Time's Echo (15 page)

I recoil from his crudeness. ‘Francis, please . . . ’

‘Please what?’ he practically spits. ‘Please crawl back under the stone you came from? Please go away and leave me to my rich husband? Tell me, did you tease his cock the way
you teased mine? Did you give him the same smiles that you gave me, leading him on until he was panting like a dog at your knees? I should have seen the Devil in your eyes. I should have known you
for what you were – nothing but a hot little harlot!’

‘Stop it!’ I bring up my hands to push him away, but he grabs my wrists and shoves me back against the tree, so hard that my head thumps against the rough bark and I cry out.

‘Betrothed, are you? He has had you, I can tell. You’re like a bitch in heat.’

I’m struggling, really frightened now. ‘Francis, no!’

‘Francis, yes!’ he mocks. ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t have you too. I’m due some recompense for all this time wasted on gentle wooing.’

I twist my face away from his lips as he tries to kiss me roughly. ‘Please, Francis, let me go,’ I beg. ‘I am a maid still, I swear it!’

But that is the wrong thing to say. ‘All the better. If I am the first to have you, it is as good as a betrothal, is it not? You can go back to your merchant and tell him that you’re
mine after all.’

With one part of my mind I am marvelling that there could ever have been a time when the thought that Francis might want to kiss me would have thrilled me. Now the very idea fills me with
horror. With the other, I am twisting and turning frantically, disgusted at his attempts to press his spittle-flecked lips to mine.

He has turned into a beast, a monster, and I am desperate to get away from him, but he is so much stronger than me. He manages to pin both my wrists together in one hand and scrapes them
viciously against the trunk of the tree while he drags my skirt up with the other and tries to smother my screams with his mouth. His tongue is like a fat, wet slug, shoving between my lips, and I
gag at the feel of it. I buck my body against his as I try to push him off me, and at last manage to wrench my mouth from his and spit out the taste of him.

‘Before God, leave me alone,’ I shout at him and kick frantically at his legs.

‘You little bitch!’ Francis drags me from the tree and throws me down into the long grass, and I cry out as I fall hard, jarring my bones.

‘Stop it. Stop it!’ I am flailing at him with my hands, frantic to get him off me, but he only laughs.

‘Scream all you want. There’s no one to hear you out here. Isn’t that why you chose it? Somewhere quiet we could be together, wasn’t that right? Somewhere no one would
see
.’

He’s lying across my chest, pinning me to the ground as he yanks up my skirts, rips at my shift, his hands cruel. He likes hurting me. I think he likes it that I am fighting him too, but I
won’t give up. I am twisting like a cat in a sack, cursing and spitting.

‘I will tell my master. He will have you strung up from the nearest gibbet!’

‘You won’t tell him. Then you’d have to tell him that you’d been sneaking off to meet me, and then what would be left of your reputation, hmm? Will your fat merchant want
you then? I don’t think so.’

His voice is gleeful, but his eyes are terrifyingly blank. He doesn’t care, I realize. I can almost hear the rushing in his head, the need to crush me, to hurt me, to destroy me.

‘Sweet Jesù, help me!’ I cry, but I know there is no one to help as he tears at my sleeves, pulling them from their laces and baring my shoulders while he slobbers at my neck
like a hound in heat.

I am so crazed with disgust that I barely notice at first when he pauses and lifts his head to stare down my breast to where it swells above my bodice and a birthmark, shaped like a small,
blurry hand, shows red against my white skin.

‘What is this?’ His voice sharpens.

‘Get off me!’ I’m beating at him with my fists, but Francis doesn’t even register my blows.

‘It is the mark of a witch, is it not? The mark of a harlot. By God, I know you for what you are!’

The sight of it prods him into a new frenzy. Now he is fumbling with his hose, throwing his legs over mine to pin them down, grunting obscenities, and I can feel him, horrifyingly stiff and
smooth, pushing at my privy parts. The rotten apples squelch beneath me as I squirm desperately to free myself. Their stench is suffocating.

