‘Oscar? Oscar? What about me? You’ve had all day with the child. Is it too much to ask for you to be here when I get home after a hard day? It’s not as if you have anything else to do. Well, is it?’
Her head throbbing with tension. Picking up the baby, who was crying in earnest now. Not knowing what to deal with first. Taking the easy way out. Agreeing with him. Telling herself she would stand up to him next time.
It always ended the same way. Martin would retreat into a monumental sulk, until she couldn’t stand it any longer and cajoled him out of it, at which point he would beg for her forgiveness in a voice choked with emotion.
‘It’s just because I love you so much, Theresa. You know that, don’t you?’
After a while, it was easier not to go out in case he rang. Easier to give in when he suggested ordering online so that she didn’t need to go to the supermarket at all. Easier to make sure Oscar was in bed before he came home.
Easier to lose contact with her own friends rather than have to make excuses about why Martin didn’t want to socialize with them. Once or twice she had made the effort to go out on her own, but she had spent the whole time worrying about whether she would get home on time, and after Oscar’s birth it had been clear that insisting on going out and leaving Martin alone with a baby after he had been at work all day would be monumentally selfish and irresponsible.
Easier to make her life smaller and smaller until it had almost disappeared.
Tess had never told anyone what it had been like. She was too ashamed.
‘It’s not as if Martin hit you or anything awful like that,’ her mother said.
‘No,’ Tess agreed dully. ‘He never hit me.’
He never had. Not physically. It was no use trying to explain to her mother, though. Sue saw Martin as the rest of the world saw him, as Tess herself had seen him at first: bright, articulate, successful, good-looking, oozing charm and confidence. When he looked at you, you felt you were the only person in the world he was interested in, that nobody else mattered.
It had been flattering at first. To be so wanted, so loved. To be the absolute centre of someone’s world. Lonely and overwhelmed by London, Tess had been dazzled by him. Somewhere along the line, though, the flattering had become bullying, and the centre of Martin’s world a more and more uneasy place to be.
Tess took a breath, tried to push back the headache grinding behind her eyes. ‘What exactly did you tell Martin, Mum?’
Sue puffed out an offended sigh. ‘I said Oscar was fine, and that you just needed a little time.’
‘You didn’t give him my new address or phone number?’
‘No, and I didn’t give him your new mobile number either, because I don’t know it,’ Sue reminded her. Tess hadn’t wanted to give her mother any of her contact details, but her lack of trust had led to such a scene that she had had to give in, able to keep only the mobile number to herself. Even that obviously rankled. ‘Satisfied?’
‘All right. I’m sorry, Mum, I just . . .’ Tess trailed off. What was the point of explaining? ‘Next time Martin gets in touch, can you please just tell him to contact me through my solicitor?’
The headache had her brain in a vice by the time she got back to Stonegate. Fumbling with the key, she could smell cut wood from the builders who were refurbishing the shop next door. It reminded her of Mr Maskewe’s closet, and that hot afternoon when she had felt her way along the new wainscot and then turned to see the chest. Her stomach clenched at the memory.
How could she have thought it was a good place to hide?
Tess put a hand to her head as she leant against the stair wall, suddenly dizzy. That wasn’t her memory. She was remembering a memory in a dream. It wasn’t real.
She just needed to lie down for a bit.
Somehow she made it up the stairs and let herself into the flat. Inside, the air felt taut, trembly with anticipation, and there was an edge to the silence that made her nerves prickle.
Not enough sleep, that was all.
She’d woken that morning, stiff and uncomfortable, with her head on the desk by the laptop. Oscar had dragged his feet, wanting to stay with Ashrafar rather than go to his new school, and Tess had underestimated how much time it would take to walk there with him dawdling all the way. Then the conversation with her mother, unearthing memories of monks and severed heads. Was it any wonder her head ached?
Her pulse boomed and thudded in her ears, adding to the thumping in her skull. She would lie down for a bit, close her eyes.
