‘You killed him too?’
‘He was an ignorant sailor.’ Ralph waved a hand dismissively. ‘No one will miss him. I will send my own man out on the boat and he can tip the bodies in the river. I have some goods arrived in Hull in any case. It will not be a wasted trip.’
Nell tightened her hold on her trembling daughter. ‘And what of us?’ she made herself ask.
‘Oh, I think we should go home, don’t you?’
What could she do? Nell was numb. Her mind couldn’t grasp the enormity of Janet’s betrayal. A frantic voice in her head kept telling her to do something, anything, but when she tried to imagine what it would be, all she saw was a blank. She couldn’t scream. Janet had a knife at Meg’s back and Meg herself had given up. She stumbled beside her mother, shuddering, beyond even tears now. All Nell could do was help keep Meg upright and pray for a miracle.
They retraced their steps through the dark streets. It was like pulling the wool out of the spindle, unwinding time remorselessly. The dogs barked again; their owners cursed and mumbled again. They went back through the passage, back through the door. Back up the stairs. No need to care for the creak this time.
Would the servants hear? Nell wondered. But even if they did, what could they do? Ralph would send them away and they would not dare say him nay. They must have heard Ralph beating her at night sometimes. They would be used to pulling the covers over their ears. They were sensible maids, both of them. They would turn over and go back to sleep.
‘In the closet, I think,’ said Ralph, businesslike.
Nell baulked in the doorway. This room had held horror for her for so long, but she had never imagined a horror like this.
Too late, she woke out of her stupor. ‘Wait,’ she said, as if he would listen to her. ‘Wait!’ But Janet put a hand to her back and shoved her into the room. Meg followed, walking stiffly like a doll.
Nell remembered holding her when she was born, how her heart had swelled with love.
Her daughter, her child. God have mercy on her, it could not end this way.
Gathering her strength, she looked at Ralph. ‘Do what you will to me,’ she said straightly, ‘but let Meg go.’
Ralph looked amused. ‘But what I will for you, wife, is for you to suffer, and for that I need the girl. I have been too lenient with you before,’ he explained almost kindly. ‘I have stayed my hand, and let you grow rude and rebellious, so now I must find a way to really cause you pain, and punish you in the worst possible way, as you deserve.’
And his smile as he turned his pale gaze to Meg froze the blood in Nell’s veins.
Chapter Twenty
‘No . . .’ What was left of her colour drained from Nell’s face. ‘She is your own daughter!’ she whispered, terrified.
‘I have never cared for her,’ said Ralph, indifferent. ‘It should have been Meg who died, not Hugh. What good is a girl to me? But you, she matters to you, does she not?’
‘Let her go, Ralph.’
‘I think not. I have some refinements to my technique I am eager to try. Bind her,’ he ordered Janet abruptly, taking over the knife she held at Meg’s throat to keep Nell quiet.
Janet bustled around, tying Nell’s wrists and ankles together, and gagging Meg with brisk efficiency. Meg was slumped on a stool, her head hanging low, her eyes dull. Nell couldn’t even be sure that she was listening. She barely reacted when Janet tightened the scarf around her nose and mouth.
‘Now that Tom is dealt with, what is the worst you can imagine, wife?’ Ralph stroked the edge of Meg’s cheek with the back of the knife. ‘Is it being shut up in the dark, or is there something worse than that, hmm?’
‘You are a fiend. I think you must be the Devil himself.’ The words, the worst she could think of, sounded bland. There were no words for the depth of her terror and disgust.
He tsked. ‘Name-calling won’t help. Now, if only you had Janet’s appreciation for my skills . . . but you always turned your nose up at me, didn’t you? Even when you were a grubby brat. So beautiful and so strong . . . I longed to break your will, but you were a disappointment to me, I have to admit. You never understood what I needed.’ He shook his head. ‘I, Ralph Maskewe, was reduced to vagrants, to filthy whores and harlots who broke at the first blow.’
‘It was you . . .’ Nell managed. ‘You killed all those girls?’
‘I was disposing of them,’ Ralph amended. ‘Filth like that, corrupting our streets. I put them out of their misery.’
