Luke’s eyes rested on her face for a long moment, before he nodded and to Tess’s relief looked away. ‘I suppose the centre of the city isn’t the quietest of locations,’ he said as he got to his feet.
‘I don’t mind the pubs. I don’t hear them at the back anyway.’ Grateful to him for accepting the change of subject, Tess let her shoulders drop. ‘It’s the rats that bother me.’
Luke bent to retrieve the discarded coffee, but paused at that and his brows shot up. ‘Rats?’
‘Or something. Mice maybe.’ Tess wished he hadn’t stood up. He was too big, too close. He took up too much air.
Edgily, she moved away, pretending to peer under the dustsheets. ‘I had a pest controller round a couple of days ago. He said there’s nothing there, but there is. I can hear it! It sounds as if something is trying to get out of the wall. It’s driving me mad!’
The mere thought of it made her voice rise in frustration, and Luke lifted his hands in an infuriatingly calming gesture. ‘Would you like me to take a look?’
He was humouring her. Tess’s lips pressed together so tightly they almost disappeared. She wasn’t going to let Luke Hutton write her off as a hysterical woman. She wasn’t going to be written off as anything.
She remembered the first time he had taken her on the back of his bike. They’d gone to the beach, lain in the sand dunes out of the wind.
I wish I could be like you, she had said. You’re so cool, so confident. You don’t care what anyone else thinks. While Tess was awkward and shy, hiding her insecurities and her grief for her father behind an aloof mask that only Luke seemed undaunted by.
Luke had turned his head to look at her. Tess could still see the curve of his mouth, the seriousness in his eyes, still feel the beat of her heart.
I care what you think, he had said. I don’t want you to be cool. I want you to be yourself.
Tess wanted to be herself again, and the Tess she wanted to be wasn’t going to rely on anyone else ever again.
She took a breath, forced calmness into her voice. ‘That’s kind of you, Luke,’ she said, ‘but there’s really no need. I was just trying to explain why I look such a wreck.’
‘If you’re sure . . .’
Tess’s phone started to ring before he could finish. She could feel it vibrating in her pocket, and she saw Luke looking around in case it was his. Tess was suddenly certain that it wouldn’t be Vanessa calling. It would be that silent breathing again and weariness sloshed through her. She didn’t want to answer, didn’t want to think about who was calling and why.
She was doing her best to be herself, but she hadn’t counted on anonymous phone calls and sleepless nights, on a world that kept slipping out of kilter or a sense of inexplicable dread that slithered at the edges of her mind.
Having checked that it wasn’t his own phone ringing, Luke turned and raised his brows in a mute query. Reluctantly, Tess drew the phone from her pocket as if it might spit at her and made herself look at the call display. Please let it be Vanessa, she prayed.
Number blocked.
‘Do you want to take that?’ Luke made a gesture suggesting that he should leave, but Tess shook her head.
‘No.’ Making up her mind abruptly, she dropped the phone onto the dustsheet. ‘Actually, would you mind looking at the wall after all?’ She flashed Luke a brief, meaningless smile. ‘I’ll let that go to voicemail.’
Had the ringtone always had that awful jeering quality? Tess did her best to ignore the sound of the phone ringing in the study as she led the way along the corridor to her bedroom. Luke made no comment, but it was a relief when the noise cut off at last, although it only served to intensify the silence in the room.
Tess looked around, trying to see it through Luke’s eyes. The bed. The chest of drawers pushed into the fireplace. The books that had looked so cheerful and inviting when she first saw them but that now seemed to watch her slyly. Would Luke notice? Would he sense the subtle malevolence in the room, the foreboding that trembled at the edge of her consciousness?
The air felt cold and congealed, and the morning sunshine had yet to make its way round to the window. Tess was very conscious of Luke’s presence in the room. He was wonderfully solid, wonderfully real, and she had to fight the urge to move closer to him.
‘It’s a bit gloomy in here, isn’t it?’ he said.
Tess moistened her lips. ‘It is a bit.’
Luke reached up and tapped the lampshade, setting the light swinging around the room. ‘Nothing that a decent light and a radiator wouldn’t cure.’
