In any case I was spending more and more time at Drew’s. Only late at night did I slip back into the house and climb into Lucy’s bed. I kept my suitcase open on the floor, to remind myself that I was really going.
The weather was vile, a dark, lowering sky that meant you had to put the lights on in the morning, and sheets of rain, day after day after day. That made it easier to think about leaving. I dreamt about a clear sky and sunlight on the sea and warmth on my shoulders.
I bought a ticket to Mexico City. One-way.
I booked it online, and the computer didn’t cut out on me halfway through. My server didn’t crash when I emailed Mel to tell her when I would be arriving. I watched almost in disbelief as the message saying that it had been sent popped up on the screen.
Only then did I let myself believe that Hawise was really going to let me go.
‘This time it really is over,’ I told Vivien when I bumped into her in the street. It was the end of October and the air smelt of wet leaves. ‘Hawise has gone.’
Vivien eyed me narrowly. ‘You certainly look better than you did.’ She lifted the hessian bag she was carrying with a faint smile. ‘Can you face apples yet?’
A tiny muscle jumped at the back of my throat, but I made myself smile. It was a test to see if I was better, and I was.
‘Sure.’ I said. ‘Why not?’
‘Then have some of these. They’re from my allotment, and I can’t give them away at the moment.’ She held out the bag. ‘Help yourself.’
‘Well . . . thank you . . . ’ I swallowed. I was braced for maggots and rotting flesh, but when I drew the apples out of the bag, they were firm and rosy.
I let out a breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding until then. ‘I’ll make Sophie an apple pie,’ I said as I took a few and put them in the plastic bag I was carrying. ‘She likes her puddings.’
‘How is Sophie?’
‘She’s spending more time with us – with Drew,’ I corrected myself, flushing with vexation at the natural way that ‘us’ slipped out. ‘She’s getting on better with her father, and I think she likes my cooking.’
Worried about Drew being alone when I left, I was doing what I could to encourage Sophie to stay home, but I didn’t tell Vivien that.
The fact that I was worrying stuck like a pip between my teeth, a constant, low-grade irritation that I could never quite dislodge.
‘So she’s not going to the Temple of the Waters any more?’ Vivien sounded surprised.
‘She is, I’m afraid, but Drew’s hoping it’s a good sign that she’s not quite as obsessive as she was before.’
I was sure that Ash was working hard to keep Sophie close, and I wished I hadn’t let him rile me that day I met him outside the Minster. I couldn’t shake the certainty that he’d taken my hostility as a challenge. Drew said that was just me looking for something to feel guilty about, but he hadn’t seen the viciousness flash across Ash’s face.
‘Sophie may not be going to as many of their “gatherings” as she did, but sadly there’s no sign of her seeing Ash Vaughan for what he is,’ I told Vivien. ‘She’s still completely in thrall to him. I don’t suppose you’d like to cast a spell to bring her to her senses, would you?’
I wasn’t being serious, but Vivien looked thoughtful. ‘Sophie will have to make her own choices,’ she said. ‘But you could cast a protective spell for her, if it would help you feel better.’
‘Me? I’m not a witch!’
‘You care about Sophie, though, don’t you?’
‘Of course I’m fond of her.’ Vivien’s eyes were very clear and very blue, and again I had the uncomfortable feeling that she could see right inside me. ‘And I’m sorry for her,’ I said, my gaze sliding away from hers. ‘Sophie’s very insecure. She’s latched onto Ash, and she won’t let herself see him clearly, because that would mean admitting that she was being naive and credulous.’
‘None of us like to look at ourselves clearly, do we?’
I looked at her sharply. The words were innocent enough, but I sensed they were meant for me. ‘I remember what it’s like to be fifteen and lonely,’ I said. ‘I just want to help her if I can.’
‘The strongest spell is the power of your love,’ said Vivien. ‘As long as you are not afraid to give it,’ she added, leaving the question unspoken.
‘I’m not afraid,’ I said, irritated. ‘I’m leaving.’
‘So you’ve decided to go?’
I was sure I could detect disappointment in her voice, and I put my chin up. ‘I’m flying out at the end of November.’
