Time's Echo (36 page)

It was partly my own fault, I knew. I had let my guard down, just as Vivien had warned. I had let myself relax and Hawise had snuck back, but this time I wouldn’t let her take over. I
would put on my amulet as soon as I got home.

It was raining properly when I walked home. I’d forgotten my umbrella and the wind-tunnel effect on the south side of the Minster blew the rain right into my eyes. Preoccupied by my
thoughts, I turned up my collar and screwed up my face, glad when the wind dropped away as I reached Goodramgate. I paused there, wiping the worst of the wet from my face with the back of my
hand.

I was careless. I’d grown used to not needing that guard on my mind, and I didn’t stop to wonder why, instead of turning left to Monk Bar, I looked right, down to where the
Beckwiths’ house once stood. The street shimmered through the rain and a sense of foreboding crept over me, so strong that I caught my breath and my hand went to my mouth. Frantically I
blinked to fix myself in the present, but it was too late.

‘They say there’s sickness in Selby.’ Isobel is back from the market and is unloading vegetables from her basket onto the table while Margery checks them,
lips pursed.

We are in the kitchen. I am showing Joan how to make an infusion to calm the stomach, and trying to ignore the sweatiness that is making my ruff itch and my hair stick to my scalp beneath my
cap. Alison is plucking a chicken and Bess is on the floor, grasping at the tiny feathers as they drift in the sunlight through the open door. It is July, and the days are long and remorselessly
hot. It hasn’t rained for weeks. The streets are baked hard and the flies are thick around the middens. The gutters are dry, the Ouse shrunken and sluggish, and the smell of the privies hangs
heavy in the air.

‘There’s always sickness in Selby,’ Margery snaps. She holds up a cucumber so limp that it bends at one end, and waves it at Isobel. ‘What do you call this?’

There is a pause while we all look at the cucumber, then as one we break into helpless giggles. Even Bess joins in, not understanding how lewd the cucumber looks, just laughing delightedly
because we are laughing, and for a moment I forget the heat and the stickiness and the discomfort. There is just a kitchen full of sunlight and laughter. I should reprove the maids for their
silliness, but I don’t want to. I want to hold onto this moment forever, I think.

‘It’s a . . . c-cucumber,’ Isobel manages, wiping her eyes, as the rest of us try to stifle our giggles.

‘Oh, you girls!’ Margery tsks and shakes her head, and it pleases me that I am obviously included with the maids. I can see that she is only pretending to disapprove anyway. A smile
is tugging at the corner of her mouth in spite of herself.

‘Could do with a codpiece, couldn’t it?’ she says, and we all burst into laughter again, until Joan gets hiccups and throws her apron over her head, which just makes us laugh
even more.

At last we subside, apart from a few hiccups from Joan, and Margery goes back to grumbling about the state of the vegetables.

‘It was the best they had,’ Isobel protests. ‘There’s nowt decent in the market right now.’

‘They’re closing the bars,’ she adds, when Margery simply sniffs and starts to pick over the strawberries that she has bought. ‘No one from Selby way is allowed into the
city. Lucky the master got back in time, in’t it?’

It is. Ned only returned from Hull yesterday. Rob is still there, overseeing the unloading of the ships from the Baltic and negotiating with the keelmen who will bring the goods up the river to
York. Ned didn’t come back on the Selby road, it is true, but when rumours of sickness start, the Lord Mayor is quick to shut the city gates to strangers. It happens most summers and it
interferes with business, but we don’t fret overmuch. It is a long time since the plague hit York hard – since before I was born anyway. A few people die every summer, but it is never
as bad as the older people tell.

So when Margery reports a couple of days later that the baker Stephen Robson is dead, we cross ourselves, but are not afraid. In life we are in death. The next day there is news of another death
in the parish – Elizabeth Lamb, the innkeeper’s wife – and the next day there are two more: the widow Catherine Bowman, and William Young’s servant, Ralf.

