Lady of Hay

by Barbara Erskine

  “The answer is no, Nick.”

  His face hardened.

  She walked out onto the balcony and stood there for a moment with her back to him. Then she turned. “Nick, do you believe in reincarnation now, after what’s happened?”

  “No. I do not.”

  “Then what do you think is happening to me?”

  “I think you are the victim of your own imagination. No more than that.”

  “You don’t think it is possible that everyone lives again? You don’t believe that we might have known each other before, when I was Matilda—”

  “No, I don’t.” Nick joined her on the balcony. He put his hands on her shoulders. “Don’t try and talk yourself into this, Jo. It’s madness.”

  “It was when I fainted at Ceecliff’s,” she went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “As I was coming around I saw someone else’s face there, in the room. Someone who was you and wasn’t you. Someone beside you—”

  “Please, Jo. I don’t want to hear any more—”

  “That person tried to strangle me. I couldn’t breathe. That was why I fainted. I thought it was you, but it wasn’t. His eyes were different and he had a beard…” She pushed past him and went back inside. “Nick, you were part of that life. And it’s catching up with me! The people from the past are following me into the present! They are here, in the shadows!” Her voice was rising. “William, my husband William was here, in my bedroom, and the baby, my baby, little Will. Nick, I started producing milk to feed him! That’s why I called Sam. I didn’t know what to do!” Tears began to roll down her cheeks. “And the man at Ceecliff’s house reached out of the past to try and kill me, Nick. None of it was my imagination. They were real!”

  Nick was staring at her in horror. “Jo, for God’s sake, get a grip on yourself. You’re talking rubbish.”

  “Am I?” She took a deep breath. “How come the Chandlers upstairs heard the baby crying?”

  “You should be very glad they did, Jo. That proves absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it was a real baby they heard.” Nick sat down, still watching her. “You need to get away, Jo. Right away for a few days. Listen. I’m not due back in the office until Monday—”

  “I know what you’re going to say.” She gave him a brittle smile. “Thanks, but no.”

  “You don’t know what I’m going to say. I was going to suggest that you come down to the boat with me—”

  “Nick! Don’t you understand? I’m afraid of you! Afraid of that other person—”

  “There is no other person, Jo!” Nick caught her arms. “You’ve been cooped up too long in this apartment with this story all around you—tapes, books, nightmares. You’ve got to get away before it sends you really insane. I’m going to take Moon Dancer back to Lymington—I never got around to it when I went to see Ma last. Come with me. You know you’ve always loved the boat, and the sea air will help get things straight for you. It always did, remember?”

  Jo hesitated. He was right. She had to get away. “No strings? Separate bunks?”

  Nick grinned. “Scout’s honor. Why don’t I ring the marina and ask them to get her ready? We’ll call in at Lynwood House and pick up my gear and we could be at Shoreham in a couple of hours or so.”

  Jo sighed. She stared around the room, thinking of the night before, sitting all alone, waiting to hear if the baby was going to start crying again. Abruptly she capitulated. “Okay, I’ll come. Thanks.”

  He smiled. “Pack a bag while I phone.” He watched as she moved toward the bedroom, seeing already a new lightness about her. He made the call and then threw himself back on the cushions of the sofa. They slipped a little and a bundle of rolled-up clothing fell onto the floor. He picked them up and shook the garments out, puzzled, then his face darkened.

  Standing up he strode toward the bedroom. “Did you do a striptease for Sam as the hors d’oeuvre or the encore?” he asked, dropping her panties on the bed.

  She stared at them blankly. “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t understand?” Nick threw her dress and bra down as well. “How strange. I should have thought it was obvious. It is no doubt part of that precious professional relationship Sam is so keen to preserve. He takes off your clothes perhaps to take your pulse, then hides them under the pillow for tidiness’ sake! Or was it because I arrived unexpectedly? Not that it’s any of my business, of course.”

