Time's Echo (34 page)

It is too hot in the bed. Usually I like it when Ned pulls the curtains around us, making a cosy island where there are just the two of us, and no one else to see what we do to
each other, no one to think that I am immodest, that together we are lascivious and shameless about it. I like the way Ned turns and smiles at me when I slide down the pillows and hold out my arms
to him. I like how he settles over me, how his hands and his lips leave me boneless with desire.

Usually, yes, but tonight we were both slick with sweat when we fell apart, and now the hangings trap the claggy air and the darkness slumps heavy on me.

I did sleep at first, but uneasily. I dreamt I was walking along a shore beside the sea I have never seen. I remember it very clearly. Ned tells me the sea is grey and turbulent; he says I
wouldn’t like it, not really, but in my dream the sea was green as an emerald, and a hot wind blew my unbound hair back from my face and stirred the leaves of the strange, spiky trees.
Beneath my bare feet the sand was warm and soft and white, like no sand I have ever seen before. There was a necklace around my neck, hot and heavy, and I wore curious undergarments. My shift was
no more than a thin sheet wrapped around my breasts, but as is the way of dreams, my nakedness seemed natural. I was smiling, I remember that.

And then I turned and the dream became a nightmare. The sea rose up and engulfed me, and I was tumbling around and around and around in the water. I was choking, I was drowning.

I woke gasping for breath. Thanks be to God, it was just a dream. ‘Drew,’ I murmured and reached for him as he lay beside me, but just before I touched him, I jerked my hand
back.

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 spending 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?’