The Dream Weavers by Barbara Erskine (books you have to read txt) 📕

times now, hovering in the distance, watching, and she had succumbed to the temptation to break her own rules and study Sandra’s aura. It had been as she’d expected, strangely jagged. There was anger there, and fear, and something else, something dark, lurking in the periphery of her energy field. Bea hadn’t probed further but what she had seen disturbed her. She felt a wave of anger again now and dismissed it firmly. She was not going to let Sandra Bedford spoil her life.

She found the north quire aisle deserted. The organ was playing softly and there were quite a few people sitting in the nave enjoying the music. She sat for a long time in the little chapel allowing her agitation to settle. Slowly the peace of the place settled around her and she saw the familiar figure sitting in his accustomed seat, his head bowed, his cowl pulled low over his head, his hands folded in prayer.

‘I ignored your advice,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry. Help me keep Emma safe.’

For a while nothing happened, then at last she saw him stir. Slowly he looked towards her and she thought she heard him sigh from deep within the shadow of his hood. ‘It is too late.’ The words drifted through the silence, barely more than a breath against the distant sound of the music. It was Bach. She recognised it. ‘Come, Sweet Death’, a funeral favourite in their last parish. Her momentary distraction was enough for her to lose him. When she refocused on the altar, he had gone.

Too late. He said it was too late. Standing up she made her way to the doorway and out across the echoing spaces of the transept, past the St Thomas shrine toward the north door that led out into the Close. Her heart was hammering anxiously, the peaceful moment dispersed. The organ had stopped playing.

Her phone rang as she reached the house. It was Anna. ‘Hi, Mum. How are you?’

‘I’m fine, sweetheart.’ She let herself in through the front door and pushing it shut behind her, stood still in the hall. ‘Any news?’

‘I’m sorry Petra and I couldn’t make it home for Easter. But we will be there for Christmas, I promise.’

‘Christmas?’ Bea felt a terrible pang of loss. That was months away.

‘I know. I’m sorry. I’ll try and get home for a quick break before that, but there is so much work to do. I was talking to Pet on the phone and she’s had an idea. You and Dad need a puppy to replace us.’

Bea let out a gurgle of laughter. ‘Well. That is a novel idea!’

‘A good one?’

‘Not at the moment, sweetheart. We’re both frantically busy.’

‘And you’re not missing us?’

‘Of course we are. But no puppy.’

She was still laughing as she pulled off her jacket and headed for the stairs. It was lovely that the girls were thinking about them, but it was true. She and Mark were frantically busy. And before she took on anything else, be it supply teaching or puppy walking, she had to help Emma. She paused, her foot on the bottom step. She wasn’t treating Emma as a surrogate daughter, was she? She remembered Sandra accusing her of suffering from empty-nest syndrome and she shook her head. No. Emma was part of a far larger problem. The lost soul who was Eadburh.

Picking up her touchstone she managed to still her anxious thoughts at last as she sat, waiting. Emma was part of her job.

‘Where are you?’ she murmured. ‘Emma?’

She could sense Felix watching, feel his anxiety as he kept looking up towards the beams in the ceiling above him. Upstairs. Emma was upstairs in her bedroom. But when Bea looked there was no one there. ‘Where are you?’ she murmured again.

Emma was standing on a hillside, looking west towards the setting sun, as the shadows lengthened across the valley at her feet. She was a young queen and he was somewhere out there, the man she loved. Her father had been lying when he told her that Elisedd was dead. She could feel him, sense him yearning as she was for their renewed embrace, dreaming of that time they had lain in one another’s arms in the hafod on the hillside. Messengers had left the palaces of Wessex again and again to look for him and brought no news. Her prayers had received no answers. Dreaming another, older, Eadburh’s dream, Emma looked down at herself and saw she was wearing her red silk dress. She was a girl again, the daughter of Offa, still the young maiden she had been when she first met Elise; her leather sandals were studded with gold that glittered momentarily as the sun finally slid below the rim of the hills. She was beautiful, her hair flaxen, tearing out of its braids in the wind and she was free. With a joyous smile she stepped forward onto the track that led down the hillside towards the drovers’ road through the valley. He would meet her, she was sure of it. Somewhere out there he knew she was coming.

In the distance she heard the lonely call of a curlew as night drew in across the land.

‘Emma?’

Bea heard her own voice echoing through the landscape.

‘Emma? Come back!’

But she wasn’t Emma any more. She saw the girl throw a quick look back over her shoulder then she turned away and ran on, down the hill, her hair flying behind her, the silk of her dress blown against the body of a slim, young woman, Eadburh, a much younger Eadburh, who had taken over the body of a teenage girl.

‘You can’t call her back.’ Nesta was there beside her, watching. ‘Why do you not trust me?’

Bea felt her knuckles whiten as she clutched the stone in her hand. ‘Because you scared me. You were in that terrible place.’

‘You came where you were not wanted. You must wait for me to come to you.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Then leave it to the sisters of Wyrd to