Time's Echo Read Online Free PDF

there would be no one to see you, or tell you to walk slowly or speak quietly, or fetch more wine or . . . or do
anything
.’
    ‘And nowhere warm to sleep and nothing to eat but worms.’ Elizabeth is nothing if not practical. ‘You’d hate it.’
    I make a face at the idea of worms. ‘But if I could fly, I could go wherever I wanted,’ I say. ‘I could fly far, far away. I could go to London!’
    I have never been further than the white stone cross on Heworth Moor. Mr Beckwith went to London once, but even though I teased him to tell us all about it, he just said it was a godless place.
I suspect they made fun of his northern ways.
    ‘You’d like to see London, wouldn’t you, Elizabeth?’ I poke her and she bats my hand away.
    ‘Not if I have to eat worms,’ she says. ‘Why can’t you just be happy to stay in York?’
    ‘It’s just . . . don’t you ever want more, Elizabeth?’
    ‘More what?’
    I pluck discontentedly at the grass. ‘I don’t know . . . more something.’
    ‘Oh, more
something
!’ she mocks. ‘Now all is clear!’
    ‘You know what I mean.’
    ‘Hawise, you want too much.’ She sits up properly, serious now. ‘Why can’t you want what everyone else wants?’
    ‘I do!’
    ‘You don’t. You don’t
think
like everyone else. You want to fly like a bird and see the Queen and go on a ship and travel to Cathay . . . ’ Elizabeth rolls her
eyes at the impossibility of my dreams. ‘You know what our mistress says. You must be careful.’
    I do know. Careful, careful, careful. The word has been dinned into me for years. I have no looks, no dowry, few kin. And I am different. My father brought me back from his adventuring when I
was but a babe. All anybody knows about my mother is that she was French, and my father is close-mouthed on the subject. For years I told myself it was because he was broken-hearted, but now I
think that too much ale has addled his memory and he doesn’t remember. For all anyone in York knows, I’m not even baptized.
    It was fortunate for me that Mistress Beckwith had a fondness for my father when he was young and charming, in a way he still can be when he tries. When he wants something. The Beckwiths took me
on as a servant when I was twelve and I have been learning how to run a household ever since, although unless I marry I will never be able to put all I now know to good use.
    There is no use wishing that I could fly or stand by the ocean or see where peppers grow. My life is here, in York, and little comfort it will be unless I have a husband. I know that. I want to
be like everyone else, I do, but it isn’t that easy to stop thinking thoughts. But I need to. I need to have a care for my reputation, just as Mistress Beckwith says, just as Elizabeth
says.
    ‘You’re right,’ I tell Elizabeth. ‘I will try harder.’
    Over the city walls the Minster bell is ringing the hour. Elizabeth gets reluctantly to her feet and brushes down her skirts. ‘We’d better go. Hawise, your cap is all crooked.
Mistress Beckwith will skelp you if you go back looking like that!’
    She will too. Our mistress has a kind heart, but a firm hand. I scramble up. My hair is dark and fine, and no matter how carefully I bind it, my cap is always slipping and sliding. I straighten
it on my head. ‘Better?’
    She studies me critically. ‘Better,’ she agrees and hands me my basket. The lettuce and parsley have already wilted in the afternoon sun, but the rosemary is stronger and its smell
is a shimmer in the air. ‘Come on, we’ll be late.’
    Hap follows with his skewed gait as we hurry along the lane, but as we turn the corner at Mr Frankland’s orchard, he stops with a whimper.
    ‘Hap?’ I look back at him in surprise.
    Elizabeth grips my arm. ‘Hawise, look!’ She points round the corner to where an old woman, bent and buckled as a bow, is standing in the middle of the path, muttering to herself.
    I suck in a breath of consternation and exchange a glance