The Memory of Midnight Page 6

  Nell had only seen Ralph once since he had been back. She had been visiting her stepmother and chasing little Harry and Peter round the yard, making them shriek with laughter, when the men came out of the hall. Immediately, Anne shushed Nell and the boys, and Nell turned, her face flushed, to see her father flanked by Mr Maskewe and Ralph.

  Her father always looked diminished when Mr Maskewe was there, and the strain was there for everyone to see, for all his great professions of love and friendship. Harry, his firstborn son, was named after Mr Maskewe, who was Harry’s godfather. The connection was an important one. Still, no one was ever quite comfortable when the Maskewes were present.

  Except Tom, of course. Tom was different.

  Whenever Nell looked at Tom, her heart lifted. It was hard to believe that he shared any blood with Ralph. They were not at all like brothers. It wasn’t that Tom was unhandsome – indeed, Nell liked his face – but he was small and wiry and dark, with a quicksilver smile and a zest for life in his expression, while Ralph was tall and solid with a ruddy complexion and eyes as pale and hard as pebbles.

  They said Ralph was a fine-looking man, and perhaps he was, but something about him curdled the blood in Nell’s veins. She hadn’t forgotten the day she got stuck in the chest, or the way Ralph had smiled when the switch lashed across her palm, when she flinched in pain and had to bite hard on her lip to stop the tears.

  The sight of him suddenly in her father’s yard after his years away was jarring and Nell sank into a curtsey and lowered her eyes so that she didn’t have to look at his teeth.

  Her stepmother apologized for the noise. Mr Maskewe grunted, but Ralph was charming. Who could object to the sound of happy children? he had asked. Or to the sight of a pretty maid?

  Nell kept her eyes lowered but she could feel his eyes on her. She could hear the lie in his voice, imagined him moving the words about his mouth, turning them like pebbles until they dropped smooth and deceitful from his lips. She was not a pretty girl, she knew that. She was too boyish with her flat chest and her freckled nose and the wild brown hair that no amount of pins could tame. Tom would scoff if he heard Ralph say that she was pretty.

  There was something sly about Ralph, for all his fair features, and Nell remembered again the careful footsteps that crossed the floor while she hid in the chest in Mr Maskewe’s closet, the leaden thump of the ledger on the lid. Had that been Ralph? Or had she imagined it all, as Tom and her stepmother had said?

  Anne Appleby would hear nothing against Ralph after he and his father had gone. He was a sober, sensible man, she said. He was comely and full of compliments. ‘And he will be rich,’ she added with a meaningful glance at Nell, who looked blankly back at her.

  ‘He is twenty-one,’ Anne said to Nell’s father. ‘He will be looking for a wife one of these days.’

  ‘Nell is only twelve. Too young to be thinking of marriage.’

  ‘She will grow older. It would be a great connection for us. If she catches Ralph’s eye . . .’ Her stepmother trailed off significantly.

  Nell had been following the conversation with dismay. ‘I’m not going to get married!’ she burst out.

  ‘Go to, Miss Eleanor! Then what will you do?’

  She stuck out her bottom lip. ‘I will stow away on a ship and make my fortune at the cloth markets in Antwerp.’

  ‘Antwerp is overrun by the Spanish,’ her father sighed. ‘You will have no luck there as an Englishwoman.’

  ‘Do not encourage her to think of it,’ Anne scolded. ‘Eleanor is not going anywhere. Her life is in York.’

  ‘I will look after Harry and Peter,’ said Nell defiantly, her eyes falling on her little brothers.

  ‘Harry and Peter will have wives of their own, God willing. You must marry to have a home of your own.’

  Nell sighed. ‘Then I will marry Tom if I must marry someone.’

  ‘Tom is a younger son, and still but a child. He will be in no position to marry for years.’

  Nell was thinking of this conversation as she and Tom climbed the lane up from the staithe. The cobbles were uneven and slimy beneath their feet but the fog didn’t feel as menacing with Tom there.

  ‘Tom,’ she said, ‘do you think you will ever marry?’