The swaying light was making Tess feel giddy, and she blinked hard, flinching as the silence was broken by the anguished rasp and scrabble behind the walls.
‘So, where do you think this noise is coming from?’ he asked.
Her face lit up. She hadn’t wanted to face the fact that she might have been imagining the noise. ‘You mean you can hear it too?’
‘No.’ He glanced at her, his eyes narrowing at the way her face crumpled with disappointment. ‘Can you?’
Scrape. Scratch. Scrabble. SCRAPE. SCRAPE. SCRAPE.
It was all she could do not to cover her ears. Tess’s eyes slid away from his. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not now.’
‘I suppose it could be rats.’ After another searching glance, Luke walked over to the wall and tapped on it. ‘This would have been an internal wall. It might not be solid.’
A roaring filled Tess’s ears, and she took a step back, groping for the edge of the bed, as the light fractured and the room wavered in front of her eyes. For a moment nothing was solid, and then the high-pitched whine of a drill started on the other side of the wall and, as if at a signal, everything slotted back into place.
‘Christ, what a bloody racket,’ said Luke. ‘No wonder you can’t sleep if you’ve got that going on.’
Tess was breathing very carefully, short, shallow breaths. The room seemed steady now.
‘They’re refurbishing the shop next door. They don’t work at night.’ The words felt odd in her mouth. She had to move her tongue around them carefully, as if they were stones, but Luke didn’t seem to notice anything amiss.
‘Maybe they’ve disturbed something. Let’s go and have a look.’
A skip piled high with rubble stood outside, blocking half the street, and the shop window was clouded with swirls of white paint. A notice was taped to the open door. Hiring now. Chef. Bar Staff (experience necessary). Also part-time waiting staff.
‘Looks like it’s going to be a restaurant of some kind,’ Luke commented, rapping his knuckles against the glass and walking in without waiting for a reply. ‘Richard won’t like that.’
Tess didn’t answer. She had never been inside the shop before – she was sure she hadn’t – but a sense of familiarity was crowding in on her, pressing towards her like the poor outside the Monk Bar barbican. Her throat was dry and clogged with a suffocating conviction that there was something she ought to do, something she ought to know.
‘Hello?’ Luke called.
A local radio station was playing at full blast upstairs, but not quite loud enough to drown out someone talking about a fight with his girlfriend. ‘So I’m like, “You’re a fucking crazy bitch,” and she starts fucking going at me,’ he complained, his surly account punctuated by hammering and the rhythmic buzz of a drill.
Luke took a few steps up the narrow metal stairs. ‘Hello?’ he said again. He glanced over his shoulder at Tess. ‘Coming?’
Chapter Six
‘I don’t think . . .’ Her voice was thin, squeezed out of her chest by the weight of recognition. She knew this place. This was the Maskewes’ hall, and when she got to the top she would see the walls panelled with wainscot, the tapestry hangings, the turned armchair over by the fireplace.
She wanted to call Luke back, but he was already disappearing round the bend in the staircase.
Tess’s eyes darted around her. The empty shop looked insubstantial, a transparency overlaying the house she
had known. Here had been the draper’s shop with the great, gleaming bolts of velvet and scarlet, of Holland cloth and lawn and cambric, leaning against the wall or rippling across the counter in swathes of colour. She could see the draper pulling the cloth from the bolt, rubbing the lustrous silk between his square, stubby fingers . . .
‘No,’ she whispered, and put out a hand to the wall to steady herself against the pull of memory. ‘No, not now.’ Upstairs, she could hear Luke trying to make himself heard over the noise, and then a bellow to someone to turn the radio off.
‘Tess?’ Luke called.
There was nothing here. It was an empty shop, that was all. Tess took a breath and put one foot on the bottom stair, then the other on the next. Another step, and another. Any moment now would come the raucous creak of the ill-fitting board.
Except that these stairs were made of metal. There was no board, no creak. Of course there wasn’t.
You imagine things.
Tess made herself climb the stairs, bracing herself for what she would see at the top. Luke was standing talking to the foreman, and as she hauled herself up the last steps, she made herself look round.