Sometime later, Tess woke with a panicky sense of suffocation. There was a great weight pressing down on her, and she struggled up, only to find that the cat had made itself at home on her chest and was regarding her with great yellow eyes, mildly irritated by her wriggles. In the end she had to lift her off bodily before she could sit up.
She felt better. Her headache had mostly gone, and by the time she had washed her face and made herself a cup of coffee, she was feeling almost normal and ready to start work. Settling at the desk in the window, she opened both computers so that she could see them side by side and called up a photograph of the first page of the manuscript. The yellowing pages were covered in a typical sixteenth-century scrawl. The ink was a little faded but otherwise the manuscript was in remarkably good condition.
These fragments of the coroner’s inquest records had been discovered in the city’s archives only the year before, and would be an important new source for Richard’s study on Tudor crime. It was Tess’s job to transcribe them accurately and translate from the Latin where necessary.
Drone work. She could almost hear Martin spitting out the words. He’d been contemptuous of her work – It’s not as if copying is a real job – and she’d let him persuade her that there was no need to carry on working after their marriage. We don’t need the money. If you loved me, you’d want to be there for me. My work is so stressful, I need you at home.
Determinedly, Tess shook off the memory. Martin was a distraction she didn’t need.
It was slow going until her eyes adjusted to the unfamiliar script. Anno regni Elizabeth regne viiimo . . . 1566. Well, a date was a start. Tess wriggled her shoulders and settled more comfortably in her chair.
Ashrafar had found a patch of sun by the window and was sitting sphinx-like on the desk, watching the tourists taking photographs below. The ends of her black fur shimmered gold in the sunlight. Every now and then Tess reached out to run her hand along her back, and she would flex her spine and vibrate with a purr. She made for a peaceful companion.
Tess worked to the end of the page, closed down the image, and pulled up the next one, and then the next. It became easier as she got used to the vagaries of the clerk’s hand, and she was able to work faster. It felt good to be using her skills again, and she was feeling confident as she pulled up the fourth page and the name Maskewe leapt out at her like a punch from the screen, driving the breath from her lungs in a cough of shock.
Coincidence, she told herself as she patted her throat and got her breathing back in order.
Focusing on the entry, she made herself work through it carefully, transcribing word by word and translating as she went along. The inquest jury had been sworn in to enquire into the death of one Joan Beck. Joan was servant to Mr Henry Maskewe, merchant, and her body was found on the riverbank at St George’s Close.
Joan had drowned.
The tiny hairs on the back of Tess’s neck lifted. She took a steadying breath and read the lines again, checking that she hadn’t made a mistake, but no, the names were clear.
Coincidence, she reassured herself again. It must be. She had never read this account before. As far as she knew, no one had looked at it properly since the sixteenth century. The records had been shoved in the back of another manuscript and lost in the city’s archives for four hundred years.
But if that were the case, how was it that she could remember so vividly standing on King’s Staithe in the fog and telling Tom about Joan’s death? How
did she know about Joan’s buck teeth and the way her head hunched down between her shoulders as if cringing away from a blow?
She didn’t remember, Tess reminded herself desperately. It had been a dream.
There had to be an explanation for the coincidence of names. Perhaps she had glanced at the page when sorting the images into a folder and subconsciously registered the names? She knew enough about sixteenth-century York to fill in other details. Tess clutched at the idea, refusing to give in to the objections clamouring at the back of her mind. Yes, that must be it. Poor Joan probably drowned accidentally.
Trying not to notice that her hand wasn’t quite steady on the mouse, she read on. Various witnesses testified to the fact that Joan had been of good character, but that a week or so before her death she had suffered a great heaviness of spirit. A neighbour, Margery Wrightson, who had seen Joan wandering by the river, opined that Joan had ‘fallen in fere of worldly shame’ and chosen to ‘rydde herself from lyf for werynes’. Joan, the court found, had killed herself.
