The Memory of Midnight (17 page)

You’re highly strung. You imagine things.

Anyone would say the same.

With a sigh, Tess pushed her laptop away. It was hopeless trying to work when she was this tired and the sky over the red-tiled roofs opposite was a high, soft blue. She would go out for a walk
and clear her head.

It was good to wear sandals again and be able to walk out without a coat, to feel the sun warm on her face. The trees lining the riverbanks were in full, lush leaf, and dazzlingly green. Tess
walked briskly, down to the new bridge built for the millennium and then back along the south bank. Perhaps Vanessa was right about this too: perhaps all she needed was to take some exercise.

On Ouse Bridge, she stopped for a while to watch a solitary rower who was also making the most of the weather. His oars dipped delicately into the river – in, out, in, out – and as
they lifted, the sunlight caught the glitter of water dropping like diamonds. Something about the steady rhythm reminded Tess of standing on the staithe below, watching the keelboat bear Tom
remorselessly away.

Desolation flooded her, and Tess jerked her head back. That wasn’t her memory. It was Nell who had stood there, Nell whose gut had twisted with love and longing.

Nell who might be a figment of her imagination but who was questing, probing, trying to find a way back into Tess’s head.

Just when she had thought it was over.

No
.
No, I won’t let you.

Tess set her jaw, steeled her mind. She was
not
going to give in this time. She couldn’t afford to drift between worlds, couldn’t risk blanking out in the middle of the
street. Oscar needed her sane and sensible. He needed her
there
. If anything happened to her, no court in the country would stop Martin from taking his son back. Tess couldn’t let
that happen.

Martin might never have laid a finger on him, but Oscar was afraid of his father, she knew. She had seen it in the flinch of his thin shoulders, in the instinctive jerk back of his head and the
shuttering of his eyes. No child should look the way Oscar looked when his father came into the room. Tess was going to make sure he never looked like that again.

She put both hands flat on the stone parapet to feel it solid and sternly real. The bridge Nell knew had been demolished in the nineteenth century. It was safe. She lifted her face to the sky,
and breathed in and out carefully as she watched a jet leave a wispy trail high overhead.

That was it. Concentrate on everything that belonged to the present. The rumble of traffic behind her. The hiss of air brakes. The smell of fumes. The flash of plate glass. The urgent beep of a
mobile phone.

When she felt more connected, Tess let go of the bridge. She couldn’t stay there all day. She had to go home. She would need to pick Oscar up from school.

Biting her lip, she began to walk, but she felt naked, exposed, raw. She didn’t trust the street not to stay solid beneath her feet. She kept stopping to look down at her jeans, wondering
why they seemed so peculiar. Several times in Coney Street she reached out to touch a wall for reassurance. At the bottom of Stonegate she stopped by a flower stall and focused fiercely on the
bright colours, the sharply defined petals, until the stallholder came round and she had to fumble for her purse and buy a bunch of gerberas she didn’t want.

She was nearly home. She just had to walk up Stonegate.

It was crowded as she turned into the street, and she had to pick her way along the mid part between the gutters where the cobbles lurched drunkenly in the mud. A needle-fine rain was stinging
her face. It had been wet for days now and the sewers ran as fast as a goodwife’s tongue. She fisted her hands in her skirts to lift their guards out of the mire.

She was thinking about Tom and whether it was raining in Hamburg. Every night in the attic chamber she shared with Alice she would peer out of the casement and hope to get a glimpse of the moon.
The best nights were those when the sky was clear and the moon was full. Then she imagined herself throwing her longing for Tom up, up into the dark sky, bouncing it against the silver moon like a
ball against a wall so that it would fall back to where he could catch it and know that she was thinking of him. That she loved him and missed him still.

That she was waiting for him.

‘Well, now, if it isn’t little Nell Appleby come home to see us.’

The voice with its blurry edge jerked her out of her thoughts, and she looked up to find John Harper leaning in the doorway of his shop under the shelter of his pentice, watching her from his
hooded eyes. Through the shutters, Nell could hear the snip of shears as his apprentice laboured over a new doublet.

