Barbara Erskine 3-Book Collection: Lady of Hay, Time’s Legacy, Sands of Time

She looked down at him unhappily. ‘Nick, I have to do this alone. Do you mind?’

‘Are you sure?’

She nodded.

‘And you’ll be all right?’

She looked round. ‘I’ll be all right. Go and find one of those pubs you were talking about. Come back in an hour.’ She pushed the door shut.

Nick watched her walk towards the church. Only when she had disappeared inside did he turn the car and drive back down the lane.

Jo opened the door into the nave and stared round. The church was completely empty. She stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind her, her eyes on the huge arch of pale stone which spanned the roof before the altar. In her hand was a copy of the little tenpenny guide. This was William’s chapel – and before him the chapel of his father, and his grandfather. It had been dedicated, the guide book said, in the year 1073.

Slowly she walked towards the altar. If it were anywhere, his ghost would be here, in the very walls where he had knelt and prayed. She felt the skin on the back of her neck prickle as she stood staring up at the simple wooden cross with the pale ochre curtain behind it. No lighted candles, no incense. The bell was silent. But there was a sense of prayer. A presence.

‘I should be praying for their souls,’ she thought. ‘Their souls – our souls – which are not at rest.’ With a shiver of something like defiance she made the sign of the cross and knelt before the altar, but the prayers would not come. The faith and burning trust which Matilda had felt before the twelfth-century statue of the Virgin were not for the twentieth-century Jo Clifford, kneeling in her shirt and jeans on the cold soap-scented flagstones. She felt nothing.

She was suddenly conscious of how quiet the church was, and how empty. Raising her eyes to the three small, arched windows above the altar she felt very cold. The air around her had become oppressive; the silence so intense she could hear it beating inside her head. Overwhelmed with panic, she scrambled to her feet and fled down the aisle, letting herself out of the door to stand in the vestibule, breathing deeply. Two women walked in past her and she felt them staring at her. They too bought a copy of the little guide, then they disappeared inside the church.

She stood in the graveyard shivering, feeling the warmth of the evening sun sinking through her shirt and into her bones. The air was glorious. It smelled of honeysuckle and woodsmoke from a bonfire below the churchyard, and of wild thyme from the Downs which ringed Bramber, bare and dusty beneath the hot evening sky. Immediately below her around the foot of the hill clustered the uneven, ancient roofs of the village of Bramber. Above, like a reproving finger, stood a huge pillar of masonry – part of the now ruined castle.

Taking a deep breath, Jo left the churchyard and began to walk up the shallow steps cut in the side of the castle hill, across the overgrown depths of the defensive ditch and on towards the ruins.

The top of the hill was a broad flat area of mown grass in the centre of which rose another steep-sided hillock, the motte on which the first William de Braose’s wooden keep had been raised in the days of the Conqueror. It was shrouded now by trees, guarded by ancient yews. Very little of the castle remained. A few areas of crumbling wall around the perimeter of the hill where the only invaders were ash and sycamore, hung with the greenish, scented flowers of wild clematis. Only the one tall finger of wall remained rearing into the sky to remind the visitor of the castle’s former glory.

Jo stood staring round her, lost. She could recognise nothing. Slowly she began to walk, seeing her shadow running before her across the grass, looking south towards the sea. Somewhere out there in the forest she had gone hawking with Richard and fallen at his feet to lie with her head on his lap. The forest had gone. Trees climbed the castle hill now, which then had been bare. Only the gap in the Downs was the same. The river was quite different too. So small. Surely then it had been vastly wider and there had been a jetty right here beneath the hill with ships and bustle and noise. The only noise now was the roar of traffic from the broad sweep of the fast road south, carried on the still evening air.

‘Are you all right, Jo?’ Nick had been following her silently.

She smiled at him. ‘The only thing I can recognise is the gap where the Downs aren’t.’ She laughed wryly. ‘And the church. I think the tower was the same, though there used to be something on top, then. And there was water all round here.’ She waved her arm. ‘I thought I said an hour?’ She looked at him closely.

‘I didn’t like to leave you, so I parked in the lane at the bottom of the hill. I was afraid …’ He hesitated. ‘Well, that something might happen.’

‘So was I.’ She put her hands on a fragment of wall, lightly touching the flints and mortar. ‘I should be able to feel something. I know I’ve been here before – how often have you heard people say that, joking? I do know it, yet I feel nothing. Why?’

‘Perhaps you don’t need to.’ He touched the wall himself. ‘Besides, it’s quite possible that you had no particular affinity with Bramber. You probably have no reason to remember it. Matilda spent most of her time in Wales, didn’t she?’