A strange wavery feeling rippled through Tess. She felt lightheaded and insubstantial, as if she had peered into a dizzying chasm, and, as if through a gauze, she saw Ashrafar flatten her ears and jump off the desk, spitting in alarm. She was gripping the top of the desk, pressing the wood between her thumb and fingers until her flesh turned white. There was a chip in the varnished edge of the table and she could feel the splintery unevenness pressing into her skin. The table was real; she was real. Tess tried to hold onto that, but the harder she gripped, the more she felt herself receding. There was a strange, sucking sensation in her head, and she barely had time to feel frightened before her eyes blurred and the world seemed to tip away from her.
She stepped out of the cool darkness of the barbican into the sunlight, and into a jostling press of vagrants. ‘A penny, sweet mistress!’ they begged, feral-eyed, rank with dirt and desperation. ‘For charity!’
‘Ignore them,’ said Alice but Nell was already digging into the purse at her girdle for a coin. She couldn’t ignore them. There were too many of them, and they were too close, too loud. She caught the eye of a girl about her own age with a gaunt face and bitter eyes, two small boys clinging to her skirts, and she threw the penny to her. Snatching it out of the air, the girl ran away with the boys before the other vagrants surrounded her like a pack of snarling dogs.
Nell watched her go. ‘Poor lass. Those boys can’t be much older than Harry and Peter. I wonder how I would fare if I had to care for my brothers? If I had to beg for a crust of bread so they could eat?’
‘For pity’s sake, Nell.’ Alice clicked her tongue and took Nell firmly by the arm. ‘Now they will all want something. Come, walk quickly.’
‘Did you hear they found another girl down by the river?’ Nell shivered even though the sun struck warm across her shoulders. ‘They say she was so savagely beaten, none could tell who she was or what she looked like. That is four now.’
‘Four what?’
‘Four vagrant girls who have been killed over the last year or so. Nobody seems to care.’
Alice shrugged. ‘They are idle and shiftless,’ she pointed out. ‘They just make trouble. Nobody does care.’
‘But who would do such a thing?’
‘Nell, it is not for you to worry about these things,’ said Alice, rolling her eyes. ‘It is a holiday. Can you not think about something merrier?’
Nell chewed her lip. It disturbed her that nobody worried about those girls whose bodies had been beaten so savagely and discarded so carelessly. The neighbourhood shrugged the way Alice did. It was distasteful, yes, but no one cried for an inquest. The girls were harlots and vagrants – rough, idle sorts. They might as well be dead as spend their lives begging outside the bars or spreading their legs in stinking alleys behind the alehouses.
Outside the bar, the calsey was wide and crowded. It was Whit Sunday, and apprentices and maids and servants, all dressed in their holiday best, were funnelling through the barbicans and out beyond the city walls, where supervision was not so strict and there were assignations to be had and quiet places to meet.
There were no plays to watch that year. In the past they would have stood in the streets as the wagons trundled past, or squeezed their way through the crowds to see Christ pinned to the cross, but no more. Belief was a fraught business these days. The Harrisons, Nell’s master and mistress, went to church every Sunday, but who knew what they believed in their hearts? To be an alderman, as Mr Harrison was, was to be a Protestant. It was only sensible. Mr Maskewe was an alderman too, though. Nell found herself remembering the priest hole Tom swore was in his father’s closet, and she wondered if it was ever used.
Letting Alice steer her away from the press of poor at Monk Bar, Nell lifted her face to the sun. They had seen little enough of it recently and it was good to get out of the narrow streets. She and Alice had been to divine service and now they had the day to themselves.
In the past, she would have spent the day with Tom. It would never have occurred to her to do any different. As children, they had slipped out through the postern gate to sneak apples from the orchards in Paynley’s Crofts or pick wild raspberries from the hedgerows, stuffing them in their mouths until their hands were stained and their lips blotched and red. They would chase each other along the paths and out to the common, and hang on the fence of the penfold, daring each other to touch the bull. Or they would head for the Foss to swing from the overhanging trees or paddle by its shallow banks. Nell could still remember the feel of the mud oozing between her toes.