The man was a rogue and a Scot, her father always said, and indeed Harper had few friends amongst his neighbours. He pushed and needled the good men of the city until they snatched off their
caps in frustration. Their wives thought differently. Say what you wanted about him, the man knew how to sew a gown, and those heavy lidded eyes could make a beldam blush. To Nell, it always seemed
as if he were unpeeling her garments one by one in his mind. As if he were pulling the pins from her sleeves, one by one, until they slid down her arms, and then very slowly taking hold of the
laces that held her bodice together, tugging them apart so that her smock billowed free and her breasts with them . . .

She swallowed. She had always been slightly repelled by John Harper – by his carnal mouth, the redness of his lips, the coarseness of the black hairs on the backs of his hands – but
there was something inexplicably attractive about him too. Whenever he looked at her, she could feel the blood pumping hot around her body, and her cheeks would burn.

Nell wanted to ignore him, but how could she? When all was said and done, he was a freeman and a neighbour.

‘Good day to you, Mr Harper,’ she said primly, very glad of the cloak that laced high on her throat and the modest ruff that hid her neck where she could feel blotches of heat.

‘You still pining for young Tom Maskewe?’ asked Harper. ‘He’ll be away a year or more, you know, and a lass like you will get lonesome. I’d be happy to keep you
company until he comes home.’ He leered and winked, and Nell’s blush reached her cheeks.

‘You are too kind, sir,’ she said, without quite meeting his eyes. She wanted to sound cool and composed, but she was only eighteen. ‘I fear I must refuse.’

John Harper only laughed – a laugh that made her think of tangled sheets and hot nights and the dark pulse of desire.

‘You on your way to see your pa?’ he asked. ‘I heard he was sick.’

‘Yes, I –’ Nell broke off, suddenly confused. What was she saying? She wasn’t going to see her father. Her father had been dead for years. She was going back to work in
the flat.

Her heart was racing with a fear she didn’t understand. She looked down at her feet and in place of her sturdy clogs saw a scant strip of leather and bare toes tipped with paint the colour
of blood. Her breath jammed in her throat and her stomach tipped as if she had tripped over her feet, even though she was standing quite still. Desperately, she glanced up at John Harper, but he
had gone and she was staring at a window made of a single pane of glass, with a great red banner slanted across it: SALE.

Another tip of her stomach and Tess jolted back to the present. Jarred and faintly sick, she put a hand to her pounding head.

How had Nell slid beneath her defences so easily? She had been determined to keep her out, to stay in the present, but it was as if Nell were already in her mind, waiting for the moment, for the
place, for the tiny gesture that would let her pull Tess back into the past.

She had to face it, Tess realized starkly. Nell was no figment of her imagination. She was powerful and she was real and she was in Tess’s head.

Somehow Tess was going to have to find a way to get rid of her. She wasn’t sure how yet, but in the meantime she would have to be more careful and pay close attention to the wanderings of
her mind. These past couple of weeks, Tess had let herself relax. She had let herself believe the danger was over. That had been a mistake. It wasn’t one she would make again, she vowed.

Her hand was shaking so much it took several attempts before she could get the key in the lock. The first thing she heard when she let herself into the flat was the sound of sawing, and her
heart leapt in relief. Luke was back. Without thinking, she went to the study to see him, to steady herself.

He glanced up when she appeared in the doorway. ‘You shouldn’t have,’ he said.

‘What?’ She followed his gaze to the flowers in her hand. She had forgotten that she was still holding them. ‘Oh. Oh, these,’ she said, feeling stupid. Her mind was fuzzy
and she couldn’t think of a single excuse. ‘They’re just . . . for me.’

Luke put down his saw. ‘What’s wrong?’

Tess opened her mouth only to close it again. How could she tell him without sounding like a crazy woman? She couldn’t deal with a cross-examination just then. She just needed him to be
there. Her fixed point.

‘Nothing. A bit of a headache, that’s all.’ She lifted the flowers helplessly. I’ll . . . er . . . I’ll just put these in some water.’

The kitchen felt strange. Tess noticed it as soon as she walked in, but she couldn’t work out what it was. The flowers still clutched in one hand, she turned slowly, checking the room.

The fridge hummed noisily in the corner. The cooker was wedged in a gap between the units, brown blobs of fat encrusting the edges. The sink looked out at an unlovely view of a blank, brick
wall. No, there was nothing wrong.

