Time's Echo (30 page)

Unlike me.

But it doesn’t matter what the neighbours say. Agnes is right. I can ignore them, but I cannot ignore the ache inside me. It will never go away until I hold my own baby in my arms.

I have been patient, I have prayed, to no avail. Now I will see if Sybil can help.

I didn’t tell Agnes I was coming. I don’t know why. I opened my mouth to ask if she wanted to come with me, but then I shut it again. Agnes will tell Francis, and I don’t want
him to know. I have accepted that I cannot change the fact that he and Agnes are married, but I avoid him as much as I can. Agnes seems happy enough. Sometimes I wonder if I imagined what he said
to me at their wedding. He has said nothing since, but still, I do not want to meet him out here again. I may have accepted his marriage, but I have not forgotten what he did to me, and what he did
to Hap.

‘Come in then, as you’re here,’ says Sybil and pushes past me into the cottage. Inside it is as clean as I remembered.

‘This is for you.’ I hand over the basket of food I have made up: a pie, some cheese, a loaf of bread.

The widow pulls back the cloth and inspects my offering before grunting in acknowledgement. She puts the food on the table and jerks her head at a stool.

I sit obediently. The cat, Mog, appears and rubs her head against my skirts. Now that I am inside, I wonder why I was afraid. It is strangely restful in the dim light, just sitting and stroking
the cat while the widow moves purposefully around, pulling dried herbs from the bunches that hang from the ceiling and whose scent mingles with the woody smell of leaves and earth.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask at last.

‘Making you what you came for.’

My hand stills on Mog’s fur. ‘How do you know what it is that I want?’ I say, and she snorts.

‘You want a child.’ Her strange eyes gleam at me. ‘What woman doesn’t?’

It cannot be so hard to guess, after all. I moisten my lips. ‘Can you help me?’

‘Can’t promise,’ she says, ‘but this will make it easier for the baby to take hold.’

‘What is that?’ I’m not sure whether I really want to know the answer or not.

‘Nothing you couldn’t find yourself if you knew where to look.’

Intrigued, I get up from the stool and go over to where she is picking over the herbs.

‘Nettles.’ I recognize one plant at least. ‘And this one?’ I ask, pointing.

‘Blossom of red clover,’ Sybil grunts.

I lift a third bunch to my nose and sniff. The smell is familiar, but I can’t place it. ‘What’s this?’

‘Raspberry leaves.’

‘Of course.’ I should have known that one. Mistress Beckwith made many of her own simple remedies, as I do in my kitchen, and raspberries have many uses.

Sybil shakes the herbs into a square of old paper, mutters an incantation over it and twists it up with surprisingly deft fingers, for one so gnarled.

‘Make an infusion of this, and drink every day, but you must do it yourself. Drink nothing prepared by anyone else.’

‘My sister has been making me a drink that she says will help.’

‘And has it?’

‘No,’ I say slowly, ‘not yet.’

‘Drink hers or drink mine.’ The widow shrugs indifferently.

I rise slowly to my feet, the twist in my hands. The thought of Agnes’s drink niggles in my brain. It hasn’t helped. But I cannot let myself believe that it has done more than
that.

I find a coin in my purse and give it to Sybil, who examines it carefully and nods. ‘Thank you,’ I say and then hesitate. ‘Will you be all right? There is much muttering in the
city about witchcraft. Janet Walker was taken for trial the other day, and Mary Thomas too. They say that the city is rife with witches.’

‘And you think I am a witch?’ The widow seems amused.

I don’t answer directly. The truth is that I am not sure. ‘I fear for you. There are folk who think any cunning woman is a witch.’

‘I don’t bother them.’

‘I know, it’s just . . . ’ I don’t know how to explain to Sybil the fever that has caught hold in the streets. Suddenly every old woman is suspect, every tiny problem
blamed on witchcraft. How can she know about that, out here? ‘I don’t think you should go into the town at the moment. There is something . . . not right . . . in the air.’

‘Don’t you worry about me,’ says Sybil. ‘Look to yourself, that’s all you can do.’

‘Grace? Where are you going?’

‘Home,’ I said. ‘I must go home.’

‘Home’s this way.’ There was a shifting, a sliding in the air, and Drew’s face slipped into focus. He was watching me with a slight frown. Beside us, people were crossing
the road as the light turned green, but I had turned and was facing back to Monk Bar.