It was a long time since she had been able to take off her stockings and go barefoot. She was sixteen. She wore a kirtle now, her best blue today, and a velvet hat. Her thick hair was plaited as best she could manage, although it still sprang out wildly from under her coif. No longer was she a wild, romping girl, a tomboy with a flat chest. Her breasts had grown and even though she tried to walk straight and tall, still her hips swung from side to side in spite of herself, and she could feel the way men’s eyes followed her down the street. It made Nell uncomfortable. She had put off childish things as she must, but oh, she missed them.
She missed Tom.
A year past, his master, Mr Todd, had announced that he would take him to Hamburg to teach him how to merchant.
Tom was wild to go, and Nell tried to make herself pleased for his sake, but it was hard not to feel left behind. He was gone for nigh on six months, and she missed him dreadfully. She waited and waited for him to come home, but when he did, everything was different.
He looked different, for a start. He was taller, his shoulders broader. His neck had thickened out and he had a new assurance that made Nell shy with him for the first time in her life. She wanted him to go back to being the Tom she knew, the Tom who tugged her hair and teased her. She wanted him to be a boy again, but instead he was a young man. A man who avoided her when he could, who wounded her with his silence.
Now when they met, their conversation was awkward, and the words clogged on their tongues. Where once they would have fought and tussled and laughed, now there was a silence fraught with uncertainty. Now instead of shoving easily at him, Nell was agonizingly aware of his deft hands. She couldn’t meet his eyes any more.
He was utterly familiar, and yet a stranger. She knew the shape of his shoulders, the quick way he turned his head, but it was as if she had never noticed his mouth before, never noticed the line of his cheek, the angle of his jaw. Had never seen how easily he filled the air. How many times had he smiled before? Why was it only now that every time his lips quirked her heart barrelled around her ribs, the air evaporated from her lungs and her blood started to thrum restlessly?
Hurt by the way his gaze slipped away from hers now, Nell pretended that she had changed too. When he was near, she laughed and slanted looks at the other young men under her lashes the way she had seen Alice do. She tossed her head; she dimpled a smile. But the instant Tom appeared the air was charged with his pr
esence, and no matter how fixedly she watched another, no matter how determinedly she chattered, her skin twitched under his bright, blue gaze and her throat grew hot and thick. It was exhausting. She had to be continually alert in case Tom should happen to find her looking as lost and lonely as she felt.
So today, instead of finding Tom as she used to, Nell was with Alice, who was also maidservant to the Harrisons. A pert wench a year or two older than Nell, Alice yearned for William Carter. William was a journeyman to a bladesmith and Nell didn’t care overmuch for him. She didn’t like his swagger, the cock o’ the walk smirk that played around his lips, but he was handsome, yes, she could see that.
Alice was determined to find him. William would not be lurking in any quiet corners. Where most people were, there William would be, surrounded by giggling maids and cocksure boys.
So Alice tugged Nell towards St Maurice’s churchyard where a cheering throng was gathered around a wrestling match. There was much betting going on, and as much attention on the money changing hands as on the two men struggling to pin each other to the ground.
‘There he is!’ Alice pinched Nell’s arm as she spied William Carter through the crowd. ‘Let’s move over there where he can see us.’
Nell winced as a clodhopping countryman stood on her foot, and an elbow landed in her side, but they managed to squeeze their way to the front. By the time she got there, Nell’s hat was askew and she was ruffled and red-faced, while Alice looked as if she might have strolled along an empty street. Her coif was in place, her skirts perfectly ordered, her smile demure.
The crowd whistled and jeered and catcalled while the wrestlers grunted. They were locked together, naked apart from their breeches, and Alice nudged Nell, momentarily distracted from William Carter. Both wrestlers were young and lean and fit, and although one was much slighter than the other, they were so equally matched they hardly seemed to be moving at all.
And then the smaller wrestler flipped the larger one onto his back so elegantly that no one saw quite how it was done. There was a shout of approval from the crowd, and the victor raised a fist in triumph. He turned round to acknowledge the applause with a blazing smile, and Nell sucked in a breath.
The Memory of Midnight Page 7