Hilton's Story...

Hilton's Story
Peter Hunter
… was I really looking at a face that died violently 596 years ago - on St Crispin's day 1415 - a French lance piercing his chest - minutes before he killed the chevalier that almost certainly would have done for his king, Henry V and changed England's, no - probably all the history of the world…
A change of events, possibly - that… would prevent me being here today?
… the two-wheeled wooden cart creaked and bounced along the rutted track across the water meadow, following the course of the mud-stained river. Tired oxen - both straining forward, breathing heavily, their snorting nostrils, plumes of condensation to the already swirling mist as they struggled to pull the cart beside the swollen river Stour - from the watermill just upstream at Stour Minster to the hamlet of Hamoon.
I was not so stupid, as to realise that perhaps my mind was playing tricks…
Stirring up an imaginative cocktail of thoughts already maturing in my receptive brain … working on what the vicar had told us in the little hamlet church earlier. It also was the day prior to a new moon, dark and atmospheric. Legend was that on this very day… St Crispin's Day… each year, the apparition would reappear - but with that setting of the brooding river mist and scudding low cloud… and what was implanted in my mind… I could not really be certain…
… all perhaps conspiring to fill my psyche with the vision I saw before me…
… or thought I was seeing…
Was it? Was it really Tobias Archer ahead of me - the ghostly apparition folk-law claimed…? And I had not… at least until now - believed…
Was what I witnessed really a ghost… or merely a distortion of the swirling threads of twilight mist, combining and refining my own over fertile imagination…
… stimulated by the local legend?
End
© Peter Hunter
Extracted from Peter Hunter's compact thriller … too late
… the tallyman…

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