She put the flowers in a jug, slipped a pinny over her head and began to mindlessly clear up. Anything other than having to think about what was happening to her. The headache hadn’t just
been an excuse – she felt as if her brain were in a vice.

Wiping up the debris of cereal and toast crumbs. Scraping plates. Filling the washing-up bowl. Tasks she had done a thousand times before, but which that morning felt eerily different, as if she
had never before seen a cornflake, never flipped the lid of a bin. The plastic bowl felt odd in her hands, its smooth density somehow repellent.

Fighting the disquiet that prickled over her shoulders, she stared down at it. She couldn’t think what it was for.

‘You okay?’

Luke’s voice behind her made her jump and she turned. ‘You gave me a fright!’

‘Sorry.’ He studied her with eyes that were too observant for Tess’s comfort. ‘What happened to the weather? It was a beautiful day when I got here.’

She moistened her lips and forced herself to concentrate. ‘Yes, it’s lovely out.’

‘Why are you all wet then?’

‘What?’

Following his gaze, she lifted a hand to her hair. It felt damp, and when she dropped her eyes, she saw that the bottoms of her jeans were wet and her toes muddy. She clutched at the apron as
the world tilted and slithered away.

Nell could hear the wind tearing at the roof tiles and rattling the pentices as she went to answer the knock at the door. Wiping the flour off her hands on her apron, she
pulled it open and clicked her tongue as autumn leaves swirled busily into the house. ‘Pappa!’ A smile of surprise lit her face when she saw her father, holding his hat against the
wind.

Strange how seeing him out of his usual context made him seem older, smaller than she thought of him normally. She was used to seeing him in the house in Stonegate where she was a child, and for
a moment it was like looking at a stranger. She had never noticed before how worn his gown was, how patchy its fur lining. Had his hair always been that thin?

He looked ill at ease, and his eyes didn’t quite meet hers. ‘I saw William Harrison at Trinity Hall,’ he said, raising his voice to stop the breeze whipping his words away.
‘I asked him if I could come and speak to you here.’

‘Is something wrong?’ Nell stood back and held the door open. ‘My stepmother?’ Her voice sharpened in concern. ‘The boys?’

‘No, no, they are well.’ He ran a finger under his limp ruff. ‘There is . . . something I have to tell you.’

‘What is it?’ Now she really was worried by his expression, and a thought struck her, stopping her heart. ‘Is it Tom?’

‘No . . . well, yes, it is to do with Tom, but I have no news of him.’

Nell let herself breathe again. ‘Then what? Come, Pappa,’ she said, leading him into the hall and urging him down onto the settle. ‘Sit here.’ A window was set high in
the wall and in the light his face looked grey and drawn. She frowned, wishing it were not too early to light the fire in the great stone fireplace. ‘Shall I bring you some ale? Or a glass of
wine?’

‘No, I need nothing,’ he said wretchedly.

‘Then tell me.’

He took a breath. ‘I have received an offer for you. An offer of marriage,’ he added to make himself clear.

‘Is that all?’ Nell shook out her apron and lowered herself onto a stool beside him. ‘Then you must thank the gentleman kindly and tell him I am already
betrothed,’ she said, smiling.

‘Nell, you are not betrothed to Tom Maskewe. Henry Maskewe did not agree. No contracts were drawn up. Nothing is settled.’

‘It is settled between Tom and me,’ she said firmly. ‘We are promised to each other.’

The truth was, she had felt easier since Tom’s father died. He was adamant in his opposition to a match between them, although Nell didn’t really understand why. Certainly, her
father was not the most successful of mercers – little more than a chapman now, if truth be told – but he was a member of the guild and the Applebys had connections in York. It was not
so
bad a match for a younger son like Tom.

Tom . . . the thought of him was like a spear in her heart still. Six months he had been gone, and she yearned for him as much as she ever did. The days were long without him, but Nell did her
best. She showed the world a bright face. She scorned to droop and moan. She was stronger than that, truer than that. She was learning to be a good housewife for when they were wed. She struggled
to cast accounts, it was true, but she could cook and sew and she had some skill in the still room. It would be enough for Tom, she knew.