Time's Echo (32 page)

Little Bess is a source of wonder to me. She is so tiny, so perfect, I cannot believe that she is mine. I lay my hand on her to check that she is breathing, and the feel of her small chest
rising and falling is like a fist around my heart. And although I am pleased that the women have taken me as one of their own, I long to be alone with my baby too, just to marvel at her.

I am tired as well, and at last the women do leave, shooed out by Margery, who has decreed that I need my sleep. Bess lies in a cradle near the bed. I lie on my side so that I can watch it. I am
scared to sleep, because if I sleep, who will watch Bess? How can I guard her from harm if I am asleep? I am determined to stay awake, but my eyelids close anyway.

I’m not sure what makes me stir, but I open my eyes to see Agnes bending over the cradle. I can’t see her expression, but there is a tension about her shoulders, a stiffness to her
arms, that makes me think something is wrong.

Instantly I am wide awake. ‘Agnes?’ I haul myself up onto the pillows as she spins round, her face shocked. ‘What is it?’ I say sharply. ‘Why do you look so?
What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong.’ The startled look is smoothed from her face and now it is blank and unreadable.

‘Are you sure? Is it the baby?’ Fear sharpens my voice.

‘The baby is well.’

I am throwing back the coverlet, trying to struggle up. Something about Agnes’s lack of expression makes me afraid. ‘I want to see her!’

‘Be calm, Sister.’ Irritation feathers her voice and she lifts Bess from the cradle and hands her to me. ‘You see?’

Frantically I check Bess, whose face is screwed up in sleep. She is breathing! She seems fine. I hold her tight, wondering how long I am going to have to live with this terror that something
might happen to her. Childhood is a dangerous time, we all know that.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say to Agnes. I can sense that she is exasperated by my fancies. ‘I was just . . . it was the way you looked.’

‘I was just admiring my goddaughter,’ she says, but she doesn’t sound as if she admires Bess. She has kept her distance from the baby until now. I think this must be the first
time Agnes has touched her in fact, and she handed her over to me as if she were a bolt of cloth, as if she didn’t like touching her.

But it must be hard for Agnes, I realize, ready to feel sorry for anyone who isn’t me and who doesn’t have my beautiful Bess as their daughter. There is no sign that Agnes has
conceived. She cannot feel my happiness. My poor sister, married to Francis Bewley and without the joy of a child of her own.

‘A new mother’s fancies,’ I apologize.

Agnes and Eliza Skelton take Bess to be baptized, and I fret all the time they are at the church. I haven’t been churched yet, and must stay at home. Ned and Margery will be there, I
reason, and Mistress Beckwith, who has had children of her own. She knows how to hold a baby. Agnes just needs to stand there and make her promises. There is no need to feel unease.

But I don’t like the fact that Francis has announced that he will attend the baptism. I have seen little of him for the past few weeks. It was one of the best things about my confinement,
and now I am to stay in my chamber until I am churched. This will be the first time Francis sees Bess. I don’t want him to touch her.

He cannot do anything to Bess in church, surely? I wish Agnes hadn’t told me that he was going. I don’t relax until Bess is back in my arms. I have to keep Francis away from her. As
soon as I am churched I will be able to watch her all the time, but until then, I want my baby safely with me, where he cannot even look at her.

‘You look terrible,’ said Drew when he opened the door.

‘Silver-tongued devil, aren’t you?’ My hand went to my pendant and I drew a breath. ‘Have you got a minute?’

‘Sure.’ He stood back and held open the door. ‘Want a cup of tea? Or something stronger?’ His voice was pleasant, but cool.

I probably didn’t deserve even that.

‘Tea would be good. Thanks.’

I followed him into the kitchen and was glad to sit down when he gestured me to a stool at the tiny breakfast bar. Drew filled the kettle, clicked it on and then leant back against the worktop
while he waited for it to boil, studying me with a crease between his brows. I was drawn and pasty-skinned, and the hair tucked behind my ears was lank, I knew. I’d seen myself in the mirror
and been appalled by the lines of strain bracketing my mouth, and the anguish in my eyes. Drew wouldn’t think I was exciting now, that was for sure.

‘You really do look rough,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you well?’

‘I’m—’

‘Fine, I know,’ he interrupted me, exasperated.

‘I
am fine
. I just didn’t sleep very well, that’s all.’

Then I wished I hadn’t said that. The memory of the night before twanged in the air between us. I looked away. Better to get it out of the way. It was why I was there, after all.

‘Drew, about last night . . . ’

But he stopped me again, holding up a hand. ‘You don’t need to say anything, Grace. I got the point when you left without saying goodbye.’ His voice was even, but I flinched as
if it had been a whip.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, shame-faced. ‘I really am. I just . . . I’m not very good at intimacy,’ I stumbled on when he raised his brows. ‘I mean, the sex
was great – really it was. It’s nothing to do with you.’

‘Oh, wait. Is this the whole “It’s not you” speech?’ he said. ‘I love that one.’