It starts slowly and then, without warning, it is out of control. One day we are at the market, waving the flies from our faces and complaining about the heat. The next the streets are empty and
the air is sour with fear. I wake up one morning expecting it to be a normal day. I am thinking about the tasks I will set Isobel and Alison and Joan, about whether it is too hot to clear out the
larder. It is so hot that we have been sleeping with the windows wide open, and still we cannot sleep.

The bells are tolling. Ned goes out and comes home, his face grave. The sickness is spreading. Already two of the aldermen are dead, who yesterday were going about their business.

‘What should we do?’

‘Stay home. Take care of our own. Do we have food?’

‘Enough,’ I say. It is hard to believe that it will affect us. Others perhaps, but not us. We are lucky.

The news of the sickness is spreading as fast as the plague. Alison and Joan have heard it from Isobel, who had it from Mistress Richardson across the street. It is not the sweating sickness, it
is the dreaded pestilence – the one Mistress Beckwith told us about, and which ravaged London some twelve years ago. I was just a child then, but I remember the hushed way folk spoke of what
was happening to the southerners. The maids are whispering of boils and black skin, of buboes that split and ooze blood and pus, and a stench like no other. It sounds horrible, but it cannot really
happen, not to us.

And for a day or two it seems that it is so. The streets are quiet, the country people stay away from the markets, and the workshops fall silent one by one. It is as if we are all waiting,
holding our breaths and keeping very still, so that the sickness won’t see us crouching in our houses as it prowls the city like a fox around the henhouse. If we do not move, perhaps it will
pass us by, the way it always has before.

It takes a long time before we realize that it will not go away, that it has settled in like a dog with a bone. The maids are frightened, and even Margery looks grim, so I try and keep up a
semblance of normality. I am worried about the Beckwiths, though.

Ned doesn’t like the idea of me going to see them. ‘Better everyone stays close to home at the moment,’ he says.

But I was part of the Beckwiths’ family for many years. ‘I will go straight there,’ I promise. ‘I just want to see they’re all right.’

‘What about your sister?’

As always with Agnes, I feel guilty. I should have thought of her first. But going to her house means I might meet Francis.

‘Could you go?’ I ask Ned. ‘Tell her I’m thinking of her. Promise her anything that she needs.’

The streets are eerily quiet as I walk through Thursday Market and up Goodramgate. A lot of the shops have their windows shut up, and the workshops are silent. There are no women sitting at the
doors, no children playing in the street. A dog slinks along the gutter, skittering away at my approach. The few people who are out scurry along, hunched as if the pestilence is stalking behind
them, waiting to tap them on the shoulder. Ordinarily I would linger outside, but not today. I feel as if I have walked into a different world.

The Beckwiths’ shop is shuttered, and the door is closed. My gut tightens with fear at the sight of it and I pound frantically at the door. It seems a long time before it is opened. My
mistress stands there, and her face is so ravaged that I take a step back.

‘No,’ I say before she has said anything. ‘No.’

‘You shouldn’t be here, Hawise.’

My mouth trembles. This was my home, my refuge. The Beckwiths have been constants in my life. They are good, decent people who saved me from my father. ‘Who?’ is all I can
manage.

‘Your master. Dick. And now Meg has the headache.’ Her voice is leached of all emotion. She looks exhausted.

I can’t take it in. My master, with his beefy face and his bluster, cannot be dead. And Dick, who teased Elizabeth and me, had almost finished his apprenticeship. He should be making his
masterpiece, joining the tailors’ guild, not lying in a grave.

‘The carters came last night,’ my mistress says. ‘They have taken them away.’

There are already too many dead for proper burials. There is just a pit. My master will not lie in the fine tomb he had planned. He will be tossed into a pit next to his apprentice, who never
had the chance to plan his own tomb.

‘What can I do?’ I ask, my throat so tight I can hardly speak.

‘Go home,’ says my mistress. ‘Keep safe.’

