Time's Echo (5 page)

‘You could say that.’

Drew was wearing a shabby tweed jacket and carrying a briefcase bulging with papers and books. He was blessedly ordinary. He was solid, real, and I noticed that, as I fixed my attention on him,
the tugging sensation in my head faded.

I cleared my throat. ‘Are you going into town too?’ That was it, I congratulated myself. Make conversation, be normal.

‘To the city archives,’ he said. ‘I’m working on local court records there at the moment.’

‘Did you finish your paper?’

‘I wish. No, I’m taking a break from it. There are only so many dung heaps and clogged gutters that I can write about at one time.’

‘It must have smelt a bit like the canals in Jakarta,’ I said. Odd that, right then, Indonesia seemed more knowable and familiar than York, with its jarring light and its wavering
air. I felt giddy again, remembering how reality had slipped sideways.

I must have imagined it. I must have.

‘Maybe,’ Drew was saying. ‘I expect we’d have found the streets of Tudor York pretty whiffy, but they had their own notions of cleanliness and they were pretty good at
enforcing them.’

‘So what are you going to be looking at in the archives?’ I asked, anxious not to let the conversation lapse. I wished I could hold Drew’s hand, but the poor man would have a
fit if I grabbed him. I would have to hang on to his words instead. ‘More nosy neighbours?’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact. I’m on research leave at the moment and I’ve a book to finish. I’m working on social identity, in a nutshell, but the chapter I’m writing
now is about misbehaviour.’

I nodded along as he talked, interested, but increasingly frustrated by that insistent itch of familiarity. I studied him under my lashes. He had one of those quiet, restrained faces that are
almost impossible to describe, but I couldn’t imagine where I would have come across Drew Dyer in the past.

‘We haven’t met before, have we?’ I asked at last.

‘No,’ said Drew. His eyes rested on my mouth for a moment and then he lifted them to meet mine. ‘I’d remember,’ he said, and there was a moment – just a tiny
moment – when there was an unmistakable zing between us. Which was ridiculous, because he was much older than me, and definitely not my type.

I looked away, unaccountably flustered.

‘Must have been in another life,’ I said, and I laughed, not very successfully.

And then I shivered.

‘Cold?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Just getting used to the change of climate.’

Drew Dyer was clearly comfortable with silence, while my fingers were wound tensely around my pendant and my shoulders hunched against the intrusive tug in my head. She was there – Hawise.
I could feel her, wanting me to remember how I had lain in the grass with my friend and my dog, and I set my jaw stubbornly. I wasn’t going to give in to it.

Deliberately I untangled my fingers from the chain and let it fall back against my neck as I thought about the clothes Elizabeth and I had been wearing. I’d never had any interest in
history, but they seemed vaguely Tudory to me, and Drew Dyer was a historian of Elizabethan York.

I glanced at him as he walked beside me, his stride easy and unconcerned. It couldn’t be a coincidence. My subconscious had obviously stirred together a mish-mash of impressions from the
night before and seasoned it with jet lag and a touch of culture shock.

Because it couldn’t be true . . . could it?

I bit my lip. ‘This area,’ I said, gesturing vaguely at the car park. ‘Have there always been buildings here?’

If Drew was surprised at the abruptness of my question, he gave no sign of it. He shifted his briefcase to tuck it under the other arm, and I had a sudden, shocking flashback to lifting Hap,
holding him wedged under my arm. My subconscious again, I told myself firmly.

‘It was mostly market gardens around here until the nineteenth century,’ Drew said. ‘Further out was the common land, but this close to the city there would have been small
allotments, orchards, that kind of thing.’

Orchards
.

An inexplicable dread prickled over my skin, catching me unawares. I pulled the sleeves of my cardigan down over my fingers as I shivered.