  “No, it isn’t any of your business!” Jo flared angrily. She picked up her dress and shook out the creases. She felt suddenly very sick. “I must have left them there earlier. I don’t know…perhaps last night. I felt so strange last night. I was drinking, and I took the last of the pills—”

  “Jo, for God’s sake!”

  “There is nothing between Sam and me, Nick. Nothing. If it’s any of your business.” Her eyes flashed. “I’m not so sure this boat thing is such a good idea after all!”

  “We’re going, Jo.” Nick picked up her bag. “Forget Sam for now. We’ll talk about him later. Get a jacket. It might be cold on the water.”

  She hesitated. “Nick, this is stupid. We can’t do it. To go away together would be crazy.”

  “Then it’s a kind of craziness we both need.” His tone was becoming threatening. “I’m prepared to carry you to that car, Jo.”

  She was too tired to argue anymore. She swallowed the automatic flare-up of rebellion and followed him downstairs, thankful only when the front door was closed without her hearing again the echoing wail of baby William’s hungry cries.

  ***

  Two and a half hours later, Jo clutched Nick’s arm. “Nick, stop! Go back!”

  The Porsche screamed to a standstill on the dusty road. “For God’s sake, what’s wrong?”

  “That signpost! Did you see it?”

  “Jo, you could have caused an accident. Christ! What is wrong with you? What signpost?”

  He turned in his seat and reversed up the empty road, past the narrow turning to which Jo had pointed.

  “There.” She was pale and excited. “Look. It points to Bramber!”

  “So?” Nick glanced in the rearview mirror and waved a truck past, then he pulled the car onto the grass shoulder. “What’s so special about Bramber, suddenly?”

  “It was William’s home. It was where I went after I was married!”

  Nick’s hand tightened on the wheel. “After Matilda was married, I suppose you mean?”

  “That’s what I said. Oh, Nick, can we go there? Please?”

  A car slowed behind them, hooted and overtook, the driver gesturing rudely as he disappeared around the curve of the road.

  “Jo, we’ve come to forget all that.”

  “Oh, please, Nick. I’ll never rest until I’ve been there now. Just for a few minutes. It’s research for the article, among other things. I can see how much it’s changed. Nick, don’t you see? I’ll be able to compare. It might prove that everything has been in my imagination—” Sadness showed in her eyes suddenly. “If I recognize nothing at all, at least we’ll know then. The Downs can’t have changed all that much, or the river. Please, Nick?”

  With a sigh Nick engaged gear. He turned up the narrow road, glancing at the countryside around them. “We’ve been around here half a hundred times before, Jo. Every time we’ve left the boat at Shoreham we’ve explored the Downs to find pubs and restaurants—”

  “But we’ve never turned off here.” She was peering through the windshield, her hand on the dash. “I don’t recognize anything, Nick. Not the countryside, the Downs are so naked—so small.” He could hear the disappointment in her voice.

  “They are the same as they were the last time you and I came down to the boat,” he said gently. “Look—” He slowed the car. “It says ‘To the Castle.’ Shall I turn up there?”

  She nodded. Her mouth had gone dry.

  Nick swung the car up the steep lane between two small modern flint turrets and into a muddy parking lot. Above them rose a wooded hill with a squat little churc
h nestling into its side. Jo pushed the car door open and stood up, her eyes fixed on the church. Nick hadn’t moved. He was leaning across, watching her.

  She looked down at him unhappily. “Nick, I have to do this alone. Do you mind?”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded.

  “And you’ll be all right?”

  She looked around. “I’ll be all right. Go and find one of those pubs you were talking about. Come back in an hour.” She pushed the door shut.

  Nick watched her walk toward the church. Only when she had disappeared inside did he turn the car and drive back down the lane.

  Jo opened the door into the nave and stared around. The church was completely empty. She stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind her, her eyes on the huge arch of pale stone that spanned the roof before the altar. In her hand was a copy of the little tenpenny guide. This was William’s chapel—and before him the chapel of his father, and his grandfather. It had been dedicated, the guidebook said, in the year 1073.

