The Memory of Midnight (19 page)

Or because he was the kind of man who would force his wife into marriage with such a threat.

Nell’s basket was full. She closed the orchard gate behind her and walked back into the city through Monk Bar. She stopped at her father’s house in Stonegate. She told him and her
stepmother that she had made up her mind, that they were safe, and then she carried the apples back to the Harrisons’ house in Ousegate where she boiled them and mashed them with ginger and
cinnamon and stirred in the yolks of two eggs, because life went on and the household still needed to be fed – and as long as she didn’t let herself feel she would be all right.

That night, she undressed methodically, letting Alice’s chatter and exclamations wash over her without hearing them. She hung her apron on its hook and unbuckled her shoes so that she
could pull off her stockings. She unpinned her sleeves, and laid them one after the other in the chest, and then, as if it were something she did every night, she tugged Tom’s ring from her
finger and dropped it into the chest where it slipped down the side past the sleeves and out of sight.

Nell closed the lid. She unfastened her petticoat, then her bodice, and laid them on top of the chest. She stood in her smock while she unbound her hair and brushed it. She rubbed her teeth. She
stripped off her smock, pulled on her nightgown and got into bed next to Alice, and not once did she look up through the casement at the moon. She tugged her share of the coverlet from Alice and
pulled it up to her chin. Moonlight poured mockingly into the little room, but that night Nell whispered no message to Tom. There was nothing she could say. She just pummelled the bolster into
shape and turned her face away.

Darkness roared in her head, so loud that she knew she would never sleep. She tried keeping her eyes closed and pretending, but when she gave in and opened them, the moon beams
had vanished and it was daylight. Her first thought was that none of it had been real, and her heart leapt.

Oh summer’s day, it was a dream!

Limp with relief, she blinked slowly, and then again as she realized that the attic room had vanished along with the moonlight. There was no offer from Ralph Maskewe, but there was no bed
either. No bolster; no kirtles laid across the kist in the corner; no shoes abandoned where Alice had kicked them off before she jumped into bed.

No Alice.

Instead there was a narrow room and a man with fierce brows and a jutting nose. ‘Jesus, Tess,’ he said as she focused on his face, ‘what is it?’

The blood drained from her head and she put out a hand to steady herself, just as her phone started to ring and ring and ring. The noise drilled into her control, a tiny fissure at first that
raced across her rigid composure until the strain of it simply snapped and she wrenched the phone from her pocket.

‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut
up
!’ She threw it down and it cracked on the tiles but the phone just kept on ringing. She stamped on it, kicked it across the room, watched it skid
across the floor, still ringing, and she couldn’t stand it any more.

At the expression on her face, Luke put up his hands and took a hasty step back. Ignoring him, Tess swept an arm along the counter and pushed. Tea bags, cereal packets, a jar of coffee and some
biscuits went tumbling to the floor, but that wasn’t enough. The contents of the fruit bowl went next. Flour and sugar exploded onto the tiles. She was grabbing at anything that was to hand,
venting the muddled rage and frustration and fear in her head. Her jaw was clenched, the tendons in her neck rigid, her eyes stark.

It wasn’t until she reached for a plate and smashed it on the floor that Luke intervened.

‘Okay,’ he said calmly, stepping through the debris to where she stood panting and wild-eyed. ‘That’s enough now.’

Tess didn’t resist as he took her by the elbow and steered her into the front room, and down onto the sofa. Her expression was utterly blank. She heard him say, ‘Stay there,’
but her limbs were locked in place and she couldn’t have moved even if she had wanted to.

With a strange detached part of her brain she watched him rootle around in Richard’s sideboard, muttering to himself. ‘Aha!’ he said, pulling out a bottle of Courvoisier.
‘I thought a bloke like Richard would have some booze lying around.’

Sloshing some of the brandy into a glass, Luke put it in Tess’s hand and folded her fingers around it. His were firm and warm against her cold flesh.

‘Drink that,’ he said, standing over her until Tess had obediently raised the glass to her mouth and taken a sip that had her coughing as the brandy burned her throat.

Luke waited until she had drunk half of it before he dropped into the chair opposite and rubbed a hand over his face. ‘What in Christ’s name was all that about?’

