Time's Echo Read Online Free Page B

walked past cars with fat yellow number plates, past street lamps, past houses, and the sense of
wrongness persisted. It was almost as if I had never seen bricks before, never walked along a pavement.
    It was a long time since I’d been in England, I tried to reason with myself. Of course everything was going to look strange. I was used to the
gang
where I lived in Jakarta, to
the deep gutters on either side of a walkway too narrow for anything but the satay-seller’s cart, and to houses half-hidden behind high walls and lush banana trees.
    A broken night hadn’t helped, either. Shreds of the nightmare lingered disturbingly in my mind, and I felt light-headed with lack of sleep.
    I’d never suffered badly from jet lag before, but now the feeling of dislocation was overpowering. I found I was walking carefully along a path beside the car park, but I kept starting at
the sight of the high brick wall on my left and I slowed.
    Ahead, children were being hustled into school by harassed parents. Two girls overtook me. One of them was talking on a mobile phone. The jagged light was intensifying, making the whole scene
waver, like a painted backdrop stirring in a draught. Behind it, I glimpsed a rough track between hedgerows lush with cow parsley and forget-me-not.
    I stumbled, blinked, and it was gone, but the smell of long grass and summer sunshine remained.
    My heart was beating hard and I put out a hand to steady myself against the wall, the brick rough beneath my fingers. I stared ahead, fixing my attention almost desperately on the two girls. The
one on the phone switched it off and said something to her friend, and they both laughed, and then the colour was leaching from the world around me, and laughter rang in my ears.
    My laughter.
    I am breathless with it. Elizabeth and I are running along Shooter Lane, with Hap lopsided at our heels, his ears flying. Our skirts are fisted in our hands, our sides aching with suppressed
giggles. We’re not supposed to run. We’re supposed to be modest and demure, to walk quietly with our eyes downcast, but it is a bright May day and the breeze that is stirring the trees
seems to be stirring something inside me too. I want to run and dance, and spin round and round and round until I am dizzy.
    All day long we have both been giggly and skittish as horses with the wind up their tails. Exasperated, our mistress sent us off after dinner to gather salad herbs from our master’s garth
in Paynley’s Crofts, and my apron is stained and grubby. Elizabeth’s, of course, still looks as if it is fresh back from the laundresses in St George’s Field.
    Our baskets were full and we were just closing the gate to the garth when we met Lancelot Sawthell. I tease Elizabeth about poor Lancelot, who turns red whenever he sees her, and coming
face-to-face with him unexpectedly was almost too much for us. We had to press our lips together to stop giggling while he stammered a greeting, his Adam’s apple working frantically up and
down, but oh, it was hard! We are cruel maids, I know, but not so cruel that we would laugh in his face, and we had to run as fast as we could so that we could explode with laughter out of his
earshot.
    ‘Oh, Elizabeth, I told you so!’ I cry as we stop for breath at last. We drop our baskets into the long, sweet grass and collapse beside them, tugging at our bodices to ease our
aching ribs. Hap flops beside me. He looks as if he is smiling too. His pink tongue lolls on one side of his mouth and his panting is loud in my ears. He can run fast, though he only has three good
legs.
    ‘Lancelot is
sweet
on you!’ I insist to Elizabeth. ‘And now that he has seen how rosily you smile at him, he will be on his way to speak to your father, right
now!’
    ‘Please, no!’ Elizabeth is almost weeping with laughter.
    We are laughing at nothing, the way silly girls do. We are laughing because we can.
    ‘I will miss you when you are married, Mistress Sawthell!’
    I