‘Tell her about your first,’ said Janet. She was circling Nell, knife at the ready. ‘I like that story.’
‘Oh, I was a bumbling beginner then,’ he acknowledged with a self-deprecating tilt of his head. ‘My mother was a devout woman and a good Protestant. She taught me early the tender power of a pinch or a slap, but then she died . . .’ His face worked with emotion. ‘She was hardly cold in her grave before my father married again.’
‘Tom’s mother,’ said Nell, grasping at the hope that if she could keep him talking long enough the madness would fade from his eyes.
‘That papist!’ Ralph spat. ‘My father was in thrall to her. He should have made her change her religion, but no! He builds a priest hole, he re-panels his closet, he lets her harbour priests and say mass . . . He was a weakling!’
Nell did not remember Henry Maskewe as a weakling, but she was not going to contradict Ralph now.
‘She had a psalter,’ Ralph went on, momentarily lost in the past. ‘She used to let me look through it.’ He laughed scornfully. ‘She thought she would convert me to the old religion, but I only wanted to see the image of the Day of Judgement.’ His eyes held a faraway expression. ‘I was so drawn to that page. I looked at what the devils were doing and I felt such a thrill. Ah, your senses are too dull . . . I cannot explain it to you! Those screams, the blood, the pain . . . it was so pure. I could feel it in my belly. I could feel it in my cock.’
He rubbed himself reflectively, and Janet chuckled, a feral sound, dark and loathsome. ‘I knew what I wanted from a bedding,’ Ralph said. ‘I thought that dolt of a maid Joan would be grateful for my attentions, but no! Oh, she went through the motions, but I’d barely broken her in before she took herself off and drowned herself in the Ouse.’
A memory sliced through Nell’s fear: she and Tom, at the staithe in the fog. Joan never did anyone any harm except herself. She could remember her disbelief that anyone could do such a thing. Nothing could be that bad, she had thought, but she had been wrong. Poor little Joan, forced by Ralph to his unnatural desires. How she must have despaired of finding help. She had chosen death over Ralph, even though it condemned her to a grave at the crossroads with a stake through her heart.
‘Then I had to look elsewhere.’ Ralph sighed at the trouble he was put to. ‘It was easy enough to find harlots. I didn’t have to worry about marking their faces, but they weren’t truly satisfying – no more than a momentary release. They would do whatever I asked if I paid them.
‘And then there was you,’ he said to Nell, who didn’t dare take her eyes from the knife he kept at Meg’s throat. ‘But you weren’t pure either, were you? Oh, there was pleasure in breaking your wild spirit, I’ll admit, but Janet is the only one who truly knows what I need. She pleases me well, but still, there are times I crave for something more. Janet understands, do you not, my sweet?’
‘I do,’ she said with a grotesque simper. ‘I know what you need, love. What you deserve.’
‘Sometimes,’ Ralph confided to Nell, ‘she likes to watch, and tonight she shall.’
He lifted Meg’s chin. ‘I have been waiting for this a long time. Look how pure she is! How unmarked! The others were filthy whores, but this will be the culmination. How glad I am you decided to run, Eleanor, else I might never have had the chance to initiate our daughter into the delights of pain.’
‘Sweet Jesù, no,’ Nell whispered, beyond terror now.
‘But yes,’ said Ralph, pleased with himself. ‘And as for you, wife, I
have something special planned for you. You planned to insult and humiliate me.’ He shook his head. ‘That was a very bad mistake, and now you’re going to pay.’
‘I won’t keep quiet if you touch Meg.’
‘Oh, believe me, you will. You’re going to be as quiet as the grave.’ He threw back his head and laughed at his own joke, and Janet sniggered. ‘You, dear wife, are going in the wall and you’re never coming out. I’m going to shut you in the dark, and you’re going to listen to what I do to your daughter, and you’re going to die screaming in there.’
It seemed she was not beyond terror after all. It swallowed her, black, shiny, slippery. ‘You are insane.’
‘You think so? For that . . .’ He nodded at Janet, who casually took Meg’s little finger and snapped it back. Meg arched in agony but Ralph had his big hand over her gagged mouth and no sound came out. Nell saw her daughter’s eyes roll back over his palm, and her mind went dark with hatred.