‘For God’s sake, be still,’ he mutters, swiping a blow at my head, and then he is jabbing at me with his fingers.

‘No!’ I am screaming. ‘No, no, no! Jesus, save me!’

But it is not Jesus who saves me. There is a thwack, a thud, and it is Francis’s turn to cry out. He rears back from me and I see Widow Dent standing over him with a stout stick.

‘She said no.’

Widow Dent is only a sparrow of a woman, but her eyes are deep and uncanny, and as she stands over Francis she looks strangely powerful.

Sobbing with relief, I start to scramble away from him, but he grabs my ankle. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Let go of her.’ Widow Dent barely raises her voice, but she lifts her stick.

‘Get out of here, you old hag,’ he snarls at her. ‘This is nothing to do with you.’

I am panting, kicking desperately to rid myself of his hand. ‘For God’s sake, let
go
, Francis!’

‘No,’ he says, tightening his fingers and pulling me back towards him. His yard still juts out of his hose, twitching like a grotesque faceless creature, and I shudder at the sight
of it.

‘Take your hands off her,’ Widow Dent tells him, still quiet. ‘Or I will curse you. All I need to do is touch you with this stick and I can unman you for the rest of your days.
Is that what you want?’

I feel Francis pause. Does he know that Widow Dent is reputed a witch? Is that filtering through his red haze?

‘Let her go,’ she says again.

His lips curl back exactly the way Hap’s do, and I see fear mixed with malevolence in the look he gives her. ‘You would not dare!’ he says, but he releases my ankle all the
same.

‘Would I not?’ She lifts the stick and points it towards him. ‘I can shrivel your balls with one touch, if I choose. Shall we see?’

Under my astonished gaze I see Francis’s thing deflating, and Widow Dent laughs as he shoves it hurriedly back in his hose. The expression in his eyes is murderous.

‘Witch!’ he hisses, making the sign to ward off evil. ‘I’ll get you.’

‘Begone,’ she tells him, ‘or it won’t be just that cock that shrivels!’ She shakes the stick at him again and Francis backs away, his eyes darting between me and
the widow.

Quite suddenly she lunges for him, and he stumbles back with a yelp of fear. ‘Shall I send my familiar to suck your blood? He’ll melt your eyeballs and eat your brains. He’ll
creep in the night and make you itch until you scratch out your own eyes. He’ll make you shit blood out your arse.’

But Francis is already running. ‘I’ll see you in Hell!’ he shouts over his shoulder, but the widow only laughs contemptuously as she lowers her stick at last.

‘More than likely,’ she says.

Overhead there is a rumble of thunder. I am retching and shivering in the grass as a gust of wind lifts my hair and splatters rain against my face.

I blinked at it, and abruptly I was back at Lucy’s desk with the rain pounding on the windowsill and the screensaver on my computer twisting and circling silently.

Lightning crackled across the sky and I flinched. The window was still wide open and the rain was splattering over Lucy’s papers, half of which had been blown onto the floor, where they
lay damp and reproachful. The temperature had dropped dramatically, and I was shivering as I stood to pull the sash window down. I was very cold, and not just because of the rain.

It was a long time since I had had a bath. I was used to sluicing cold water over myself from a
mandi
, and it felt very strange lowering myself into hot water, but my
teeth were clacking together so hard that my jaw ached, and I knew I had to get warm.

Lying back in the water, I listened to the rain splattering against the windows, and willed myself to relax, but the harder I tried to empty my mind, the more I churned with memories of that
brutal assault in the orchard. The stench of rotting apples clung in my nostrils and I ached all over. I couldn’t get the feel of Francis out of my mind – his vicious hands and slobbery
tongue, and the violence as he tried to push himself into me.

The memory of it made me gag. Perhaps he hadn’t succeeded in raping me completely, but I still felt sick and soiled. I found some soap and a flannel and scrubbed my body vigorously, trying
to obliterate the disgust, the fear, the powerlessness, but no matter how hard I rubbed, I couldn’t get clean.