It was bigger and brighter than she had expected. The ceiling had been stripped away to expose the old roof timbers, and the sunlight so absent from her bedroom next door was striping through two dormer windows in what had once been another storey.
The wainscot had gone, the hangings with it. The walls were being stripped right back to uncover grimy grey beams, and the air was spangly with dust which lay thick on the floor where rush matting had once protected the boards. In the place of the turned chair stood a sawhorse, a plank of new wood balanced across it, and the smell rammed at her senses, just as it had done in Richard’s study earlier.
Tess balled her hands into fists and struggled to focus on the present.
Luke was explaining about the noise, and the other men shook their heads. ‘We haven’t seen any sign of rats. You can see, we’ve stripped the wall right back.’
‘Is there anything else it could be? Something in the wiring?’
Tess turned slowly, studying the room with half-narrowed eyes. It wasn’t exactly as it had been. Walls had been moved, windows punched in, and the fireplace had been blocked off at some point, but it was the Maskewe hall. She could feel it in her bones. Against the wall directly opposite her was where the turned chair had stood. The stairs had been behind her, and there, where there was now a wall between this building and the flat, had been the door to Mr Maskewe’s closet. Her bedroom.
She could hear music. The beat of a drum and the catchy whistle of the pipes. And laughter. Uncertainly, Tess looked around to see where it was coming from. Had the radio been switched on again? She glanced at Luke, wanting to hold onto his solid presence, but all at once he was blurred and the floor was tipping away from her while the music grew louder and louder and the room shuddered and spun around her, faster and faster and faster . . .
‘Faster, faster!’ Nell was dancing with Peter, her youngest brother, and her favourite. He was eight now, a tow-headed boy with a snub nose and a merry disposition. Quick and restless, he reminded Nell of herself when she was younger. When he walked, he seemed forever on the point of breaking into a run. Nell thought of Peter whenever she watched steam lift the lid of a pot. It was as if there was too much of him to be contained in one boy.
And he danced with an energy that left her breathless. They spun each other round until they were shrieking with laughter, in the middle of the crowded hall.
Outside, winter had the city in a bitter grip. The iron cold had ridged the streets with ice, but inside the Maskewe house the hall was ablaze with candles and hot with the press of bodies. A great fire spat and crackled, and the men stood round it, their furred gowns hitched around their hips, their faces ruddy from the wine and the heat of the flames. They were dealing the way those men always did. Several times Nell had seen them spit on their palms and shake to seal a bargain. They were merchants, even at Christmas.
Their wives had gathered at the other end of the hall, their hoods bobbing and swaying, their voices raised shrill above the sound of the music and stamping feet. The tables had been cleared so the young people could dance, and the waits were crammed into a corner, blowing and drumming and strumming.
To Nell, swinging with Peter in the middle of the floor, the room was a blur of colour and noise. Round and round they went, until she was dizzy with it, and then there was a strange, still moment when everything jarred to a halt. The company spun away and she was alone in the empty hall. Peter had gone; Mr Maskewe’s rich hangings had gone. There were no cushions, no candles. No fire in the hearth, no pewter goblets gleaming in the firelight. The room was bare, silent, leached of colour and warmth and life, and Nell stumbled in shock.
Then Peter was hauling her around once more and the hall slotted back into its rightful place. Nell blinked, but the image had vanished. Everything was as it should be.
‘What ails you?’ Peter shouted over the music, frowning at the expression on her face, and Nell shook the memory of that empty hall aside and pinned her smile back in place. It was Yuletide. It was a time to be cheerful, not indulge in strange fancies.
‘Naught,’ she said as the dance ended with a great bang of the drum. Breathless, the company laughed and clapped and called for more. ‘I am well.’
‘Then let us dance again!’ Peter grabbed her hand, but she hung back.
‘Later,’ she said. ‘I want to dance with Tom.’ Absently she twisted the garnet ring on her finger as her eyes searched the hall for him. Tom had been on edge all day, which was not like him. She needed to touch him and make him smile.
‘Dance with Tom next time,’ said Peter. ‘Come, or we will lose our place!’