I can’t just leave her here with poor, sick Meg. I take a step forward without thinking. ‘You need help. Let me come in.’

‘No.’ She bars the door. ‘You have a child to think of.’

The thought of Bess makes me hesitate. ‘But—’

‘No, Hawise, it is too dangerous,’ she says as firmly as her exhaustion allows. ‘I’m surprised your husband let you come at all.’ Seeing my expression, she guesses
the truth and shakes her head. ‘You always were wilful, but you’re a good girl. You look after that daughter of yours.’

She makes to close the door and I can’t bear the thought that this may be the last I see of her. ‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ I insist. ‘I’ll bring you food at
least.’

But when I go back, there is no answer. The door stays shut. I knock and knock and no one comes.

This time there was no jarring, no dislocation. The edges of time were blurred, and all I did was blink to slip between one world and the other, a sideways step rather than the
precipitous fall it had been before.

My face was wet as I stared at where the house had been. The facade was changed now beyond all recognition, but the memories of the place resonated beneath the tarmac and the concrete, layer
upon layer of events and actions and feelings that had settled into a thick crust. It seemed solid and stable, but it could shift with no warning, just as the Earth’s crust had slipped
beneath the Indian Ocean.

Leaden with grief, I turned and walked back out through the bar to Lucy’s house – the house I kept forgetting not to call home. Mistress Beckwith had been a fine person, much
cleverer than her husband and sensible enough not to let him know it. She was the closest Hawise had to a mother, and I knew what it was like to lose a mother.

I remembered when mine had died. I hadn’t cried, all the time she was ill. Not that I was brave or sweetly supportive. I was furious. I was angry with her for being sick, for wasting away
before my eyes, for the tubes and the bags and the stink and the pain. I was angry with my father for not being able to stop it happening, and with myself for not being kind or heroic, the way I
knew I should have been. I was fifteen and cruel and selfish, and part of me knew it at the time. That made me angry too.

So I was thinking about my mother as I walked home in the rain, and I forgot to think about Hawise or how easily she had overcome my resistance. The rain plastered my hair to my head and ran
down my face, and I knuckled it away from my cheeks. I wasn’t crying, I was just wet.

A stone had settled cold and hard in my chest. I let myself into the house. I dropped my bag onto the table in the little dining room, right next to the apple I had known would be there. For
once, I barely noticed it. I was too sad to care.

I set the basket wearily on the table in the hall. Ned is there and he looks a question at me. I shake my head in reply, my lips pressed fiercely together to stop them from
trembling.

‘Oh, little wife,’ he says and puts his arms around me.

I lean against him. He is strong and solid and safe. ‘I’m frightened,’ I say quietly.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘It is God’s will, Hawise. We must accept it.’

I nod – what else can we do? – and pull myself away from him. Only then do I see Francis Bewley standing in the shadows.

‘What are you doing here?’ I demand, too heartsick for courtesy.

Too late I realize that Agnes is behind him, hanging onto Francis’s arm. ‘I knew she wouldn’t want us here,’ she says in a trembling voice.

‘I asked them to stay,’ says Ned.

‘We agreed that it would be easier if the family were together,’ Francis puts in, and even in this time of trial his hot eyes seem to leave a slimy trail as he looks over my body.
‘Agnes cannot manage on her own. Our servant has gone home to her mother, who is sick. We do not have others, as you do.’

Ned can see my face. ‘It is sensible, Hawise,’ he says. ‘We must look out for each other.’

I am too tired and sad to argue. ‘As you wish, Husband.’

Margery is the first to die. The next morning she is creasing her eyes as if the light is too bright. I send her to bed, my gut churning with anxiety, and ask Agnes to keep
Bess well away.

Margery’s eyes glitter with fear. Her body is racked with fever and she retches into the basin that I hold helplessly. I wipe her face with a wet cloth, but she is burning up. It is only
now that I realize how much I have come to rely on her to keep the household running.