  ‘Marry?’ Tom stared at her as if she had asked if he would grow a head with a single eye in the forehead, like the Cyclops in the book of travellers’ tales Mistress Harrison sometimes read out loud in the evenings. ‘What makes you think of marriage?’

  ‘Oh, it was just something my stepmother said.’ She scuffed at the edge of a pothole with her clogs. ‘She said you were a younger son and that you wouldn’t marry for a long time.’

  ‘I dare say I won’t,’ said Tom cheerfully. ‘I will be adventuring overseas. I will join Captain Drake and sail to the Indies and bring back sugar and spices and Spanish gold. What use will I have for a wife?’

  ‘I wish I could go with you,’ Nell said, her green eyes wistful.

  ‘Well, if I do come home a rich man and want a wife, I will marry you,’ Tom offered generously, and her face lit up.

  ‘I wish it could be so!’

  ‘I’ll have to finish my apprenticeship first, mind,’ Tom warned. ‘And then I’ll go to sea. It won’t be for a while.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Nell. ‘It’s not as if anyone else will want to marry me.’ An image of Ralph watching her in the yard slithered into her mind, and she twitched it off as she would a fly. ‘I have little dowry, and it’s not as if I’m pretty.’

  Tom didn’t bother to correct her. ‘You can run fast for a girl,’ he said. ‘That’s something.’

  Her eyes snapped open and she stared into the darkness, aware only of the blood drumming in her ears. And the fear snapping and crackling under her skin.

  What had happened? One minute she had been trudging up the lane with Tom, and the next it was dark. Was she back in the kist? At the thought, horror shook her like a terrier with a rat, and her hands shot up as if to push frantically against the lid, but they met only air.

  No kist.

  The panic receded and the tightness in her chest relaxed a little as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. There was a faint, fuzzy light coming through a window, and a yellowy glow striping across the room from the open door. She wasn’t in the kist. Thank God she wasn’t shut up. She could breathe. Jerky, shallow breaths, but she could breathe.

  And she could remember.

  A dream. That’s all it had been. Tess, she was Tess, not Nell, and she was in York. She remembered now. She was in Richard’s flat, and Oscar was sleeping in the other room.

  Oscar! The thought of her son jerked Tess upright. Muddled by the lingering fear of waking and not knowing who she was, she almost fell out of the bed and stumbled along the passage, careening off the walls in her exhaustion.

  Oscar was sound asleep, his arms flung high on the pillow. Tess laid her hand lightly on his body and let the steady rise and fall of his chest calm her. She was properly awake now, but her mind was jangling still from the vividness of the dream.

  She could remember exactly the eerie light, the dampness clinging to her lashes, the smell of wet rope and river and dried fish. Tom, his thin, homely face alight with a longing to explore the world. And herself as a girl, restless and brimming with energy. Tess could still feel the roughness of the linen shift against her skin, the weight of the sturdy clogs encasing her feet, the way they skidded slightly on the slimy cobbles.

  Tess had never dreamt that clearly before.

  In her dream, she had had memories. Of poor, rabbity Joan. Of Ralph’s teeth. Of the terror of being shut up in a box. Was that normal? Tess wrapped her arms around herself and chewed the inside of her cheek as she stood looking down at Oscar in the darkness. Dreams didn’t work like that, did they? This hadn’t felt like a dream at all. It felt as if she had been there, lived there. It felt like a memory.

  Which it couldn’t be, of course. Immediately, Tess started to rationalize. She was a
historian of sorts, after all. The sixteenth century was her period, and the clothes, the houses in her dream were familiar to her. It wasn’t surprising she had dreamt of that time, especially given the work she was going to be doing for Richard. Moving into his flat had obviously been a catalyst. This house would have been standing in the sixteenth century. Perhaps not in the form Nell and Tom would have recognized, but it had been here.

  In fact, it would have been surprising if she hadn’t dreamt of Elizabethan York.