Tess looked down into the glass. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she muttered, embarrassed at how utterly she had lost control. ‘I don’t usually give in to
hysterics.’

‘Maybe you should,’ said Luke. He leant back and studied her speculatively. ‘It can’t be good to keep all that bottled up inside you. I’ve done a lot of travelling
over the last few years and seen a lot of crazy people, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone lose it as completely as you just did.’ To Tess’s surprise, he sounded
interested rather than judgemental. ‘You were a woman possessed.’

If only he knew. Tess wanted to laugh but she was afraid it would sound as if she were succumbing to hysteria again. She took another slug of brandy instead. Perhaps it was the Courvoisier, or
perhaps it was the cathartic effects of her tantrum, but she was feeling rather strange, emptied out but oddly calm.

‘I’ve been under a bit of strain,’ she started to excuse herself, only to stop and glare when she caught the disconcerting smile that hovered around Luke’s mouth.

‘I gathered that.’

‘Do you want me to explain or not?’

His smile glimmered stronger. ‘It’s good to hear you sounding tart again, Tess,’ he said, but then his expression sobered. ‘Yes, tell me.’

Tess tipped her head back against the sofa. It was a relief to be able to talk about this at least. ‘My husband’s been ringing me for two weeks,’ she said, keeping her eyes on
the ceiling. ‘He’ll ring repeatedly, but say nothing if I answer, and as soon as I switch off, he rings again. Or he’ll leave it, and then call at odd hours of the night.

‘I can’t prove it’s him,’ she said, nodding as if Luke had objected. ‘I just know that it is. It’s driving me crazy.’ She smiled crookedly at the
ceiling. ‘Wrong: it
drove
me crazy just now. I was hoping he’d get tired of the game and give up,’ she added with a sigh. She slid both her hands behind her head and
stretched her neck with a grimace. ‘I should have known better,’ she said. Martin doesn’t give up. Ever.’

She felt rather than saw Luke stiffen. Felt his eyes on her face as she tilted her head from side to side to try and loosen the knots in her neck.

‘I didn’t realize,’ he said slowly.

‘Why should you?’

‘No, I thought . . . I assumed your husband had left you and that you’d come back to York with your tail between your legs,’ said Luke. ‘I thought that’s why you
were so uptight and snotty.’

Ruffled, Tess let her hands drop and straightened her back. ‘I wasn’t
snotty
!’ she objected. Luke was a fine one to talk about being snotty!

‘Okay, maybe snotty is too strong a word, but you were very stiff.’

‘So were you!’

‘Only because you were.’ Luke stopped as he caught her eye, and his mouth twisted down in a rueful grin. ‘Well, okay, maybe I wasn’t very mature,’ he conceded.
‘I bumped into your mother soon after I came back to York last year,’ he told Tess. ‘You can imagine what a pleasure that was for both of us.’

A little mollified, Tess settled back into the cushions once more. ‘Not the cosiest of chats, I gather?’

‘No.’ Luke leant forward and rested his elbows on his knees. ‘She was at pains to impress on me what a wonderful life you had in London. How rich and successful your husband
was. What a big house you lived in. How deliriously happy you were and so on.’

‘Ah.’ Tess buried her face in her glass once more, cringing inwardly as she pictured the scene all too easily. She could just hear her mother boasting, and see Luke sneering in
response. The two of them had always rubbed each other up the wrong way. Her mother was a snob, Luke prickly and defensive.

And very quick to think the worst of her, she realized with a stupid stab of hurt.

‘You thought I had turned into my mother, in fact?’ she said as lightly as she could.

Luke hunched a shoulder. ‘I might have made a few assumptions about you having turned into a yummy mummy,’ he admitted grudgingly.

‘Thanks a lot!’

‘When Richard told me you were going to live in his flat, I thought your husband had kicked you out or something.’ He paused, rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. ‘I guess
when your mum told me about your wealthy husband and perfect life, it made me feel . . . well, jealous. Or inadequate. Or something. It was like you’d moved on, left me and York behind, and I
was just a second-rate photographer making ends meet with a bit of joinery.’

Jealous? Inadequate?
Luke
? Tess blinked, uncertain of how to react.

