Time's Echo

by Pamela Hartshorne

  It wasn’t Drew, I thought in horror. I was in bed with the wrong man.

  Then I came fully awake and realized I had been trapped in the nightmare still. There was nothing wrong. I was lying next to Ned, my beloved husband. Deliberately I laid my hand against him, recognizing the texture of his skin, the familiar smell of him. Of course it was Ned. Who else had I expected it to be?

  The dream is fading, but the sense of panic and confusion lingers. Drew. Andrew is an uncommon name in these parts. Why would I wake with it on my lips?

  The air is suffocating, as hot as it was in my dream, but without the warm wind. The nightmare has left me with a sense of foreboding and now I cannot get to sleep again.

  Beside me, Ned is sprawled across the bed, oblivious to my discomfort, his breathing a slow, steady rasp. A quill from the feather mattress is sticking through the sheet, and every time I turn over it pricks me. We might as well be lying on straw, I think crossly.

  Somewhere outside a dog is barking, barking, barking incessantly, but at least it can breathe. The heat is smothering. Cautiously, so as not to wake Ned, I pull back the curtain by my pillow. Now I can hear Bess snuffing on her truckle bed, and Margery’s whistling snores from the chamber overhead. Everyone is asleep, it seems, except for me.

  And the dog.

  Puffing out a sigh, I shift my legs into a more comfortable position, then I try turning onto my side. I normally like to lie against Ned’s back, but it is too hot to press my flesh to his tonight. Not that he would care. I am irritable with him for being able to sleep when I cannot, and I stare broodingly up at the canopy, determined to dwell on all the difficulties of my life.

  Which in truth are not many. I am happier than I have ever been before. Margery dotes on Bess, and I am included in her fussing. Alison and Isobel, taking their lead from her, are less sullen too, and make no fuss when Ned finds me a new maid, Joan, who is supposed to help me with Bess; but with Margery and me, there is little enough for her to do. But she is a good lass and fetches and carries and is willing. All in all, we are a happy household.

  Strange my dream should take me to the East, if so it did. No longer do I yearn to fly. Perhaps sometimes I think about the world outside the city walls, and remember my childish dreams of travelling across the seas, but on the whole, I am content. Yes, when Ned goes to the Synxon market in Antwerp, I wish I could go with him, but it is really only tonight that it seems unfair that I cannot. I would not leave Bess in any case.

  My daughter grows bonny and bright. She is a sturdy child, with huge eyes the same colour as Ned’s, but hers have none of his quietness and calm. Instead they are full of mischief. She laughs easily, and why should she not? She has poor Margery twisted around her small finger, and her father is no better, although he conceals his doting better than Margery.

  And as for me . . . I cannot measure the love I feel for my little girl. I marvel at the miracle of her every day: at the skin that blooms like the petal of a rose in May, at the impish smile and the eyes that widen with wonder at the world. I discover beauty again through my daughter’s eyes. Together we spend long hours watching a butterfly or grasping at the motes of dust that dance like specks of gold in a sunbeam. When we walk in the garden, Bess picks up a pebble and examines it with the delighted attention a woman might give a priceless jewel. I read her stories from the book Ned gave me. She is too young to understand them, but she likes the pictures and she smacks the page, her baby hand fat and dimpled.

  She accepts the adoration of the world as her due, and gives it back tenfold.

  Except to my sister and Francis Bewley.

  Bess doesn’t like Francis. When he lifts her onto his lap, she squirms and squeals to get away, and I snatch her back. I don’t like his hands on her.

  I am sorry for the fact that she doesn’t like Agnes, either, but there is nothing I can do about it. I pity my sister. I am the only one who loves her, and deep down I know my love is a sad, dutiful thing. There is no dizzying rush of feeling when I look at her, the way there is when I look at Ned or Bess.

  Nobody looks at poor Agnes that way. She has no child to love her, and her husband barely seems to notice her. Not that Agnes appears unhappy with him. Far from it. She watches him hungrily whenever he is in the room, and she talks proudly about how godly he is, and how everyone respects him.