Back to Coney Street, back to the past.

I was getting better at adjusting. The shift from past to present had been so subtle that I had barely more than a moment’s disorientation. It was enough for the green man to turn red.

‘Sorry,’ I said to Drew. ‘I thought I’d forgotten something. It doesn’t matter, though.’

I’d forgotten quite how acute his eyes could be. Had he noticed the blankness in my face? I wondered. Had he sensed that, for a few moments, I had been somewhere else? Sometime else?
Someone else?

I hoped not. I didn’t want to answer any questions. I didn’t want to lie to him, and I didn’t want to tell the truth, either. He wouldn’t understand –
wouldn’t
want
to understand – how I could be aching still with the loss of the baby that Hawise had longed for.

Drew was still studying my face. He had a way of looking at you, as if he could see right inside you. It was very disconcerting.

Sliding my gaze from his, I made a big deal of shifting my bag from one shoulder to another and tried to think of a way to distract him.

‘What are you seeing tomorrow?’ It was the best I could do, but at least I had the satisfaction of catching him unawares for once.

‘Tomorrow?’

‘You said you were going to the cinema.’

‘Oh . . . yes.’ He told me the title, but I didn’t recognize it. Something Italian, with subtitles. Not my kind of thing at all.

‘Are you going with Sophie?’

All right, I was fishing, but it worked. ‘No, actually I’m going with Sarah.’

His voice was a shade too casual, and in spite of myself my lips tightened, sure that it meant he and Sarah were seeing each other. I felt a fool, remembering the lust that had gripped me, until
Hawise had dragged me back to the past.

‘Oh.’

‘We’re just friends,’ said Drew.

Our eyes collided and veered away, and I stared at the red man, mortified to find that I was blushing.

‘Oh,’ I said again, but I was glad.

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Drew wiggled the mouse to bring the desktop’s screen back to life. ‘A lot of the material is very repetitive.
I’m not sure it’ll mean anything to you.’

‘Yes,’ I said, although the truth was that I
wasn’t
sure. Did I want proof or not? If none of the people I knew as Hawise had ever existed, then I would be forced to
conclude that it was all in my mind, and I didn’t like the idea of having such a vivid fantasy life. It smacked of mental illness to me, and that felt as bad as the idea of being possessed.
Either way, it meant I had lost control of myself.

But now I was doing something to take back control, I reminded myself. ‘I’d like to try anyway,’ I told Drew.

‘Okay.’ Standing, he clicked around the screen until a database appeared, and motioned me to the chair. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘You might as well make yourself
comfortable.’

The screen was divided into columns. ‘This is the manuscript reference,’ said Drew, pointing. ‘Date, ward, first name, surname, occupation, and so on. I’ve included the
category of offence and the fine, as well as the location, if known, and there’s a final field for a transcription of any particularly interesting entries.’

‘Right,’ I said, peering at the screen. The type was so small it was hard to make out any details. There were clearly pages and pages of entries. ‘How do we find an
individual?’ I was eager to get started by then. ‘I presume you can search the database somehow?’

‘Of course, but the more information you can provide, the better. If you just have a first name like Thomas, John or William, you’re going to get thousands of matches. Bear in mind,
too, that there was no standardized spelling at this period, least of all when it came to surnames, so you need to do a search that will bring up all possible variations. If you know an occupation,
or where the individual lived – even if it’s only a ward – you can narrow down your search.’

‘Okay.’ I drew a breath. ‘Let’s try.’

But Drew wasn’t finished yet. ‘The database includes all individuals who appear in the wardmote-court records between 1575 and 1586, so it’s a narrow window, but even then, it
doesn’t really prove anything one way or another,’ he warned. ‘All the men in the ward were invited to the court, but only those chosen to be jurors had their name recorded; or if
they were officials of some kind – a churchwarden, say, or a constable, or an alderman presiding over the court, of course. Or they might appear if they were presented for some offence, but
they could just as easily slip through and not appear in any of the records at all.’

‘I understand.’ I was finding it hard to contain my impatience. ‘We could have a go, couldn’t we?’

Resigned, Drew pulled up another chair and sat down next to me. ‘What name did you have in mind?’

I drew a breath, let it out carefully. ‘Ned Hilliard,’ I said, and his name felt plump and sweet and
right
in my mouth.

