Time's Echo by Pamela Hartshorne Page A

man, and the idea is both thrilling and unsettling. I know my mistress wouldn’t approve, and I know why. I shouldn’t be risking my reputation
with a stranger, but how can I give up my very first chance to be like everyone else? So I feel guilty, but excited too.
    I wish I could remember better what Francis looks like. He won’t really be my sweetheart, of course, and he’ll be going back to London soon, so what harm will it do to pretend, for
today? If not today, when? There may never be another young man who will ask me to meet him in the crofts. Perhaps I will like him better this time.
    I take the cloth back inside. My mistress has said that once my chores are done I can have the rest of the afternoon to visit my sister, Agnes. I just need to tidy the hall after the meal, and
then I can go.
    The afternoon sunlight slants through the high window into the hall, and I watch the dust drifting lazily across each beam as I put the pewter dishes in the buttery and straighten the carpet on
the chest. Maybe it’s because I’m anxious to leave before I lose my nerve, but time seems suddenly languid, as if it is gathering itself for a leap into the unknown.
    Or perhaps it is I – not time – that is poised on the edge of change. The thought makes me shiver with excitement. I am longing for change, for something to happen. Perhaps, I think,
I will look back on this moment, on this last hour before I met Francis, and realize that nothing was ever quite the same again.
    I stand in the hall, the crimson velvet cushion embroidered with flowers of green clutched to my chest, and all at once I am conscious of how familiar everything is. Meg and I put down fresh
rushes the day before yesterday, and their sweetness mingles with the scent of the onions and garlic stacked in the corner, and the smell of the last bacon hanging from the ceiling. The windows are
open, and I can hear wood pigeons burbling on the roof. Dick is whistling in the yard, my mistress is scolding Meg in the kitchen. Brushing crumbs from his doublet with a napkin, my master has
taken Mr Hilliard into his closet and they are talking business over a cup of wine.
    And I am going to meet Francis.
    I set the cushion back on the turned chair by the fireside and draw a breath. I am stepping away, growing up, becoming a woman at last.
    My hands shake a little as I untie my apron up in the chamber that I now share with Meg. I don’t dare change into my best gown – my mistress would be bound to notice – but I
brush down my kirtle, shake out my gown and straighten my cap. I am hoping to slip out quietly through the back gate, but Mistress Beckwith is in the yard, and she raises her brows when she sees
me.
    ‘I am going to visit my sister, Mistress. You said that I might,’ I remind her, and when she nods I bob a curtsey and sidle towards the gate. I have my hand on the latch when she
calls me.
    ‘Hawise?’
    I turn. ‘Yes, Mistress?’
    ‘Be careful.’
    I bite my lip. My mistress has a nasty habit of seeing more than I want her to, but I do indeed visit Agnes. That much is true.
    As usual my sister is abed, and the air in the chamber at the top of the steep staircase is tired and stale.
    ‘It’s a lovely day,’ I say. ‘Shall I open the shutters?’
    ‘No! I can’t bear the noise, and the light makes my head ache so.’ Agnes leans back and lays her arm over her eyes. She is peevish and out-of-sorts today.
    I sit on the edge of the bed, guilty as always for being the lucky one. I am scrawny, but I am strong, unlike Agnes, who has been sickly since she was a child. We are almost exactly the same
age. Her mother was a widow when my father married her after he came back to York. I think I have a memory of him throwing me up into the air and laughing at my squeals of delight, but perhaps I
have made it up. After he married Agnes’s mother, there was little laughter, that is for certain. My father began to spend more time in the alehouse than his