Vivien nodded slowly. ‘I see. Well, good luck if I don’t see you before then.’
‘Thank you for all your help, Vivien,’ I said awkwardly. Something about her made me uneasy, but I owed her, I knew. ‘And for the apples, of course!’
‘You’re welcome,’ said Vivien. ‘Blessed be. Oh, and Grace?’ she added as I walked on, and I turned.
‘Yes?’
‘Tomorrow is Samhain.’
‘Samhain?’
‘Halloween,’ she said. ‘All Hallows’ Eve. It’s not just about pumpkins and trick-or-treating. It’s a time when the worlds of the living and the dead become as one. You should take great care.’
I tackled the apples straight away. I knew that if I put them aside, I would worry about them rotting. I took them out of the bag and put them on the worktop in Drew’s kitchen. There were seven of them. They were red and fresh and satisfyingly uneven, nothing like the tasteless, uniformly round apples I saw in the supermarkets. Apples that had come from a tree, not a container shipped from the other side of the world.
I made myself pick them up and sniff them. They were fine. They didn’t smell of rage and despair.
I got out a bowl and started sifting flour for pastry. If I was going to make apple pie, I was going to do it properly. I was feeling ruffled after my encounter with Vivien, and cooking usually calmed me down, but that day it took longer to shift my bad mood. The mention of Halloween had lodged a sliver of disquiet, needle-sharp, inside me.
Hawise had died on All Hallows’ Eve.
I tried to shrug it off, to think about something else, but then I kept replaying Vivien’s offhand remark about love. As long as you are not afraid to give it.
What did that mean, exactly? I wondered, crossly dicing butter and lard. The knife chinked against the plate, an edgy counterpoint to the grumble and whirr of the washing machine. I wasn’t afraid. There was just no point in loving Sophie if I was going to leave her, the way I was going to leave her father. I couldn’t pretend to love her. It would just hurt her even more when I left. I was being kind, I was being honest. I wasn’t afraid.
Gradually the rhythm of pastry-making soothed me. I dipped my hands into the buttery flour and lifted them high, rubbed the mixture between my fingers then let it tumble back into the bowl. Dip, lift, rub. Dip, lift, rub. I stopped glancing at the apples out of the corner of my eye, stopped waiting for them to sag and moulder before me. They were just apples.
I did everything properly. I let my pastry rest in the fridge. I found an eggcup and turned it upside down to act as a pie-funnel once I’d lined the pie plate with the pastry. I peeled and cored the apples, and didn’t flinch once from handling them. I piled the slices high in the pastry and sprinkled over a little sugar.
Admiring my efforts, I adjusted the eggcup slightly and found myself thinking about my mother. She had had a special pie-funnel shaped like a blackbird, and memories of Sunday mornings at the kitchen table crashed over me so suddenly that I caught my breath. It was almost a shock to remember my own mother instead of Hawise.
Mum always nestled three or four cloves into her apple pies. Subconsciously I had known something was missing. On an impulse I rootled through Drew’s motley collection of herbs and spices.
Cloves – there they were! I pulled out the jar and shook a few into my cupped palm, breathing in the lovely, warm smell of them. They reminded me of Indonesia, and th
e men squatting in the gangs, the smoke from their kreteks curling through the heavy air.
I scoop up a handful of cloves from the sack and inhale. Next to rosemary, this is my favourite smell. To me, cloves are the scent of the East, of countries unseen and roads untravelled, proof of a strange, exotic world that exists alongside mine, yet is forever out of reach.
I pick one from my palm and hold it between my thumb and forefinger, studying it as if I have never seen one before. It is hard and stubby, like a tiny piece of wood, with a bulbous end – a peppercorn surrounded by four stiff little leaves. It is not quite a flower, not quite a nut. How does it grow? I wonder. On a tree? On a bush? Somebody far away in the Spice Islands has picked it and someone has collected it, and it has been bought and sold across the seas until it arrived in Hamburg, where Ned’s agent, John Watson, bought two sacks and put them on a ship to Hull.
