Barbara Erskine 3-Book Collection: Lady of Hay, Time’s Legacy, Sands of Time. Barbara Erskine
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seemed like hours she had stopped shaking.
Nick was brief to the point of curtness on the phone then he put the receiver down and came back to sit beside her. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s hear it all from the beginning.’ Leaning forward he stubbed out her abandoned cigarette. She did not protest. ‘I take it you’ve got it all on tape?’ He nodded towards the machine.
‘All but the last few minutes.’
‘Do you want me to hear it?’
She nodded. ‘The other side first. You’ll have to wind it back.’ She watched as he removed the cassette and turned it over, then she stood up. ‘I’ll go and get some clothes on while you listen.’
Nick glanced at her. ‘Don’t you want to hear it again?’
‘I did. Just before you came home,’ she said quietly. ‘We’ll talk when you’ve heard it.’
She carried her glass through to the bedroom and closed the door. Then she walked across to the mirror and stood staring into it. Her eyes were strained, but clear. There was nothing in her face to show what had happened. She looked exactly the same as usual.
She realised suddenly that she was listening intently, afraid that the sound of voices would reach her from the front of the flat, but the door was thick and Nick must have turned down the volume. The room was completely silent. She went to open the blind which she had drawn earlier that day against the sun, and looked down into the cobbled mews which lay behind the house. On a flat roof nearby someone had put out rows of window-boxes. Petunias, brilliant jewelled colours, their faces wet with raindrops, blazed against the grey London stone. Overhead, a jet flew soundlessly in towards Heathrow, the wind currents carrying the roar of its engine away. It all looked so familiar and comforting, so why did she find the silence unnerving? Was it that at the back of her mind she kept remembering the white windswept silence of the Welsh hills? She closed her eyes and at once she felt it, pressing in around her, the vast desolate spaces beneath their blanket of snow and again she felt the ache of the cold in her feet. Shivering, she lay down on the bed and pulled the quilt over her. Then she waited.
It was a long time before Nick appeared. She lay watching him quietly as he walked across the carpet and sat on the bed beside her. He looked grim.
‘How much of that do you remember?’ he asked at last.
‘All of it.’
‘And you weren’t fooling?’
She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. ‘Did I sound as if I were fooling? Did he?’
‘All right, I’m sorry. I had to be sure. Do you want to talk about it now?’
‘I don’t know.’ She hugged her bathrobe around her. ‘Nick, this is crazy. I’m a journalist. I’m on a job. A routine, ordinary sort of job. I’m going about my research in the way I always do, methodically, and I am not allowing myself to become involved in any personal way. Part of me can see the whole thing objectively. But another part.’ She hesitated. ‘I was sure that it was all some kind of a trick. But it was so real, so very real. I was a child again, Nick. Arrogant, uncertain, overwhelmed and so proud of the fact that I was pregnant, because it made me a woman in my own right and the equal of William’s mother! And I was going to be the mother of that bore’s son!’ She put her face in her hands. ‘That is what women have felt for thousands of years, Nick. Proud to be the vehicle for men’s kids. And I felt it! Me!’ She gave an unhappy laugh.
Nick raised an eyebrow. ‘Some women are still proud of that particular role, Jo. They’re not all rabid feminists, thank God!’ His voice was unusually gentle. ‘You remember all her feelings then? Even things you don’t mention out loud?’
Jo frowned. ‘I don’t know. I think so … I’m not sure. I remember that, though. Hugging myself in triumph because I carried his child – and because I had thought of a way to keep him from molesting me. He must have been a bastard in bed.’ Her voice shook. ‘The poor bloody cow!’ She picked up a pot of face cream from the table and turned it over and over in her hands without seeing it. ‘She probably had a girl in the end, not the precious son she kept on about, or died in childbirth or something. Oh God, Nick … It was me. I could feel it all, hear it, see it, smell it. Even taste the food that boy brought me. The wine was thin and sour – like nothing I’ve ever drunk, and the bread was coarse and gritty, with some strong flavour. It didn’t seem odd at the time, but I can’t place it at all, and I could swear I’ve still got bits of it stuck between my teeth.’
Nick smiled, but she went on. ‘It was all so vivid. Almost too real. Like being on some kind of a “trip”.’
‘That follows,’ Nick said slowly. ‘You obviously have had some kind of vivid hallucination. But that is all it was, Jo. You must believe that. The question is, where did it come from? Where have all the stories come from that people have experienced under this kind of hypnosis? I suppose that is the basis of your article.’ He hesitated. ‘Do you think this massacre really did happen?’
She shrugged. ‘I gave a very clear date, didn’t I? Twenty years of King Henry. There are eight of them to choose from!’ She smiled. ‘And Abergavenny of course. I’ve never been there, but I know it’s somewhere in Wales.’
‘South Wales,’ he put in. ‘I went there once, as a child, but I don’t remember there being a castle.’
‘Oh Nick! It’s all quite mad! And it was nothing like the experience Mrs Potter had when I watched her being hypnotised by Bill Walton. She was – so vague – so blurred compared with me.’ She pushed her hair out of her eyes.
‘What did it feel like, being hypnotised?’ he asked curiously.
She sighed. ‘That’s the stupid thing. I’m not sure. I don’t think I knew it was happening. I didn’t seem to go to sleep or anything. Except real sleep when I slept in the castle. Only that wasn’t real sleep because the time scale was different. I lived through two days, Nick, in less than two hours.’ She lay back against the pillows again, looking at him. ‘This is what happened before, isn’t it? When Sam was there. They did hypnotise me and they lost control of me that time too!’
Nick nodded. ‘Sam said you were told not to remember what happened, it would upset you too much. And he said I mustn’t talk about it to you, Jo, that’s why I couldn’t explain –’
‘I lived through those same scenes then,’ she went on, not hearing him. ‘I saw the massacre then too.’
Nick looked away. ‘I don’t know, Jo. You must speak to Sam –’
‘It must have been the massacre, because I hurt my hands tearing at the stone archway. But I really bled in Edinburgh. My fingers were bruised and bleeding, not just painful!’ Her voice was shaking. ‘Oh, God, it was all so real. Nick, I’m frightened.’ She stared at her hands, holding them out before her.
Nick took hold of them gently, standing up. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We need another drink. And something to eat. Is there any food in the flat?’
She dragged her thoughts back to the present with difficulty. ‘In the freezer. I forgot to buy anything today.’ She gave a rueful smile. ‘I was going to go shopping on my way back from Devonshire Place but everything went out of my head.’
Nick grinned. ‘I’m not surprised. Being a baron’s lady with a castle full of serfs, you can hardly be expected to lower yourself to trundle round Waitrose with a shopping trolley. You must try not to let it upset you too much, Jo. Try and see the amusing side. Think of it as a personalised horror film. You got front row stalls and no ice-cream in the interval. But, apart from that, thank God there’s no harm done this time.’
‘That doesn’t sound very scientific.’ She forced herself to smile. Standing up slowly she pulled the belt of her robe more tightly round her. Then she headed towards the kitchen and pulled open the freezer door. ‘There’s pizza in here or steak.’ The normality of her action calmed her. Her voice was steady again.
‘Pizza’s