Drew was still talking. ‘This path we’re walking on is an ancient right of way. In Roman times it was a road leading to the praetorium, where the Minster is now.’ He pointed
ahead to the city walls with the cathedral behind. ‘Later in the Middle Ages they moved the gate to where Monk Bar is now, and they called this—’

‘Shooter Lane,’ I murmured, and he stopped and looked at me, astonished.

‘How on earth did you know that?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly, and I shivered again.

I really had to get myself a warm jacket.

York is a very old city, and it shows. There are crooked, cobbled streets and buildings misshapen with age. There are narrow alleyways with quaint names and an ancient church every time you turn
a corner. There are handsome Georgian houses jostling with half-timbered shops and modern office blocks, and dominating them all is the bulk of the Minster, looming above the city like a great
limestone liner. It’s not quite as pretty as you think it will be, but there is a sturdiness to the city that has seen off the centuries. Swept up within the circle of city walls, indented
like a child’s drawing, this is a practical place where people live and work and play, the way they have always done.

But that first day I knew none of that. I knew only that disquiet was beginning to claw at my spine once more, as we walked under a great stone gateway through the city walls. A taxi ride from
the station in the dark with a taciturn driver was my only experience of York at that point, but I didn’t need Drew to tell me where we were. I
knew
the gate was called Monk Bar. I
felt as if I had walked beneath it countless times before, and as we headed down Goodramgate, recognition began to clang like a bell inside me.

Déjà vu, I tried to tell myself, but the uncanny sense of familiarity and wrongness persisted. The streets weren’t quite right. The houses weren’t quite right. Nothing
was quite right. Only the Minster towers, soaring above it all, looked as they should . . . but that couldn’t be right, either.

I caught the unmistakable whiff of open drains and sniffed at the air. Drew saw me wrinkling my nose. ‘Chocolate,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The smell. It comes from the Nestlé factory.’ He pointed behind us. ‘When the wind is in the right direction you can practically taste it.’

I sniffed again. It didn’t smell like chocolate to me. I detected a much more pungent combination: wet straw and wood smoke, perhaps. Mud and freshly cut timber. Shit, lots of it. Stagnant
water. Something earthy and raw that caught at the back of my throat.

Not a hint of chocolate.

A monstrous headache was building behind my eyes. The sense that I ought to recognize the street had grown oppressive, and I found myself staring from side to side, searching for something that
would trigger a memory of when I might have been there before, and why.

Delivery vehicles were parked half-on, half-off the pavement in Goodramgate, holding up the traffic that was trying to make its way along the narrow city streets. I was frowning, which Drew
evidently took for disapproval.

‘They’ve got to unload before eleven,’ he told me. ‘After that, vehicles are banned and the streets revert to pedestrians.’

He stood back and gestured for me to go ahead of him, past a lorry laden with scaffolding. There was only room for single file on the pavement, and even then I had to fatten myself against a
shop window to squeeze past the wing mirror. As I turned my shoulder, the pavement tipped beneath my feet without warning and my heart jumped into my throat as I felt myself falling.

It’s still beating hard as I edge past the end of the cart and step over the gutter into the street, but I don’t understand why I am suddenly afraid. The feeling
only lasts a moment, and then I shake it aside. The world is not out of kilter. Nothing is wrong.

The cart taking up most of the street is laden with tar barrels. A shaggy horse waits patiently
between the shafts. Hap, scavenging in the gutter, gives its hooves a wide berth, but I stop to stroke its nose while the carter and his apprentice hoist barrels off the cart and roll them towards
Mr Maltby’s door, ignoring the bad-tempered cursing of the countryman on his wagon who is trying to pass.

I like horses. I like the feel of the velvet lips feathering my palm, the warm, grumbly breath, the patient eyes. I wish I could ride. Even country girls get to perch on the rump of a pony
sometimes, but I am a mercer’s maidservant and I must walk everywhere. Once I told Mr Beckwith that I would like a horse of my own one day, and he threw back his head and laughed so that I
could see the gaping hole where the barber drew his tooth. ‘Where would you go on your horse, Hawise? You don’t need a horse to get to market.’

