Sands of Time

Second Sight

There was a time tunnel at the stately home. Corinne knew it well because she had been there before. A dark leafy passage, it ran between the car park and the open area of gravel in front of the house. She paid her fee and walked through it, moving from the present into the past as she stepped from a cloak of green shade and into the sunlight. At once she saw the crowds milling around: tourists like herself wearing ordinary clothes and the people around them, who purported to come from Tudor times, wearing ornate velvets and silks or home-spun rags – some barefoot, some with intricate ruffs and elaborate jewellery.

She loved it. It was so easy to imagine yourself in the past. If it wasn’t for the ordinary people who had just climbed out of cars and coaches, she would find it totally convincing. And she wanted to be convinced; to lose herself in the past; to forget her loneliness and anger for an afternoon at least. It had worked last time she came. For several hours she hadn’t given a single thought to him – the man she had thought of as her lover, until she had caught him cheating.

She wandered towards the moat where a narrow bridge led towards the house itself and turning right, instead of going on into the dark, panelled rooms, she walked alongside the water where a peacock strutted and flirted its tail proudly, enamoured by its own reflections. A group of Tudor people stood there. They were playing some kind of Elizabethan game on the grass and seemed unaware of her curiosity. They were there, after all, to be stared at. One of them, a man, looked up suddenly and caught her eye. He doffed his velvet cap and gave her an elaborate bow, smiling impishly. She laughed.

That was nice. It was friendly. She felt attractive – something her lover’s insults had made her doubt – but not threatened. There was no way he was going to talk to her, not unless she approached him more closely and even then he would talk that wonderful mock-Shakespearean language which these people managed to improvise.

She was very impressed with the way they did it. It showed how talented they were, how completely they had entered into the parts they had chosen to play. Something she needed to learn to do. To play the cool, independent, confident woman of the world. Then, with or without a man, she could hold her head high.

Still managing to smile cheerfully, she walked on, leaving them to their game. Round the back of the house it was all very busy. She was heading towards her favourite places: the dairy, the kitchens, the dimly lit, dusty barns where they wove and spun and dyed their wool and did all the everyday things of life when lives were real and proper and self-sufficient, in a time when people made everything themselves. The dark shadowy areas, lit by candles and stray beams of sunlight from the high windows, filled her with excitement, inspired her. She loved to see the people chatting, gossiping, laughing round the smoky fires. She spent a long time staring at them as they worked. Then at last, overwhelmed with sudden, unexpected sadness that she was not part of a community such as this, she turned away, threading a path out of the crowd, and headed up towards the orchard to the part of the garden which was deserted. No tourists came here, because nothing ever happened. There was nothing to watch. It was empty, a place to think.

Slowly, trying to imagine herself wearing a long velvet gown instead of her usual trousers and loose sweater, she walked into the trees – and stopped in surprise. There were things going on here after all. She could see a group of Tudor-dressed people in the distance. They were talking together quietly, urgently, and she found herself wondering if she was going to catch them out talking modern English or did they, even here away from the crowds with no one to watch and listen, still keep to the parts which they had so carefully constructed for themselves?

The grass was soft and damp under the trees. They didn’t hear her coming. She walked slowly, not hiding her approach, but drawing near to the group she began to feel inexplicably nervous. There was no one else around and they were clearly talking about something personal and secret. She wondered suddenly if they would welcome someone watching them. She paused, pretending to examine the leaves on a damson tree nearby, trying to look casual, wondering whether to bring out the sketch book which she always brought everywhere with her. She groped in the haversack on her shoulder and produced the small pad and pen and, perversely perhaps, given her suspicions about their preoccupation with themselves, began to move towards them.

The group shifted. There were five men. They were talking, then shouting. Two of them walked apart, throwing insults at one another. She couldn’t hear them properly. In fact she couldn’t hear quite what language they were using, but if it was acting it was a very persuasive show of a quarrel.

She stopped, leaning against the trunk of a tree, regretting that she had come so close, wanting suddenly to turn back towards the house to the noise of ordinary people talking and laughing, to the children screaming as they chased the peacocks. It was growing very hot. The sun beat down between the trunks of the trees, but her eyes kept being drawn back to the scene ahead. She was as trapped by it as were the participants, and in a way as involved. The voices grew louder. She could almost feel the heat pouring off the men. One of the two was waving his arms about. She watched his face growing red as he gesticulated, fascinated by the way the feather on his jaunty cap shuddered around his face, curling beneath his chin. Even as she thought about it, he tore off the cap and threw it to the ground, seemingly beside himself with rage.