  I cannot imagine what they say to each other when they are alone. It makes me shudder just to think of it. Their house in Jubbergate is cheerless and cold, and I avoid it as much as I can, but I have to be careful not to slight Agnes. I try to visit when I know Francis will be at his business. Agnes is right. He has a reputation in the street for devotion, and he flourishes as a notary, but his showy piety doesn’t fool me. I haven’t forgotten the way Francis promised to see to his old master.

  So I steer clear of him as much as I can, and he hasn’t touched me again. But every now and then he glances at me when no one else is looking, and runs his tongue slowly around his lips, the way he did at my churching. It is his message to me. It tells me that he hasn’t forgotten me, that he is biding his time, but for what, I don’t know.

  The day after I dreamt about Hawise dreaming about me, Drew came to help me paint Lucy’s sitting room.

  I was restive after the broken night, and unsettled by my dream, just as Hawise had been by hers. It was very strange to see myself in someone else’s dream, and to experience my nightmare at second hand, as it were. Oddly I hadn’t dreamt about the tsunami since I arrived in York. I wondered what that meant.

  My face burnt every time I remembered her reaching out and murmuring for Drew. I didn’t want to think about what that meant. It’s an uncomfortable feeling to see your subconscious at work. There had been moments when Hawise had been aware of me before, but never so explicitly, and I didn’t like it. I felt as if some secret camera had recorded me in the bathroom and posted on YouTube. There were some things you didn’t want to share, even with a ghost.

  It made me scratchy and out of sorts, and I snapped at Drew when he insisted on pulling all the furniture to the centre of the room and covering it with a sheet.

  ‘All we need to do is splash on a coat of paint,’ I grumbled. ‘All I want to do is make the place look fresher. Anyone buying the house is going to redecorate anyway. There’s no need to wash everything as well.’

  ‘Why do it at all, if you’re not going to do it properly?’ Drew handed me a roll of masking tape. ‘You do the skirting boards, and I’ll prepare the walls.’

  So I had to crouch down and stick tape along the top of the skirting boards and around the door, and then he made me run in and out with buckets of hot water, muttering ungratefully.

  Drew ignored my bad mood and worked steadily and sensibly, rubbing down the walls and carefully taking out picture pins.

  ‘You know, there’s really no need to fill in every little crack,’ I said as he squeezed Polyfilla onto a trowel. For someone so intellectual, he had a disconcertingly practical streak.

  ‘You’ve heard of the expression “painting over the cracks”, haven’t you?’ said Drew. ‘It means there’s no point in prettying up the surface unless you deal with the problems beneath – although I can see why that would be your preferred approach,’ he added.

  ‘What, so now you’re a psychologist as well as a historian and a painter and decorator?’ I said snippily, tearing off a piece of masking tape with my teeth, and perhaps with rather more force than was strictly necessary. ‘Quite the Renaissance man, aren’t you?’

  ‘Isn’t that what you do?’ said Drew, unperturbed. ‘Skate along over the surface and make sure nobody ever gets close enough to find out what you’re really like? Slap on another layer of paint, move to another place – anything rather than deal with your issues.’

  ‘I don’t have any issues, thank you!’

  ‘Oh yes, I forgot, you’re fine.’

  Irritably I slapped the length of tape against the window frame. ‘I’m just saying, it’s not worth sp
ending a lot of time on decorating. Chances are, the first thing anyone who buys this house will do is to repaint this room.’

  ‘But if everybody just does a slap-happy job, the house gets in a worse and worse state,’ he pointed out disapprovingly. ‘Left to people like you over the years, this whole room would collapse under the weight of endless botched paint jobs.’

  I sighed. I couldn’t myself see what was wrong with letting the next owners worry about that, but I knew that was the wrong attitude. It wasn’t an argument I was ever going to win, anyway. Drew would go ahead and do whatever he had decided to do, regardless of anything I said.

  And he had the nerve to call me stubborn.

  We had spent quite a lot of time together by then, and we knew each other in a way that was hard to explain. I didn’t really understand why we got on so well. We had almost nothing in common. His habit of precision drove me wild at times, while I know my tendency to impatience and restlessness was equally irritating to him, but somehow it was easy being together. We laughed at the same things. That helped a lot.