‘May all the devils in Hell torment you to the end of time,’ she cursed her husband. ‘May you be hounded to your death, and may you die in agony ten times worse than that you have made your own daughter suffer.’
Ralph waved her curses aside. He was in great good humour. Pain always made him smile. ‘Gag her,’ he ordered Janet and before Nell could draw breath to scream again, a filthy rag was slapped over her mouth and knotted firmly behind her cap.
Meg had fainted, and was slumped on the floor by the stool. Nell tried to hop over to her, but Janet pulled her back with the same casual inhumanity she used on Meg. How could she ever have thought of this woman as a friend? Nell wondered with an oddly detached part of her mind, the only part that was not blank and black with horror. How could she not have guessed that beneath that homely, ordinary surface lay a writhing mass of cruelty and madness?
Ralph was standing by the fireplace, moving his hand over the wainscot. ‘Who would have thought I’d ever be glad that papist persuaded my father to put in these priest holes? They are so cunningly concealed, you would never find them unless you knew where to look . . . ah, here one is!’
There was a clunk, and a panel on one side of the fireplace swung open. In spite of herself, Nell’s gaze was drawn to where the hole gaped obscenely black.
‘No, no, no . . .’ Shaking her head frantically, the words strangled by the rag in her mouth, she tried to back away, but she had forgotten that her ankles were lashed together. She fell heavily, and a bright shock of pain bloomed as her head struck the floor.
It had been freshly strewn with sweet-smelling herbs. She had seen to it herself, not wanting Ralph to suspect that she was going. It was strange seeing the floor from this sideways angle with her skull still ringing from the impact. There was a tiny spray of meadowsweet right in front of her eyes. It was grey and dried and the leaves were withered. She remembered picking the flowers in the summer when they were feathery and white against their fresh green leaves, remembered holding the stems to her nose to breathe in their fragrance and then hanging them in bundles in her still room to dry. Shouldn’t there have been a warning then, a prickling sense that these would be among the last things she would ever see?
For she was going to die. Nell knew that now, but still she struggled as Janet and Ralph tsked at how she had fallen and bundled her to her feet.
‘I’ll tell everyone you ran off with Tom,’ Ralph informed her conversationally. Helpless as she was, Nell resisted as best she could as he dragged her across to the fireplace. ‘No one will look for you. They’ll all have seen how you panted after him like a bitch in heat. Janet can come back and keep house for me . . . yes, it will all work out perfectly.’
‘What about the girl?’ asked Janet, jerking her head at Meg, who had come round and was curled in a ball on the floor, keening as if she had lost her mind. As Nell profoundly hoped that she had.
Ralph paused, dropped Nell while he considered. ‘The river?’
‘Depends if you want to mark her or not,’ Janet said practically. ‘You can’t pass her off as a whore and a vagrant. The coroner will ask questions, and you don’t want no jurors nosing around. Leave her unmarked – you can say she killed herself after her mother abandoned her.’
He pouted. ‘No marks, no fun.’ He smiled down at Nell, showing all his big teeth. ‘Besides, I want her mother to be able to hear her suffer.’
‘You could put them in together,’ Janet suggested, eager to help. ‘When you’re done.’
‘Too small. Ah, I have it!’ Ralph clapped his hands. ‘We’ll use the secret stair.’ He strolled over to the corner of the room by the window overlooking the garden and began feeling around for another hidden latch. ‘Another papist alteration, but one I confess I have found useful when not wanting to advertise my night-time . . . travels.’ The teeth flashed again, bone white in the flickering candlelight, as a heavy click announced that the panel was open. ‘A shame to close it up, but worth it, I feel. I’ll get John Tyler in to brick up the door into the garden. He doesn’t need to know why.’
Fastidiously, he brushed the dust off his fingers. ‘Well, then, now that’s decided, we can get on.’
Without more ado, he and Janet picked up a struggling Nell and bundled her into the priest hole. It was so small that the process was not without difficulty, but they managed with some shoving. At the last moment, Ralph ripped the bonds from her wrists.