The man next to him suddenly had his hand on the hilt of the sword which had been hidden by his cloak. She caught her breath.

Stepping away from the tree a little to show she was there, she moved closer still, hoping that one of them would catch her eye and acknowledge her presence, perhaps with another good-humoured bow to defuse the atmosphere around them. But they didn’t see her. Two of the men lunged towards the one who had the sword, as he drew it with a rasp of metal from its sheath. They pulled at his arms, his clothing, trying to restrain him, but his anger had overwhelmed him. He swung the sword for a moment over his head and the man who had broken away stepped back, his red face suddenly white. ‘No,’ he shouted. ‘No!’

The blade entered his body through the velvet and through the white shirt. Red spilled down his front. Corinne caught her breath. She tried to remember that this was make-believe. He would have something secreted under his clothes to contain the blood – some kind of bladder they wore to hold the gore; Kensington gore, that’s what they called it, didn’t they? It was very convincing.

The man clutched the sword, plucking at the blade as his assailant pulled it out, his fingers stickily trying to hold together the hole in his clothes, to stop the blood, the gore, seeping out. With an awful expression on his face, he fell to his knees on the grass. The others looked round. They seemed horrified. Stunned. And the one whose sword it had been looked at the bloody weapon in his hand for a moment as though he couldn’t believe that it were there. Then he dropped it on the grass and ran, passing within a few feet of her as he headed towards the house and out of sight among the trees.

Embarrassed, Corinne waited. Did they expect her to applaud? What did people do under these circumstances? What was supposed to happen next? Her mouth had gone dry. She couldn’t move. She wanted to go back to the house, have tea and surround herself with people, but was trapped.

The three remaining men stood huddled over their companion, awkwardly hunched on the ground. There was a moment’s silence, then one looked up at the others. ‘He’s dead.’ The words, stark, modern or ancient, without embroidery, echoed in the quiet of the orchard. She held her breath. What were they going to do now? The man who had spoken bent over his fallen friend, touched his shoulder and rolled his body over. It flopped, convincingly inert, and sprawled at their feet.

As she watched, the three of them lifted him clumsily. He was heavy. His cloak dragged on the ground. One shoe fell from his foot. They heaved their awkward bundle up and began to run with it towards the trees in the distance. In a moment they had gone.

Released at last to move, Corinne hesitated. She wasn’t sure what to do. Suddenly she didn’t feel like being with other people after all. She had been caught up for however short a time in the drama of the moment. Openly now, she walked forward, composing herself.

She went quickly to the spot where they had been. It would be there – the great red stain – and she would be able to tell now that it had all been an act, part of a play. She looked around in the grass. It must be the wrong place. She moved forward, looking for the shoe which she had seen fall from the man’s foot. There was no sign of it. She went to the next tree and the next, but the ground was untouched, the long grass uncrushed; there was no sign of the sword, no sign of the shoe, no sign of the blood which had so copiously flowed from the man’s chest. There was nothing.

A strange shiver swept over her and she realised that she was feeling very cold. This was odd. Nothing felt right.

Almost without meaning to she followed the way they had gone, away from the path through the nettles and the long grass. There was no sign of anyone having come this way, never mind three men, encumbered by cloaks, dragging a heavy burden. She stared into the shadows beyond the boundary hedges. Where had they gone? She saw now that there was rabbit fencing round the orchard, and on the far side of the hedge an electric fence and beyond that a field of grazing cattle. Of course the men could have vaulted the hedge and fences. Once out of her sight they could have put down their burden, and he, miraculously alive again, could have run with them lightly tiptoeing, probably laughing, out of sight of their audience.

She walked back again, searching meticulously, more thoroughly now, determined to find at least a trace of them. There was a tiny core inside her, growing steadily more afraid. She walked up to the corner of the orchard, along the back hedge, looking at each tree, quartering the ground. She did the whole thing twice, gridding backwards and forwards beneath the tall, old-fashioned, ancient apple trees heading back towards the house. Of the sword, the shoe, anything at all in fact, she found no trace. There was nothing in the orchard.

She began to retrace her steps back towards the open sunlight and the tourists and the people in their costumes, enacting scenes from a Tudor past, and looked at them suddenly with different eyes, knowing in some inner part of herself that she alone of all the people there had had a glimpse of the real thing…

‘Corinne?’ The voice behind her stopped her in her tracks. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

She turned.

The lover. Repentant. Charming. Rueful. ‘Please?’ He held out his hand.

She was still a little shocked. Still slightly shaky, she realised, suddenly. Had it not been for that, she might not so easily have decided that she needed someone to have tea with.

Anyone, as long as he belonged to the present.