  I often had supper with him, and with Sophie when she was there. Sophie liked it when I did the cooking, and I was happy to potter around Drew’s kitchen, which was so much brighter and more welcoming than Lucy’s, where the scent of rotting apples persisted in spite of the fact that Hawise had thankfully receded from my mind.

  Sometimes Sophie and I trawled the charity shops together or just sat and drank coffee. She could be very good company and had a real talent for mimicry when she forgot to be serious and spiritual. I was just sorry that the Temple of the Waters was off-limits, as I would have loved to have seen her take off Mara. But the slightest hint of flippancy in connection with the Temple put her prickles up, so I learnt not to tease.

  Drew never mentioned the fact that we had slept together, so of course I didn’t either, but I didn’t like how clearly I could remember it. It annoyed me, too, that Drew didn’t seem to have any difficulty in just being friends, while I found myself thinking about the night we had spent together at the most inappropriate times. I didn’t even know why. He wasn’t attractive. Not really. He was very ordinary-looking in fact. He was just . . . Drew.

  And it wasn’t that I wanted to sleep with him again, I reassured myself. Nothing had changed. I would still be leaving, and the last thing I needed was to get involved in that way. Falling back into bed with him would be a big mistake.

  But whenever I was with him my mind would drift alarmingly, like it did that day in Lucy’s sitting room, with the masking tape in my hand and only half my attention on what I was doing. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Drew paint, his arm stretching rhythmically up and down the wall, and lust jittered under my skin. Every time he pushed the roller up, his faded T-shirt rose too, giving me a glimpse of his taut belly, until my mouth was dry and my blood pounding with frustration.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked at last, squelching the roller through the paint in the tray.

  ‘Fine.’ I cursed inwardly as that word slipped out, and Drew cocked an eyebrow at me. My voice was thin and high too, and my instinctive reaction was to go on the offensive. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re very quiet.’

  ‘I’m thinking.’

  ‘What about?’

  About what it would be like to nip his throat, to push up the paint-spattered T-shirt and kiss my way down his long, lean body. My mouth dried. For a dizzying moment my mind was blank and I was terrified the words would fall out of my mouth of their own accord.

  ‘About Sophie,’ I said in a rush, clutching onto the first idea that came into my head. ‘Did I tell you that we saw Ash yesterday?’

  We’d been in a charity shop in Goodramgate. I’d just found a sleeveless dress in a wonderful shade of yellow that I thought would work with a belt and vintage cardigan that I’d found in the Save the Children shop a couple of weeks earlier. It was a beautiful fabric too, silky and slithery, and I couldn’t wait to try it on.

  ‘I was showing her a dress I wanted to buy, and she was rolling her eyes and giving me a hard time about it, but that was fine,’ I told Drew. ‘She was being normal.’

  One minute Sophie was relaxed and laughing, and the next her face had coloured up as she saw someone behind me. Even before I turned I knew who it would be.

  ‘Ash Vaughan was outside, looking at us through the window.’

  I twitched my shoulders, remembering the shiny malice that reminded me so much of Francis Bewley.

  ‘He looked at me and then he looked at Sophie, and I could tell he didn’t like the fact that she had been enjoying herself with me. He summoned her like a dog,’ I said tightly. ‘He didn’t move his lips or anything; he just looked, and she turned without a word and trotted out to join him. And then he looked back at me and he smiled.’ I pulled a face. ‘He gives me the creeps. I can’t prove anything of course, but I think he did that just to show me he could control her. It was a challenge.’

  Drew’s face had darkened at the first mention of Ash’s name. ‘That sounds like him. Arrogant little tosser.’

  ‘I slung the dress back and hared out after her, but there wasn’t much point. Ash already had her just where he wanted her.’

  When I went back into the shop someone else had snapped up that yellow dress. I was still cross about it.

