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

looked doubtful and sad and said she did not know anything about what happened to the king’s younger son or how he had died. She had not even known he was dead.

Simon and Emma were standing by the gate to the Cathedral Close, while Felix waited for his father in the car by the kerb. The girl was wan and tired and tearful. ‘She insisted she wanted to speak to you,’ Simon said in an undertone as Emma began to hurry away from them towards the cathedral. ‘She needs you to calm her down. Reassure her. Tell her she’s not a freak!’ He looked distraught. ‘Let me explain what happened—’

‘Let her tell me herself, Simon,’ Bea said firmly. ‘She is not a freak, I can assure you. She is a perfectly normal young lady who needs some reassurance, that’s all. You go and get yourselves some coffee. I’ll text you when we’ve talked.’ Bea was watching Emma who had stopped, scuffing the path with her toe, waiting for her. ‘Try not to worry. Go. Look after Felix.’ She had seen the boy’s anxious face peering at them from the car.

Bea led Emma back towards her house, skirting the cathedral’s great west door and crossing the grass with its crowds of people enjoying the spring sunshine, and, mindful of the likelihood of Sandra’s beady eyes spotting them, ducked into Church Street, past its inevitable busker, then down the narrow alley between two shops where the back gate into their garden was hidden in a small private courtyard. Going in that way, no one was going to spot them.

She listened to Emma’s story in the kitchen over tea and cake, coaxing her to eat and drink, drawing out the story the girl had told Kate, and as she listened she felt a strange dawning affinity with this sensitive, lost, frightened girl.

‘It’s nothing to be afraid of. I do it too,’ she explained at last. ‘It’s a gift: the ability to read an object’s past through touch. It’s called psychometry, and it’s an amazing thing to be able to do. Some people are born with the ability, and other people spend hours trying to teach themselves how. You are blessed. And so am I. We can do it naturally.’

She watched Emma’s face change from misery to interest and at last to a slow dawning hope. ‘You do it too?’

Bea nodded, thinking of the stone upstairs. ‘You were sensing something that happened in the scriptorium where the book was being written. The intense emotions of the people there, the scribe, the other monk, the invading army, their feelings were so strong they have embedded in the fabric of the pages so that centuries later they can still be felt by someone who has the gift.’

Emma’s expression morphed again, this time into one of complete incredulity. ‘That’s not possible.’

Bea smiled. ‘It is.’

‘But that’s garbage. It’s not real. It was my imagination.’

Bea sighed. ‘You can look at it that way, of course you can. Emma, what you do with your gift is up to you. I can show you how to control it. To switch it off, if that’s what you want. How to ignore it whenever you feel it beginning to filter into your consciousness. It’s not easy to live with and I understand you may not want to. You may prefer to think of it as an over-active imagination. That’s up to you.’

‘Have you switched yours off?’ Emma looked at her intently.

‘I have learned to control it, yes. Sometimes I feel I need it to explain things that are happening round me, or round other people, and then I use it. It’s another sense we possess like touch and smell and taste.’

And, for want of something else, I deliberately look for a stone to anchor me to the place. That was not something she intended to tell Emma.

‘But you couldn’t deal with the voice at the cottage. The ghosts.’

‘No. That was something different. What your father calls a ghost is an echo from the past.’ Bea hesitated. ‘But I am going to use every method at my disposal to help understand what is going on up there. There are layers of memories there that are particularly intense and your father’s book has somehow brought them into focus.’

‘So, it’s his fault.’

‘It’s no one’s fault. It just is. Like an echo in a huge dark cave.’

Emma shivered. She looked round. ‘Has this house got ghosts?’

Bea smiled. ‘It did. I asked them to go away.’

‘It’s very old.’ Emma was looking up at the beams in the kitchen ceiling.

‘Parts of it are. It’s part of the cathedral estate. There were buildings here for centuries before the Church dignitaries decided to refashion them into beautiful houses for the dean and Chapter. Mark and I love it here.’

‘Tell me how to switch it off!’ Emma’s desperate cry interrupted her.

Bea sighed. ‘All right. I think we should go upstairs to my study, where I keep my books and candles and herbs, things that create a calm atmosphere and will help set the mood for what we want to do.’

She led the way up the broad staircase with its elegant handrail and bannisters curving up to the first floor, then on up the narrower flight, conscious of Emma so close behind her she could feel the warmth from the girl’s body.

It was peaceful in Bea’s sanctuary, and it felt safe. Hilde and Eadburh were for now locked away in the past. She turned to Emma. ‘I want you to sit down on the big cushion there and relax. You’re so full of tension and stress you won’t be able to think straight until you feel more comfortable.’ She searched through the music list on her phone and found a quiet tune to play, then she sat down too, in the corner, not watching, not too close; there in case she was needed. The girl needed healing before anything else could happen.

Slowly the window grew dark. Below on the far side of the