  Slowly she walked toward the altar. If it were anywhere, his ghost would be there, in the very walls where he had knelt and prayed. She felt the skin on the back of her neck prickle as she stood staring up at the simple wooden cross with the pale ochre curtain behind it. No lighted candles, no incense. The bell was silent. But there was a sense of prayer. A presence.

  I should be praying for their souls, she thought. Their souls—our souls—which are not at rest. With a shiver of something like defiance she made the sign of the cross and knelt before the altar, but the prayers would not come. The faith and burning trust that Matilda had felt before the twelfth-century statue of the Virgin were not for the twentieth-century Jo Clifford, kneeling in her shirt and jeans on the cold soap-scented flagstones. She felt nothing.

  She was suddenly conscious of how quiet the church was, and how empty. Raising her eyes to the three small arched windows above the altar, she felt very cold. The air around her had become oppressive; the silence so intense she could hear it beating inside her head. Overwhelmed with panic, she scrambled to her feet and fled down the aisle, letting herself out of the door to stand in the vestibule, breathing deeply. Two women walked in past her and she felt them staring at her. They too brought a copy of the little guide, then they disappeared inside the church.

  She stood in the graveyard shivering, feeling the warmth of the evening sun sinking through her shirt and into her bones. The air was glorious. It smelled of honeysuckle and woodsmoke from a bonfire below the churchyard, and of wild thyme from the Downs that ringed Bramber, bare and dusty beneath the hot evening sky. Immediately below her around the foot of the hill clustered the uneven, ancient roofs of the village of Bramber. Above, like a reproving finger, stood a huge pillar of masonry—part of the now-ruined castle.

  Taking a deep breath, Jo left the churchyard and began to walk up the shallow steps cut in the side of the castle hill, across the overgrown depths of the defensive ditch and on toward the ruins.

  The top of the hill was a broad flat area of mown grass in the center of which rose another steep-sided hillock, the motte on which the first William de Braose’s wooden keep had been raised in the days of the Conqueror. It was shrouded now by trees, guarded by ancient yews. Very little of the castle remained. A few areas of crumbling wall around the perimeter of the hill where the only invaders were ash and sycamore, hung with the greenish, scented flowers of wild clematis. Only the one tall finger of wall remained rearing into the sky to remind the visitor of the castle’s former glory.

  Jo stood staring round her, lost. She could recognize nothing. Slowly she began to walk, seeing her shadow running before her across the grass, looking south toward the sea. Somewhere out there in the forest she had gone hawking with Richard and fallen at his feet to lie with her head on his lap. The forest had gone. Trees climbed the castle hill now, which then had been bare. Only the gap in the Downs was the same. The river was quite different too. So small. Surely then it had been vastly wider and there had been a jetty right there beneath the hill with ships and bustle and noise. The only noise now was the roar of traffic from the broad sweep of the fast road south, carried on the still evening air.

  “Are you all right, Jo?” Nick had been following her silently.

  She smiled at him. “The only thing I can recognize is the gap where the Downs aren’t.” She laughed wryly. “And the church. I think the tower was the same, though there used to be something on top then. And there was water all around here.” She waved her arm. “I thought I said an hour?” She looked at him closely.

  “I didn’t like to leave you, so I parked in the lane at the bottom of the hill. I was afraid…” He hesitated. “Well, that something might happen.”

  “So was I.” She put her hands on a fragment of wall, lightly touching the flints and mortar. “I should be able to feel something. I know I’ve been here before—how often have you heard people say that, joking? I do know it, yet I feel nothing. Why?”

  “Perhaps you don’t need to.” He touched the wall himself. “Besides, it’s quite possible that you had no particular affinity with Bramber. You probably have no reason to remember it. Matilda spent most of her time in Wales, didn’t she?”

  Jo nodded. “You’re right. I expect all her memories are there.” She sighed. “There was something, though—just for a minute, in the church.” She shivered again. “William was so obsessive about religious observance. Do you know, his clerks had to be paid extra because of all the flowery bits of religious pomposity he insisted on adding to all his correspondence—” She stopped abruptly. “I must have read that somewhere—”

  Nick took her arm. “Come on, Jo. Let’s get on to Shoreham.”