‘Anyway,’ he said after an awkward moment, ‘that’s why I was so quick to jump to conclusions. The honest truth is that there was a bit of me that was pleased when I heard
your oh-so-wonderful marriage had broken up, and I’m not proud of it.’ He met her gaze straightly. ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you, Tess.’

She looked back at him, conscious of a warmth stealing through her veins. How long was it since someone had looked at her directly and said that they were sorry?

‘I’m sorry if I seemed snotty,’ she offered.

They smiled at each other, tentatively at first, and then more easily, but the smile lingered a little too long until neither of them knew what to do with it any more. Tess felt the warmth
spreading, tingling up her throat and into her cheeks, and she made herself look away just as Luke jerked his own gaze down to his hands and cleared his throat.

‘Yes, well, I’m sure I was a dick too.’

‘Let’s just say you were very intimidating.’

Luke lifted his head. ‘Come on, Tess, I never intimidated you! It was one of the reasons I always liked you.’

‘Of course I was intimidated.’ It was good to be able to tease him, to feel the stiffness between them evaporate. ‘I was petrified, in fact. You were always so fierce, all
snarling and surly.’

‘Not with you,’ said Luke. ‘Don’t rewrite history! We used to talk and laugh all the time, do you remember?’

‘Yes.’ Tess smiled a little sadly, thinking about how little she had been able to talk to Martin about anything. Her job had been to listen to her husband and to agree. She had never
laughed with him the way she had with Luke. Even now, it was amazingly comfortable to sit across from Luke and talk. Almost as if they had never been apart.

He seemed to read her mind. ‘Did you ever think about what it would have been like if we’d stayed together?’

She thought about lying, decided against it. ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘Then I’d remember how hurt I was when you left,’ she added with a look.

‘Hey, you were the one who went to London,’ he said mildly.

‘
You
went off to Ouagadougou or Timbuktu or wherever you were so determined to go!’

‘Only after you’d made it clear that all you wanted to do was settle down. A good job. Marriage. Kids. You had it all worked out.’

Tess folded her lips in frustration. How could Luke remember things so differently? He had made it clear that his plans to travel the world taking photographs didn’t include her, so of
course she had pretended that she didn’t want to go anyway. And she
had
wanted a career and a family. Was that so wrong?

Look where it had got her, hallucinating about a life in the past and having hysterics in the kitchen.

‘Oh, what does it matter anyway?’ she said, draining the last of the brandy. The warmth and ease she’d felt only a few moments ago had frayed on the jagged shards of memory.
Perhaps it was just as well. ‘It’s all a long time ago.’ She put down the glass. ‘I’d better go and clear up that mess in the kitchen.’

‘Tess,’ Luke said quietly as she made to push herself up from the sofa.

‘What?’

‘Was it very bad, your marriage? I know it must have been,’ he said as she sank back down. ‘I know you’d never have left if it wasn’t. And if I hadn’t been so
choked with my own sense of inadequacy, I’d have realized that it was more than wounded pride making you so brittle.’

Tess didn’t answer at first. ‘It was pretty bad,’ she said at last. ‘Oh, Martin wasn’t violent,’ she added quickly as she saw Luke’s face change.
‘I wasn’t deprived. I was living in a beautiful house with no financial worries, just like Mum told you. I kept telling myself that I didn’t really have anything to complain
about.’

She picked at the piping on the sofa arm, needing to explain to Luke, but at the same time reluctant to spoil the fragile trust they seemed to have built up. She was ashamed, humiliated by what
she had to tell him. For a few moments there she had let herself feel like the Tess Luke remembered, the girl who had loved and laughed and trusted, the girl who had defied her mother’s
snobbery and her friend’s disapproval to climb on the back of his bike and believe in the restless, passionate boy she glimpsed beneath his brusque exterior.

She didn’t want to tell Luke that that girl had vanished, but there would be relief, too, in telling the truth.

‘It’s hard to explain what Martin’s like,’ she began again after a while.

‘He’s older than you, I bet.’

Tess looked at Luke, surprised. ‘How did you know?’

He shrugged. ‘I always figured you were looking for someone to replace your father.’

The idea caught Tess on the raw. ‘Martin’s nothing like Dad,’ she said sharply.

‘I just meant . . .’ Luke looked as if he was searching for the right words. ‘I know how much you missed your dad after he died, that’s all.’