  How strange to muddle it up with some garbled knowledge of vampires, though. Tess wondered where all that about poor Joan’s burial had come from. As far as she knew, there had been no belief in vampires at the time . . . but why was she trying to make sense of a dream anyway? Perhaps a psychologist could make something of it but she wasn’t going to waste any more thought on it. It was just a dream. It didn’t matter, and she had other things to think about.

  Still, she wouldn’t sleep now. She was churning with a mixture of fear and fascination. She couldn’t get the dream from her mind: the fog hanging low over the river, her horrified fascination with the dead girl who would be buried with a stake through her heart, and how easily her young mind had jumped to other concerns.

  Tess pulled a hoodie over her vest and shorts and padded restlessly through to the front room without turning on the lights. In the glow from the shop fronts outside, she booted up her main laptop. If she couldn’t sleep, she might as well do some work.

  The clock at the bottom of the screen read 03.14. The dead of night, Tess thought and then wished she hadn’t. Something about the word ‘dead’ struck cold between her shoulder blades.

  The street below was empty. It had stopped raining but the air was still damp and she huddled into her hoodie. She should have put on some tracksuit bottoms as well, but they were in the chest of drawers in the back bedroom and she didn’t want to go back there.

  Not in the dead of the night.

  ‘Stop it,’ Tess told herself out loud, but her voice came out shakily.

  Pressing her lips together, she opened the document with Richard’s notes on editing conventions for the records. How to indicate text that had been omitted by the clerk, or that had been deleted. Whether a fine was squeezed between lines, or words written in the left- or right-hand margin. Working steadily, Tess set them up on a clipboard, ready for her to start work the next day.

  It was just the mindless task she needed, she decided, but as she worked she kept stopping to lift her head and listen to the silence. She couldn’t shake the conviction that it was thickening, growing denser by the second, until it became a tangible thing that was creeping up behind her. Several times she actually glanced over her shoulder.

  Her palms were damp. She wiped them on her thighs, just as the shrill of the phone beside her ripped through the heavy silence without warning. Tess’s whole body jolted in shock, and it was a moment before her lungs started to work again and she could remember how to breathe.

  Brrr, brrr. Brrr, brrr. Brrr, brrr.

  It had to be an emergency for someone to ring at this time of night. Tess stared at the phone as if it were a living thing, her heart still jerking frantically. It was Richard’s landline, she realized. What if a relative was trying to get in touch with him? Shakily, she picked up the unfamiliar phone and struggled to focus. Her thumb was so unsteady that it took several goes before she pressed the right button firmly enough to answer.

  ‘Hello?’ she croaked.

  In reply she could hear breathing, quiet and steady.

  ‘Hello?’

  Nothing, just a dull burring in her ear as the connection was cut and the line went dead.

  As dead as the dead of night.

  Chapter Four

  ‘I didn’t tell Martin anything!’ Sue Frankland’s voice rose plaintively.

  ‘Then how did he know how to get in touch with me?’ Tess knuckled her eyes. They were gritty from lack of sleep. Oscar was safely at school, and she was walking back towards Monk Bar, her mobile pressed to her ear.

  She should have known her mother would be the weak link.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Theresa! You said there was nobody on the other end of the line. It was probably a wrong number.’

  ‘At half past three in the morning?’

  ‘Exactly. Why on earth would Martin ring you at that time and not say anything?’

  To scare me. To let me know that he knows exactly where I am.

  ‘I know it was him,’ said Tess stubbornly.

  She had a new mobile phone. She had changed her email address and shut down her Facebook account. She had done everything she could think of to cover her traces. And yet within a few hours of her moving out of her mother’s house, somehow Martin had been able to find out Richard’s number, which meant he not only knew how to contact her, he knew where she was.

  If it had been him.

  Maybe it hadn’t. Even Martin couldn’t have access to that kind of information that quickly, could he?

  Could he?

  ‘Have you spoken to him at all?’ she asked her mother, who huffed and puffed and finally admitted that Martin had rung the night before.

  ‘So he knows we’re still in York?’