  She shook off his hand. “You were right. I took my clothes off for Sam.” She was staring into the distance. “I thought he was William. He ordered me to do it, Nick.”

  “Are you sure?” Nick stared at her grimly.

  “I was in the solar of the castle at Brecknock and he stood in front of me and ordered me to undress while the blind man played the flute.”

  “William may have ordered you in your dream, Jo. Not Sam, surely. Sam wouldn’t do such a thing.” Nick swallowed uncomfortably.

  “Why did I take my clothes off then?” she cried. “Why? If it was just for William I would have described it, not actually done it!”

  He frowned. “You’re making a terrible accusation, Jo.”

  “There was no tape of what happened,” she whispered. “No one else there. Just Sam and me. And a pile of crumpled clothes.” She shivered again, looking down at the shadow of the castle wall on the grass. “People can’t be forced to do anything against their will while under hypnosis, I know that. But I was Matilda, and I thought he was my husband—”

  “No, that’s crap! You’re talking complete, unmitigated crap.” Nick turned away sharply. “I can quite believe that you might do anything. I’ve seen you, remember? But Sam? He’d be crazy to try something like that. Besides, nothing happened, did it? Your husband didn’t rape you?” His voice was harsh.

  Jo colored. “No, he didn’t rape me, because someone—presumably you—came. But not before he had humiliated me and mocked me and set out to browbeat me like the sexist pig he was. He threatened to whip me, naked, before everyone in the castle, and no doubt if there had been time he would have had me on my knees before he put me on my back.”

  She began to walk swiftly down the way they had come.

  Nick followed her. “Well, that proves it wasn’t Sam at any rate,” he said grimly. “I don’t see him as kinky.”

  “Don’t you?” Jo flashed back. “You surprise me.”

  ***

  Nick glanced at Jo from the phone. She was sitting in the corner of the pub nursing a Scotch and ginger. The noise level in the bar was fairly high. After taking out his diary, he found the number he was looking for and dialed it, leaning against the wall so that he could watch her while he waited, change in hand, for the call to connect. He w
as thinking about Sam.

  Carl Bennet had come in from Gatwick Airport only three-quarters of an hour before. He cursed quietly as his wife came to get him out of the bath.

  “Nick Franklyn? What the hell does Nick Franklyn want?” he muttered, wrapping a towel around his middle.

  “I don’t know, dear, but he’s in a pay phone.” Melissa Bennet smiled fondly at her husband as he tried to clean the steam off his glasses. “Get rid of him, darling, then come down and eat.”

  “Eat, she says.” Bennet snorted as his wife ran down the stairs. “What the hell else does she think I did on that plane?” He picked up the receiver. “Yes?” he barked. His glasses had steamed over again.

  Within seconds he was reaching for his notepad. “You are right. I should see her as soon as possible. I could fit her in tomorrow here.” He listened again for a few minutes, frowning with irritation as Nick paused to slot more money into the phone.

  “Very well, Mr. Franklyn. Monday at ten. I agree a break would do her good. But should this happen again—anything that worries you—I want you to promise to call me, here, at once.”

  He hung up at last and sat still, chewing the inside of his cheek. He sighed. Posthypnotic suggestion was always a dangerous field. To do as Nick Franklyn asked and wipe out the girl’s memory of Matilda forever—that was a sad request. But the man was right. The past had to be controlled. It had to be relegated to where it belonged, otherwise it threatened to take Jo Clifford over and, in so doing, destroy her.

  17

  Sam opened the front door of the apartment to Judy that evening with a scowl. “I’m packing to go to Edinburgh,” he said curtly. “I’m afraid I can’t spare you much time.”

  “You can’t?” Judy threw herself down on a chair. “That’s good, because I don’t require much time. You know of course that by now Nick and Jo are back together.”

  “I know they’ve gone down to the boat.” He was watching her closely as he sat down opposite her.