not really, but in my dream the sea was green as an emerald, and a hot wind blew my unbound hair back from my face and stirred the leaves of the strange, spiky trees. Beneath my bare feet the sand was warm and soft and white, like no sand I have ever seen before. There was a necklace around my neck, hot and heavy, and I wore curious undergarments. My shift was no more than a thin sheet wrapped around my breasts, but as is the way of dreams, my nakedness seemed natural. I was smiling, I remember that.
And then I turned and the dream became a nightmare. The sea rose up and engulfed me, and I was tumbling around and around and around in the water. I was choking, I was drowning.
I woke gasping for breath. Thanks be to God, it was just a dream. ‘Drew,’ I murmured and reached for him as he lay beside me, but just before I touched him, I jerked my hand back.
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