The keelman sent word this morning that he is tied up at King’s Staith. Rob arranged for the carter to bring the sacks to our warehouse down by the river, and now we are checking that everything is as it should be. The cloves have come a long way, and so have I. I am not just a woman, not just a widow. I am a merchant adventurer now.
It is over a year since the pestilence. A year since Ned died. A year since I was able to turn into him at night and press my cheek against his chest. A year since I felt steady, and certain. And safe.
It is a year, too, since Jane saved Bess from the carter’s horse. Bess is nearly four now, and she does not remember that dark time, and I am glad of it. When I look back, I wonder how we went from day to day, but we did. We all did.
Not long after they opened the city gates to strangers once more, the keelboats started to ply the river again between York and Hull, and one morning Ned’s apprentice, Rob Haxby, appeared in the hall. He had done as Ned said and stayed in Hull to wait for the goods John had sent from Hamburg, stamped with Ned’s mark. John was once Ned’s apprentice, but now it is Rob’s turn to learn how to merchant. He is a shy, gangly boy with huge hands and feet, and I saw something crumble in his face when I had to tell him that Ned was dead. I wanted to pull him to me and let him weep, but we had a shipload of goods to unload, and store, and sell.
I knew how to run a household, but merchandising was men’s work. But I had no man, only a boy to help me, so I went down to Trinity Hall and found Mr Appleyard, the governor of the company of merchant adventurers there, who had dined with Ned more than once. Mr Appleyard has pendulous cheeks and a red nose like my father’s, but his eyes are quick and shrewd. It was my right to take over Ned’s adventuring, as he well knew. He didn’t like it, but he told me who I needed to see and what I needed to do, to keep the business going.
I remember standing in the warehouse with Rob by my side that first morning. We had a tun of wine, some pottery jugs packed into a barrel, three primers, beautifully painted, bales of ginger and nutmeg and peppercorns and, when we untied the cords and unwrapped the canvas, a quantity of luxurious furs. So many beautiful things, and all I could wonder was who was left to want them.
We sold the wine first. I heard later that Mr Bowes chortled that he had it so cheap he would have bought ten times as many tuns if he could, but I set my jaw and I learnt. I drive a harder bargain now, and my customers are more like to shake their heads and complain, but still they buy. This I have learnt. The world keeps turning and the money keeps going round and round. There will always be someone to sell and someone to buy.
Before we had sold the last jug, John wrote from Hamburg. He could sell wool and lead, he said, and buy more furs if we thought we could shift them. I wrote back, a hard letter to write, and told him that Ned was dead, but that if he stayed I would honour his contract and admit him to the merchants’ company as his master would have done.
And so I became a merchant. John has a nose for a deal, but mine is the risk, and we work well together. I have a feel for it, I think. I know how to take a chance on a shipment, and how to make folk want just what it is that I have to sell.
Rob has stayed. Like Jane, he has nowhere else to go. We are a small household now, but we go on. What else is there to do? For a time we were numb with grief, but it fades. Alone in my great bed, I roll over at night and Ned isn’t there, and his absence is a rusty knife twisting in my heart. Every morning, there is a moment between waking and opening my eyes when I tell myself that it was just a bad dream. I will open my eyes and there Ned will be, yawning and scratching his fingers through his hair. I will it to be just a dream. But it isn’t, it is real, and Ned is gone.
But yes, we go on. We are even content. I thought I would never laugh again, but we do. Bess is a mischievous child and a loving one. When she has been naughty, she has a way of peeping a look at you that makes it hard indeed to keep a stern face. She loves Jane and Rob. We are a little family.
We are all outcasts of one kind or another, save Bess, of course, and Francis makes sure that everyone knows it. Francis’s devotion is even more conspicuous since the sickness. He took his survival as a sign of God’s favour, and prays loudly and long. The neighbours are impressed by him, and they know I turned him and Agnes from my house in their time of need – or so Francis tells it. In the battle for the good opinion of the street, Francis is the victor, and it makes a difference. I am a wealthy widow with a thriving business, a merchant in my own right, but no one has approached me about marriage.