  ‘Of course he knows you’re still here. I had to tell him that, at least.’ Her mother sounded huffy. ‘Martin’s very concerned about you, Theresa, and about Oscar.’ Sue was the only person apart from Martin who called her Theresa. ‘He’s Oscar’s father. He has a right to know where his son is.’

  ‘You said you didn’t tell him!’

  ‘There’s no need to snap. I didn’t give him your address, since you made such a fuss about it, but it was very awkward. I don’t know why you’ve got it into your head that you can’t trust Martin. He was charm itself when he rang yesterday, even though I could tell how disappointed he was not to be able to talk to you.’

  ‘He can be charming when he wants to be,’ Tess said wearily. She was never going to convince her mother that Martin wasn’t the best thing that had ever happened to her. And that was her fault. For the first couple of years she had believed it herself.

  Sue sucked in a breath. ‘I don’t understand you sometimes, I really don’t. You had a wonderful life in London. Martin adores you.’

  ‘Mum . . .’

  ‘It’s true! You can tell by the way he talks about you.’ Her mother’s voice began to wobble in distress. ‘You had that lovely home, everything you could ever want . . . if you ask me, you’re spoilt! And now you throw it all away just because you’ve got some idea in your head about Martin being controlling.’

  Tess was wishing she hadn’t called her mother, but she needed to know what she had told Martin. She set her teeth. ‘It’s not an idea, Mum,’ she said.

  ‘The trouble with you, Theresa, is that you’ve always been overimaginative,’ Sue went on as if Tess hadn’t spoken.

  That was always Martin’s line too.

  Tess pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Mum, I was a historian. I deal with facts, evidence. I’m the least imaginative person I know.’

  ‘You were always imaginative,’ Sue insisted. ‘It could be quite embarrassing at times. Remember that time we took you to Rievaulx Abbey?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, you do. You ran around pointing out monks and trying to talk to them.’

  A memory glimmered into life. Tess holding her father’s hand, pulling him out of the way as the monks went about their business, puzzled rather than frightened when nobody else seemed to be able to see them.

  ‘I was just a kid,’ she said uncomfortably. ‘I can’t have been much older than Oscar then.’

  ‘Then there was the time you started screaming because you could see heads stuck up on Micklegate Bar.’ Her mother seemed determined to prove her point.

  Tess took the phone away from her ear and looked at it. Another incident she appeared to have wiped from her mind, but now her mother mentioned it, she did remember the bloated, rotting heads spiked
to the top of the bar, the ghastly grimaces glimpsed between clouds of flies. Her stomach heaved. No wonder she had blocked out that particular memory.

  She frowned. ‘We must have been doing something at school about how they used to display traitors’ heads on the bars or something.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean!’ said her mother triumphantly. ‘Barbara Jessop always said you were sensitive, but I think you just took something you’d read or been told, and then exaggerated it out of all proportion.’

  Well, thanks for that ringing endorsement, Mother, thought Tess. Good to know that your own mother thinks you’re hysterical, neurotic and obsessive.

  ‘Now you’re doing the same with Martin,’ Sue said. ‘You’ve read some silly magazine article or something and you’ve decided that you’re a victim too.’

  ‘Where have you been?’ Martin, grabbing her the moment she stepped through the door, shaking her.

  ‘Just the supermarket.’ Trying to free her arm so that she could manoeuvre the pram in.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Some milk. Martin, let me go. You’re hurting me.’

  Releasing her reluctantly. ‘Who did you meet while you were there?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘There must have been someone. You met that guy, didn’t you?’

  ‘What guy?’

  ‘The one I saw you talking to the other weekend. Young guy. Earring. Ponytail.’ Spitting out the description.

  And she, lacking the energy to argue, but trying anyway. ‘Martin, he was a shelf-stacker. I wasn’t talking to him. I was asking him where the caster sugar was.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me!’ His voice rising without warning. ‘You were flirting with him. I saw you smiling and chatting and he was lapping it up!’

  Oscar, whimpering at the noise. Tess, flinching at the rage boiling in the air.

  ‘You’re frightening Oscar.’