  Drew loaded more paint onto his roller. ‘I can’t suggest it to Sophie, but I’ve got a nasty feeling that he’s deliberately targeting her because she’s my daughter. Ash isn’t the type to forgive or forget, and I know he blames me for not giving him better marks – conveniently forgetting the fact that he didn’t do any bloody work.’

  ‘I thought he’d decided university wasn’t spiritual enough for him?’ I said, and Drew snorted.

  ‘He says that now, but at the time he was furious. Ash likes to think of himself as king of all he surveys, and that’s hard to pull off when you’re a university dropout. Much better to recast it as being victimized by the system – that’s me – that is too stupid or corrupt to understand his unique talents. I wasn’t at all surprised he’d set up his own cult. I just wish he’d done it somewhere else, where Sophie wouldn’t have crossed his path.’

  ‘I’m guessing he’s someone who prefers to be a big fish in a little pond,’ I said.

  ‘I just wish I knew why Sophie is so impressed by him,’ Drew sighed as he attacked the wall with the roller.

  My masking-tape duties finished, I perched on the windowsill. ‘She’s looking for somewhere to belong,’ I said, spinning the roll around my forefingers. ‘From what she’s told me, she’s lonely, and torn between you and her mother, and she doesn’t find it easy to make friends at school. Whatever they do at these “gatherings” that she talks about, they’re giving her something she needs. You may not like it, but she loves all that spirituality stuff.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t she go to church?’ asked Drew. ‘I wouldn’t mind that so much.’

  ‘I don’t think the Church has quite the glamour that Ash offers. We might think it’s all mumbo-jumbo, but for Sophie it’s mystical and powerful and it’s different from conventional forms of spirituality. It’s a heady mix.’

  Drew sighed. ‘So what should I do? Just accept that Ash can manipulate my daughter at will?’

  ‘I wonder if it’s more about accepting her,’ I said slowly. ‘She knows how much you hate what she believes in. Maybe that makes her feel that she doesn’t belong with you, either.’ I hesitated. ‘Does Sophie know about your mother?’

  He shook his head. ‘I never wanted to encourage her.’

  ‘She didn’t need any encouragement,’ I pointed out. ‘She’s looking for someone to feel a connection to, and neither you nor her mother share her beliefs. Maybe she needs to know that she’s not the first in her family to feel the way she does.’

  I saw Drew thinking about that. ‘Do you think I should tell her how her grandmother died?’ he asked after a while. ‘Show her how dangerous these cults can be?’

 
; ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘She’ll just think that you’re getting at Ash. First, let her feel that you’re not completely hostile to everything she believes in. You could give her something of her grandmother’s, maybe. Or why don’t you ask Vivien Price to invite her back to their coven, or whatever it’s called? I know you haven’t got much time for Wicca either, but it’s harmless compared to Ash.’

  I thought about Vivien’s garden, and her calm, powerful presence. I didn’t think ‘harmless’ was really the right word, but she had none of the malevolence I sensed in Ash.

  Drew was frowning at the wall, the roller moving more and more slowly as he thought. ‘That might be worth a try. Sophie was right into witchcraft before Lucy died. She might be tempted back – although, God knows, I never thought I’d be encouraging my daughter to join a coven!’

  ‘Sophie’s too young to join their coven, but I’m sure Vivien would find a way to include her,’ I said. ‘She’s quite an impressive person really.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Drew looked unconvinced, but when I offered to have a word with Vivien, he didn’t say no. And when I was round for supper a few days later he produced a small box decorated with moons and stars.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Sophie when he pushed it across the table towards her.

  ‘It was your grandmother’s. Look inside.’

  She pulled out a pentagram hanging on a fine leather cord, and her mouth dropped open. ‘My grandmother was a witch?’

  ‘Among other things,’ said Drew.

  ‘Wow, that is so cool!’ Sophie’s smile was brilliant as she slipped the pendant over her head. ‘Is it really for me?’

  ‘I think she’d have liked you to have it,’ he said gruffly.

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’ She patted the pendant as if to reassure herself that she wasn’t imagining it. ‘It’s like a real connection.’ Her eyes lifted to her father’s. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about her before?’