Not that I care for marriage just yet. Jane says that I should look around for someone young and handsome, but she didn’t know Ned. She doesn’t know what we had. Bess needs a father, she points out when I tell her that, and it is true, but I can’t bear to think of it.
‘I will,’ I promise whenever she mentions it. And I will. Just not yet. I am young still, and there is plenty of time.
Now I drop the cloves back into the sack and brush my fingers together with satisfaction. John has done well. They are dry and firm, and when I dig down, I find no dust, but more precious cloves. I will be able to sell them for a good price.
Taking a puckle in my hand for the kitchen, I leave Rob in the warehouse and walk back to the house. The streets are wet and slubbery with mud. The rain loosens the cobbles, and the horses’ hooves dislodge them further, so that the potholes get bigger and bigger. They trap the rubbish that spills sluggishly from the gutters and cast a sour smell over the neighbourhood. It is not yet autumn, with its brisk winds and sharp air, but summer is long past. Everything is tired and dreary, and the mood in the street is sly, acrid with disappointment.
It is as if the losses of last year have finally caught up with us. We are weary and fretful instead of grateful to be alive. It is harder now. I can feel my sense of satisfaction fading as soon as I leave the warehouse. I pretend I don’t notice the way folk have started crossing themselves again when I pass, or watching me from the corners of their eyes. I pretend I don’t mind that my neighbours are no longer my friends. I don’t care, I say, that they won’t let their daughters come to me as maids to help Jane. I have my daughter, I have my home. I have Jane and Rob, and my business flourishes. I tell myself that I have enough.
Jane has been to market, and Bess is helping her to unpack her basket when I go into the kitchen.
‘What’s the news today?’ I ask, rescuing the cabbage that Bess is pulling off the table.
‘They’re all on about them witches that were arrested yesterday.’ Jane doesn’t hold with the hysteria that sweeps through the city every now and then.
‘More arrests?’ I frown as I stop Bess from tugging a whole pat of butter onto the floor. I sweep her up into my arms and tickle her nose to distract her and she shrieks with laughter, but for once my mind is not on her.
This witch-hunt is Francis’s doing. After Sir John died of the pestilence, they sent a new priest, a diffident man who cares only for his books and lets Francis run the parish. Francis himself has taken to hectoring the neighbours in the street, calling down God’s mercy on them. Their sins are not to blame for the sick
ness, he says, and makes them ask then: whose are? And it is not a long step for people to remember the witches who curdled their cream before, who made them stumble and drop their pie. If their cow sickens, if their corn rots, if their ale spills, they look around for someone to blame, and who better than the old women who have no one to speak up for them?
‘Who is it now?’ I ask Jane.
She pauses to search her memory. ‘Bridget Dobson, I think they said, and Madge Carter . . . oh, and old Ma Dent.’
‘Not Sybil Dent?’ I say, my heart full of foreboding, but I know what Jane will say.
‘Her as lives out on the common.’ She nods. ‘They’ve taken her in for questioning. Leastways, that’s what I heard.’
Questioning? I think bitterly. More like they will torture her until she confesses to whatever they want. Sybil, who saved me from Francis, who gave me my Bess.
‘Where is she?’ I demand. ‘Quick, tell me.’
Jane gapes at me in surprise. ‘At t’castle, most like. Why, where are you going?’ she asks, when I put Bess down and head for the door.
‘I’m going to get her out,’ I say.
But when I go to the castle, no one knows anything about Sybil. I spend a frustrating morning being passed around from official to official, every one of whom requires a coin to unfasten his mouth, even if it is only to suggest that I ask elsewhere. My purse is almost empty by the time I eventually find Sybil in the gaol on Ouse Bridge.
Surrounded by stone, she looks diminished. She is a creature of the woods, a hedge-pig of a woman, and I can feel that she craves the breeze in her face and the stars above her.
I crouch beside her. ‘What can I do?’
‘En’t nothing you can do,’ she says.
‘This is Francis Bewley’s doing,’ I say in a low voice. ‘He knows you are my friend.’
The widow laughs at that, a short wheezy bark of laughter. ‘Bad choice of friends you have!’
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