But another voice cut across him before Nell could reply. ‘Dance with me.’ An order, not an invitation.
It was Ralph Maskewe, resplendent in a red velvet doublet, intricately embroidered, and slashed breeches. His nether stockings were immaculate, and tied precisely at the knee with silk garters. His ruff was crisp and white and puffed rigidly around his neck. Oh, he was by far the comeliest man there. There was no denying that.
Ralph was always polite, always attentive, but something in those pebbly eyes still repelled Nell. She didn’t like the way he looked at her, as if he would pin her down, a butterfly under a cat’s gleaming claw.
He held out a hand. ‘Dance with me,’ he said again as Peter slipped away with a grimace behind his back.
Nell was supposed to curtsey and thank Ralph courteously. She was supposed to put her hand in his and smile as he led her out onto the floor, but something in her rebelled. She couldn’t shake the conviction that Ralph only asked her to dance because he knew that she didn’t want to touch him.
‘I thank you, but I am waiting for Tom,’ she said, her hands spread flat against her stiff skirts.
‘Tom is with his master,’ Ralph pointed out. His voice was smooth, but somehow sticky, like the slimy trails snails left on stones early in the morning. It always made Nell want to wash her face.
He gestured towards the fire, to where Tom could indeed be seen next to Mr Todd. In deference to the feast, Tom was wearing his best doublet and hose. He wore them stiffly, as if he would much rather be in breeches and a leather jerkin, and premonition, feather-light, touched Nell between her shoulder blades. Something was wrong. Not the clothes so much as the hunch of his shoulders and the muscle jumping in his jaw. It was not like Tom to look so sober.
‘Come, Nell.’ A smile played around Ralph’s mouth. He was enjoying her reluctance. ‘You will have to find a better excuse than that.’
She couldn’t think of one. Nell put up her chin. ‘I am Eleanor now,’ she said instead. ‘I am not a child any longer.’
‘My brother calls you Nell.’
‘That is different.’
‘How so?’
‘Tom and I are betrothed.’
Ralph shook his head p
ityingly. ‘I think not,’ he said. ‘Tom has spoken to our father, and to yours. They are agreed. Tom is an apprentice still. He cannot afford a wife, and when he can, he will need one who can bring him honour.’
‘Tom told me this,’ Nell said. ‘I am hurly-burly, the hoyden daughter of an impoverished merchant, and no fit match for a Maskewe, your father thinks.’ The sting of it curdled her voice.
‘Can you deny it?’
She curled her fingers into her skirts. ‘I would be a good wife for Tom,’ she said stoutly. ‘I will be. We knew they would not let us marry immediately,’ she told Ralph. ‘It matters not. I will not marry anyone else and nor will Tom. We are promised to each other. He gave me a ring – see?’ She held up her hand so the garnet on her finger glimmered in the candlelight. ‘And I gave him a knife. We made the vow in front of witnesses. It is done.’
‘Done?’ Ralph’s smile slid into a sneer. ‘You know nothing of done, Eleanor. It takes more than a trumpery ring and a knife to make a betrothal. I do not advise you to take on my father as your enemy,’ he added, his voice silky, and she took a step back, sensing a threat.
‘I don’t want an enemy,’ she said valiantly. ‘I only want to marry Tom.’
‘Have you not yet learnt that we cannot always have what we want?’ said Ralph. ‘Now come, lower your chin and let us dance.’ He lifted his hand to her again, imperative. ‘You should be kind to me, Eleanor,’ he said. ‘If you are wise, you will try to get me on your side.’
He was right, Nell knew. She should be cleverer than she was. But still the thought of putting her hand in his made her skin shrink. She had no choice, though, she knew that. Tom was half turned away, nodding at something his master was saying. He could not come and rescue her, and why would he? Ralph was his brother. Ralph’s father was godfather to her brother. She had no reason not to dance with him.
Setting her mouth in a smile, she laid her fingers against his cool palm. It wasn’t clammy, it wasn’t rank with sweat or dirt, but she couldn’t stop the tiny flinch of revulsion, and Ralph knew it. He smiled as he led her into the dance.
The Memory of Midnight Page 10