‘Ned as in Edward?’

‘Yes.’

Drew filled out some complicated filter, typing in Hilliard, Hilyard, Hillyard, Hiliarde.

‘Any idea where this “Edward Hilliard” lived?’

‘Bootham ward,’ I said without thinking, and then, when Drew looked at me, ‘Coney Street.’

‘As it happens, Coney Street
was
in Bootham ward in the late sixteenth century,’ he said.

I said nothing.

‘Occupation?’

‘Merchant.’

I was very aware of Drew’s jean-clad thigh close to mine, of his fingers on the keyboard, and I wondered how they would feel against my skin. The thought made me shift uncomfortably in my
chair. I felt guilty, as if I had been caught ogling another man in front of my husband.

But of course Ned wasn’t my husband. He was dead. He’d been dead for more than four hundred years, if he had ever lived at all.

‘Okay.’ Drew clicked on ‘apply filter’, and the answer popped up in a fraction of a second.

No match found
.

I stared at the screen, shaken by the bitterness of my disappointment. Only then did I realize how much I had wanted Ned to be real.

I gnawed at my thumb. ‘Try . . . try Francis Bewley.’ Just saying his name sent a wave of loathing through me.

A William Bewley popped up, but no Francis.

Drew was carefully not saying ‘I told you so’.

‘Do you mind trying one more?’ I asked him. I could feel Hawise in my head, urging me on. Look harder, look further.

Drew opened his mouth and I was sure he was going to point out that I was wasting my time, but in the end he just put his fingers to the keyboard. ‘Name?’

I thought of my master, and how he had grumbled about the streets. Surely there would be some record of him? I remembered him so vividly: a brash, bluff man who rarely realized how cleverly his
much more interesting wife managed him. He had to have been real.

‘William Beckwith,’ I said, leaning forward, tense. ‘He lives in Goodramgate.
Lived
,’ I amended quickly at Drew’s look. ‘Maybe.’

‘Monk ward then.’ He pulled up another database and filled out the filter fields: name, surname, location.

And there he was on the screen: William Beckwith, mercer, Goodramgate.

I hissed in a breath that was part-shock, part-satisfaction.

‘It’s not an uncommon name,’ said Drew, watching my face. ‘It doesn’t prove anything.’

‘I know,’ I said, but it did for me. I
knew
that William Beckwith, and no amount of psychoanalysis by his friend Sarah would tell me otherwise.

‘Is this all you have?’ I asked Drew. ‘Just this database?’

‘No, the records are transcribed. I’m not sure they’d mean much to you. They’re very repetitive.’

‘Can I look at them anyway?’

With an air of resignation, Drew got out a folder of closely typed pages and handed them over to me. I sat at his kitchen table. The entries were laid out in a strange way, and I didn’t
understand all the symbols. Although they were mostly in English, the spelling made it hard to read, but if I said it out loud I could make sense of it, and the phrasing rang like a bell inside
me.

I turned the pages, and my back prickled with the uncanny sensation of Hawise leaning over my shoulder. I recognized so many of the names. John Standeven, Robert Cook, Mr Frankland . . . I
– she – knew them all. John Harper. I could picture him exactly, with his carnal mouth and the lazily insolent way that he undressed with his eyes every woman who passed. And my eye
snagged on an Andrew Trewe, although I didn’t think Hawise could have known him well, for the name felt only vaguely familiar. It was strange to look down at my own surname, written so
casually and so long ago, and to wonder if he might have been some distant ancestor.

Nicholas Ellis
. The name jumped out at me and I grew very still as I reread the entry, until only my eyes were moving, flicking backwards and forwards over the lines.
We present
Myles Fell mylner for kepinge a mastis bytche unmossyllid whiche dyd bytt Nicholas Ellis legge.

My mouth was dry as I showed the entry to Drew. ‘What’s this
mastis bytche unmoss
-whatever?’

‘Miles Fell was a miller,’ he said, and I didn’t tell him I knew that already. ‘He’s presented here for not muzzling his dog, a mastiff bitch, which obviously bit
this Nicholas Ellis on the leg. All the bigger dogs were supposed to be muzzled in the street. It seems to have been quite a problem.’

I wasn’t listening. I was remembering the miller and his brutish dog, the fury on Nick Ellis’s face. If it hadn’t been for that commotion, Hawise might never have met Francis
Bewley.