Eventually the water grew cold, but I couldn’t face getting out, so I leant forward and turned on the hot tap, and let it run while I soaped my arms and shoulders mindlessly. Encountering
the familiar texture of my birthmark, I paused and my fingers traced the outline of it unsteadily. Hawise had the same mark, in the same place.
The mark of a witch
. Francis’s words
echoed around the bathroom and I shuddered.

Why couldn’t I stop
thinking
? After the tsunami I’d been able to shut down any thoughts I didn’t want. I put them in a box and didn’t look at them. I
didn’t want to rehash the experience endlessly. What was the point in that? It was over. Sometimes, it was true, a memory would prod at the edge of my consciousness and my throat would close
with apprehension, but I learnt to deal with the fear. The moment I felt myself start to remember, I would stop. I made myself breathe through it, deliberately blanking my mind until the memory
subsided back into the darkness. I was good at it.

But lying there in Lucy’s bath, the thought of Francis felt too raw and too vicious to be pushed away easily. Still, I tried. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes and told myself to
breathe.

Don’t think,
I said to myself.
Just breathe.

‘Breathe,’ says the widow as I gasp and retch in the grass. ‘Don’t think about what happened. Don’t think about anything. Just breathe.’

Her voice is strong and I do as I am told, closing my eyes and closing my mind to Francis, and concentrating instead on breathing laboriously – in and out, in and out – until the
panic recedes and the awful tightness in my chest begins to relax. I have the strangest feeling that I have done this before, but how could I have done? I have never felt this fear and disgust
before, this realization that, for Francis Bewley, I am not a person. I am not Hawise. I am just a thing.

I look up at Sybil Dent with a mixture of fear and gratitude. She must be a witch. I saw with my own eyes what she did to Francis, but if she hadn’t been there I would have been lost.

Trembling, I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. ‘Thank you.’

‘Are you hurt?’

I realize that my wrists are bleeding and that I’m scratched and bruised. My cheek is aching, and when I touch my throbbing mouth, my fingers come away bloody. Francis’s ring must
have cut me.

‘Less than I would have been if you hadn’t come along,’ I say.

She nods. ‘You can’t go back like that. Can you get up?’

My legs are shaking so much I can barely stand, but I haul myself up using the tree for support. Shaking off the pieces of crushed apple staining my skirt, I pull my sleeves back into place as
well as I can.

The widow studies me with those strange eyes that seem to know everything about me without me saying a word. ‘Come,’ she says in her odd, abrupt manner, and turns to shuffle off.

I am afraid to follow her, but afraid not to, and after a moment I follow her to her cottage. It’s a lonely place, tucked amongst some trees beyond the crofts, and I can’t help
remembering all the stories I’ve heard about witches. Will she make me serve the Devil? I am trembling all over, but right now I think I would prefer Satan himself to Francis Bewley. I can
hardly believe how quickly he changed, and when I think about the viciousness in his expression, I could almost believe he
was
the Devil.

I hesitate in the doorway of the cottage. It’s a single room, dark and smoky, with just a rough plank table, a couple of stools and a pallet of straw, but the mud floor is swept and
tidy.

At a gesture from the widow, I sink down on one of the stools and she fetches a bowl of water with some herbs floating in it: lady’s mantle, mint, pennyroyal and rosemary. It smells good,
it smells clean, the way rosemary always does, and it comforts me.

The widow’s gnarled hands are gentle, a strange contrast to her manner, as she sponges the blood from my hands and face. Afterwards she helps me retie my sleeves and brings me some spiced
ale. I drink it under the unblinking yellow gaze of a cat with dark, striking markings.

She is a beautiful creature, and I rub my fingers to beckon her, the way I do to Hap sometimes. After a moment’s consideration she comes and inclines her head to let me scratch her
chin.

The widow watches me as the cat strops herself against my skirts and I stroke her soft fur. ‘What is her name?’ I ask.