Jo nodded. ‘You’re right. I expect all her memories are there.’ She sighed. ‘There was something, though – just for a minute, in the church.’ She shivered again. ‘William was so obsessive about religious observance. Do you know, his clerks had to be paid extra because of all the flowery bits of religious pomposity he insisted on adding to all his correspondence –’ She stopped abruptly. ‘I must have read that somewhere –’

Nick took her arm. ‘Come on, Jo. Let’s get on to Shoreham.’

She shook off his hand. ‘You were right. I took my clothes off for Sam.’ She was staring into the distance. ‘I thought he was William. He ordered me to do it, Nick.’

‘Are you sure?’ Nick stared at her grimly.

‘I was in the solar of the castle at Brecknock and he stood in front of me and ordered me to undress whilst the blind man played the flute.’

‘William may have ordered you in your dream, Jo. Not Sam, surely. Sam wouldn’t do such a thing.’ Nick swallowed uncomfortably.

‘Why did I take my clothes off, then?’ she cried. ‘Why? If it was just for William I would have described it, not actually done it!’

He frowned. ‘You’re making a terrible accusation, Jo.’

‘There was no tape of what happened,’ she whispered. ‘No one else there. Just Sam and me. And a pile of crumpled clothes.’ She shivered again, looking down at the shadow of the castle wall on the grass. ‘People can’t be forced to do anything against their will whilst under hypnosis, I know that. But I was Matilda, and I thought he was my husband –’

‘No, that’s crap! You’re talking complete, unmitigated crap.’ Nick turned away sharply. ‘I can quite believe that you might do anything. I’ve seen you, remember? But Sam? He’d be crazy to try something like that. Besides, nothing happened, did it? Your husband didn’t rape you?’ His voice was harsh.

Jo coloured. ‘No, he didn’t rape me, because someone – presumably you – came. But not before he had humiliated me and mocked me and set out to browbeat me like the sexist pig he was. He threatened to whip me, naked, before everyone in the castle and no doubt if there had been time he would have had me on my knees before he put me on my back.’

She began to walk swiftly down the way they had come.

Nick followed her. ‘Well, that proves it wasn’t Sam at any rate,’ he said grimly. ‘I don’t see him as kinky.’

‘Don’t you?’ Jo flashed back. ‘You surprise me.’

Nick glanced at Jo from the phone. She was sitting in the corner of the pub nursing a Scotch and ginger. The noise level in the bar was fairly high. Taking out his diary, he found the number he was looking for and dialled it, leaning against the wall so that he could watch her while he waited, change in hand, for the call to connect. He was thinking about Sam.

Carl Bennet had only come in from Gatwick airport three-quarters of an hour before. He cursed quietly as his wife came to get him out of the bath.

‘Nick Franklyn? What the hell does Nick Franklyn want?’ he muttered, wrapping a towel round his middle.

‘I don’t know, dear, but he’s in a phone box.’ Melissa Bennet smiled fondly at her husband as he tried to clean the steam off his spectacles. ‘Get rid of him, darling, then come down and eat.’

‘Eat, she says,’ Bennet snorted as his wife ran down the stairs. ‘What the hell else does she think I did on that plane?’ He picked up the receiver. ‘Yes?’ he barked. His glasses had steamed over again.

Within seconds he was reaching for his notepad. ‘You are right. I should see her as soon as possible. I could fit her in tomorrow here.’ He listened again for a few minutes, frowning with irritation as Nick paused to slot more money into the phone.

‘Very well, Mr Franklyn. Monday at ten. I agree a break would do her good. But should this happen again – anything which worries you – I want you to promise to ring me, here, at once.’

He hung up at last and sat still, chewing the inside of his cheek. He sighed. Post-hypnotic suggestion was always a dangerous field. To do as Nick Franklyn asked and wipe out the girl’s memory of Matilda forever – that was a sad request. But the man was right. The past had to be controlled. It had to be relegated to where it belonged, otherwise it threatened to take Jo Clifford over, and in so doing, destroy her.

18 (#ulink_13af3125-76a1-5bab-973d-a9a01c63e220)

Sam opened the front door of the flat to Judy that evening with a scowl. ‘I’m packing to go to Edinburgh,’ he said curtly. ‘I’m afraid I can’t spare you much time.’

‘You can’t?’ Judy threw herself down on a chair. ‘That’s good, because I don’t require much time. You know of course that by now Nick and Jo are back together.’

‘I know they’ve gone down to the boat.’ He was watching her closely as he sat down opposite her.

‘She doesn’t want him. She is using him. You know that as well as I do, I expect.’

Judy was wearing a pink flying suit which clashed violently with the bitter orange of the upholstery in Nick’s flat. She threw herself back in the chair pushing her hands deep into her pockets. ‘I want Nick back.’

Sam raised an eyebrow. ‘Lucky old Nick,’ he said coldly. ‘So?’

She smiled. ‘You want Jo.’

She studied his face under her eyelashes, but his expression gave nothing away. ‘I think we should pool our resources, don’t you?’ she went on after a moment.