That is true. It doesn’t take long to walk from one side of the city to another. I have no need of a horse, and nowhere to go.

Scratching the horse between its ears, I catch myself feeling restless and make myself stop. I have tried so hard not to think that way. I must be quiet, I must be ordinary. I mustn’t
think or wish or dream.

I am giving a final pat and turning to go on, when there is a loud scraping sound and a thud behind me. Too impatient to wait, the countryman has pushed on. His wagon has scraped against Henry
Lander’s stall, and now it is stuck and Henry is shouting and swearing at the countryman in his turn. Edward Braithwaite’s apprentice is offering pointless suggestions from across the
street, until Henry and the countryman turn on
him
. They are having a fine old row.

Between their cursing and the loud quarrelling coming from the alehouse, the air is rent with vexation, but beneath their noise and fury, the sounds of the street make a music of their own: a
burst of laughter through a window, the snip of shears, banging and clanking from the spurrier’s workshop. An apprentice is whistling. Somewhere a baby is crying. And, weaving through it all,
the thrum of conversation. Isabel Ellis has her head together with two of her gossips. They are clustered in her doorway, leaning eagerly in to discuss what she has seen in the fields, or heard
under a window. I can’t hear what they are saying but it will be something scandalous. Their faces are bright, their hands clapped to their mouths to hide their delighted shock.

They stop talking as I pass and watch me in silence. I know what they are thinking: there she goes, the odd servant of the Beckwiths with that strange dog of hers. I bite my lip and pretend not
to notice. The consensus in the street is that Hap should have been drowned after the accident that cost him his paw. He is too black, too different. They don’t understand how clever he is.
They don’t understand that now he is my only friend.

For Elizabeth is dead.

As always, the thought of her grabs me by the throat, and for a moment I cannot breathe for grief. Mr Beckwith had the old stable pulled down last September and built a fine new one, but the
carpenters left an old nail in the yard, and Elizabeth stepped on it one day. It went through the sole of her shoe. Later, I remembered that day in Paynley’s Crofts when we lay in the grass
and laughed – the day we met Widow Dent. ‘Beware the iron,’ she had said. We didn’t think she meant a little nail.

At first we thought it would be all right, but that puncture in her sole grew red and angry, and then the whole foot puffed up. We watched helplessly as the poison spread up her leg until it
consumed all of her. Elizabeth died one day when the mist hung heavy over the city and spangled the spiders’ webs with tears. I held her hand until she had gone and felt pain close around my
heart like a fist.

It was God’s will, I know, but oh, I miss her so.

Two small boys are chasing another, even smaller, one down the street. Their quarry dodges through the crowd. He bumps into William Paycock’s stall, swerves around Margery Dickson, and
narrowly avoids falling over one of Percival Geldart’s pigs, but his luck runs out when he gets to me. He crashes into me and I stagger back.

I sucked in a breath at the impact as someone jostled past me on the narrow pavement and I fell back against a window, unable to tell at that point where I was,
who
I
was.

‘Grace!’ Drew came up, frowning, and took hold of my arm. ‘That guy nearly knocked you off your feet!’

His grip was extraordinarily reassuring. ‘Really,’ I said, through the roaring in my ears, ‘I’m—’

‘Fine, I know,’ he interrupted me. ‘Where are you going?’

Back to the Mr Beckwith’s house, of course. I’ve been to the market. My mistress will be waiting.

I struggled to focus. ‘Solicitor,’ I managed. ‘I’ve got an appointment.’

‘What time?’

It took a few seconds to remember what he was talking about. ‘Ten-thirty,’ I said at last, a hand to my pounding head.

‘Then you’ve got time for a coffee.’

Drew took charge, steering me into a coffee shop and pushing me into a leather chair. The roaring had moved from my ears to my brain by then, and darkness was rushing in.
Without thinking, I leant forward and dropped my head between my knees.