At the kettle’s frantic whistle he turned to pour boiling water over the teabags and I looked helplessly at his back.

‘It
isn’t
you,’ I said. ‘It’s me.’

There was a silence. ‘Is there someone else?’ Drew asked without turning round.

‘No. At least . . . ’ I thought of Ned, of how easy it was to confuse my feelings for the two men. ‘No, not really. It’s not that.’

I wanted what Hawise had with Ned, I realized, but I couldn’t imagine ever getting close enough to anyone to get married. I would have to let down my guard and make myself vulnerable, and
that felt too dangerous.

Hawise hadn’t had a choice. If she’d had one, would she have married Ned? I didn’t think so, and that meant she would never have known what it was like to love him.

I had a choice, but the responsibility felt huge, stifling. How could you possibly know that you were making the right decision? How could you know what it would be like to live with someone,
day in, day out, knowing that you couldn’t – or shouldn’t – walk away whenever you wanted?

Drew turned at last. Handing me a mug, he pushed the milk across the breakfast bar. ‘If it’s not someone else, what is it?’

‘It’s just that I’ve got a lot on my mind at the moment,’ I said weakly. ‘Everything’s so complicated right now.’

That at least was true. I was living Hawise’s life as well as my own – I had just had a baby, for God’s sake! – while teaching and trying to sort out Lucy’s
affairs. I couldn’t be expected to embark on a relationship too.

‘Last night was a mistake,’ I said.

Drew wasn’t going to let me off the hook that easily. He was leaning against the kitchen units, ankles crossed, watching me with that unnervingly level gaze. ‘In what way?’

I turned the mug round and round between my hands, wondering how to explain. I could hardly tell Drew that I was possessed, that I feared that I had been aroused by memories of another man, of a
man who had died hundreds of years earlier.

And I couldn’t blame it all on Hawise. I had known what I was doing. The memory of Drew’s mouth on me speared through my misery, quick and clean and hot. I hadn’t been making
love with Ned. Drew smelt different, felt different. It had been him.

‘Look, the truth is, I’m not into a committed relationship,’ I said, knowing that I sounded bolshie, and Drew raised his brows.

‘I wasn’t planning on asking you to marry me,’ he said coolly. ‘Don’t you think you’re taking things a bit too seriously? It was just one night, but
you’re right: it
was
good. It doesn’t have to be complicated.’

‘I’m just no good at the whole holding-each-other-afterwards and sleeping-together stuff.’ I stirred my tea, not looking at him. ‘That’s why I left last night. I
should have said goodbye, I know, but I get all panicky . . . To be honest, I thought you might regret it this morning too.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, we’re so different, aren’t we? We want completely different things.’

Drew set his mug carefully on the worktop and gave me a level look. ‘How do you know what I want?’ he asked.

‘I know you’re a settled kind of guy,’ I said. ‘You’ve got your job, your house, your daughter, and I know they’re all important to you. I don’t want
any of those things.’

‘Have you ever tried them?’

‘The closest I got to it was with Matt, but it would have been a disaster for both of us,’ I said. ‘I can see that now. He’s happily married, and his wife is about as
different from me as you could imagine. If we’d stayed together, one or other of us would have been fooling ourselves that we wanted something that we really didn’t. At least the
tsunami made that clear.’

‘So what do you want, Grace?’

I didn’t look at him. Until the night before I would have been able to answer without hesitation. Now, I had given birth. I knew what it was like to hold my daughter in my arms. My breasts
were still tender, my body churning with hormones, my mind swerving between the past and the present.

‘I want to know that I can pack up my case and move on whenever I feel like it,’ I said in the end. That had always been true, and there was no reason to change now. ‘I
don’t want to need anybody or anything.’

Drew took off his glasses and began to polish them with the bottom of his shirt. ‘Are you afraid I’m going to trap you somehow?’

‘No . . . I don’t know . . . ’ I was horrified to find myself close to tears as I twisted the chain of my pendant round and round. ‘I just don’t want you to get the
wrong idea.’

‘So what’s the right idea?’

I lifted my eyes at last and looked at Drew. His head was bent over his glasses, and he was solid, real, rock-steady in the middle of a world that seemed to be spinning ever more wildly out of
my control. As I looked, the swirling seemed to still for a moment of extraordinary clarity and I saw him as if for the first time, in startling detail. The dent on the bridge of his nose, where
his glasses pressed. The faint prickle of stubble along his jaw. The furrows of concern on his forehead. The firm angles of his face, the formidable line of his mouth. I knew what that mouth felt
like, what it tasted like, and I stamped down on the heat that threatened to uncoil within me.

Only now did I realize how familiar he had become to me. How important.

I wished I could go over and lean against him, but I couldn’t afford to depend on him. Drew couldn’t sort out Hawise for me. I had to deal with that myself and, when I had, I would
be leaving York. I didn’t want to feel that I needed him. I didn’t want to miss him when I had gone.

‘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.