‘I like the idea of hearing you fighting to get out,’ he told Nell. ‘And you’ll be able to hear exactly what I’m doing.’
And with a last gleam of his teeth, he closed the panel on her. A dull click as the wood slotted into place and Nell was alone in the smothering dark. The cobwebs clung to her lips and eyes, and the blackness licked its lips, slavering at the prospect of eating her up. But worse than all that was the inhuman cry that came from her daughter, left alone with the monster that was her father.
Even though it would please Ralph, Nell couldn’t help herself from beating on the panel. She couldn’t bear to listen, but neither could she bear for her daughter to think that she had abandoned herself to her own terror without thought for Meg’s. Her beating would bear witness that Meg was not alone. So she ripped at the implacable wood until her fingers were torn and splintered and behind the filthy rag that covered her mouth still she cursed Ralph and Janet from the bottom of her heart.
Meg was whimpering now, calling for her mother, her moans punctuated by the sound of Ralph grunting, and the slap of flesh on flesh. Every now and then he called out: ‘Can you hear, Eleanor? Can you imagine what I’m doing to her?’
And she could. God help her, she could. Wrapped as she was in blackness, Nell could see with agonizing clarity: Ralph beating Meg. Ralph hurting Meg, stinging and slicing her tender flesh. Ralph forcing Meg to his vilest and most degrading pleasure while Janet groaned and shuddered with delight.
And Nell could do nothing. Nothing. She was trapped in the dark, with horror and grief and rage and despair and a desperate, wrenching guilt her only companions and she swore that she would pursue Ralph into Hell and beyond until her daughter was avenged.
She could hear Meg begging: ‘Please . . . please . . . please . . .’ but her cries grew fainter and fainter until Nell was straining to hear her. She continued to beat and tear at the wood, long after the only sounds were of the lash of the whip, and of Ralph and Janet gasping and groaning in ecstasy.
Finally, exhausted, depleted, Nell’s ruined hands slid down the wood in despair. She would have slumped, but there was no room for her legs to do more than buckle, and the pain blotted out all but the most dreadful knowledge that speared dagger sharp through it all.
Her daughter was dead. Tom was dead. Nell was ready to welcome death, but horror had not done with her yet. It had its hands around her throat, and her heart jerked agonizingly as the darkness crushed her. It was pressing in, pressing on her mouth, on her ribs, on her mind, blotting out Ralph and Janet and even Meg at last, until there was only Nell, alone with terror and pain and the beas
t that was horror.
It suffocated her with its fetid stink. It gnawed at her flesh with its razor-sharp teeth, and fed on her belly, tearing at her entrails and clawing its way up inside her until it latched at last onto her heart and tore it apart with a bright shriek of agony that blotted out all awareness.
It was the only mercy shown to Nell that day.
Her eyes flew open with a wrenching gasp for air. He was backing away from her, bafflement and unease warring in his expression.
‘What’s happening?’ he said, glancing over his shoulder, then back at her. ‘Why are you looking so strange? What’s going on?’
She was free! She raised a hand to her mouth but the filthy rag Janet had tied around her was gone. There was no tie around her ankles.
Her fingers were torn and bleeding, but she could breathe. She could breathe.
Exultation filled her, coursing along her veins with every breath, and she straightened like a leaf unfurling. The room was strange and everything was out of kilter, but the darkness had gone and the light was dazzling her eyes.
And the author of her horror was standing right in front of her.
‘You,’ she said softly. ‘I told you I would follow you to Hell and beyond.’
‘Stop it, Theresa!’ His voice rose. ‘Why are you talking like that?’
‘Stop it? I will not stop. I will never stop until I have avenged my daughter!’
‘Daughter? What daughter? What’s wrong with you, Theresa?’
She threw back her head and laughed, a harsh sound that jangled through the clammy air in the room. ‘You are wrong! You are monstrous. What evil lives in your head that you would kill your own daughter?’
‘Theresa, that’s enough. I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t like it!’ His eyes widened as they fixed on her bloody fingers. ‘Christ, what’s happened to your hands?’
The Memory of Midnight Page 36