The Memory of Midnight

by Pamela Hartshorne

  Sensing her gaze, he lifted his eyes from the coffin and met hers, and in spite of the solemnity of the occasion, Tess felt lust curl in her belly. They were different still, and they argued, but Luke challenged, he didn’t try to control. He helped, he didn’t attempt to take over. She thought about the quick laughter they shared and the sharp spear of desire she felt at his touch. About the friendship that ran clear and true through every argument, and the sense of sailing into a safe harbour at last when she lay curled against him and listened to him breathing.

  She thought about Nell and Tom, and how much they had risked for that. For them, the longing to be together had ended in tragedy, but that didn’t mean it would be the same for her and Luke. Nell’s story didn’t have to be hers. Perhaps, Tess told herself, it was time to stop being afraid of the past and start living for the future. She would talk to Luke when they got home.

  Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, the priest intoned and Tess stepped up to the grave.

  As soon as she was out of hospital she had gone back to work on the assize court records. Only the week before she had come across an entry dated 1588. Janet Scott, widow, indicted for murder. Tess’s hand had begun to shake as she transcribed and translated. An inquisition on the body of Ralph Maskewe, merchant, had found that on 31 October the said Janet had stabbed Ralph Maskewe to death with a dagger while they were lying together in bed.

  Had some shared madness seized them, Tess wondered, or had Janet turned at last on her partner in pain? Either way, Ralph had been spared the lingering death Nell would have wished for him, but it had been sordid and, Tess hoped, painful. The jury had been in little doubt of their verdict on Janet. Guilty, was the clerk’s laconic record. To hang.

  Tess looked at the rosemary in her hand – rosemary for remembrance. Earlier that morning she had stood alone on Ouse Bridge and watched the sunlight striking diamond bright on the water that was Tom’s grave as she dropped a sprig into the river in his memory. Now she let the rosemary fall gently from her hand onto the coffin where Nell and Meg lay together. She would remember them all.

  ‘Rest in peace, Nell,’ she said.

  Epilogue

  Murder in Merry England

  The discovery last year of two skeletons found walled up in a house in Stonegate was a story that caught the public imagination for a while, and many theories were put forward about who they were and how they came to be there. These are questions, historians say, that can never be answered conclusively.

  ‘The evidence can only take us so far,’ says historian Richard Landrow, whose forthcoming book on Tudor crime will include a discussion of the Stonegate skeletons. ‘Forensic examination of the two bodies established that they were both female and approximately four to five hundred years old. One was of a young girl between ten and fourteen years of age, and the other of a woman in her early thirties who had given birth. DNA analysis proved that they were related, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that they were mother and daughter, but we can’t say for sure that was the case.’

  Landrow points out that the forensic evidence, while compelling, is limited. ‘We know that the young girl’s hyoid bone was fractured, indicating that she was strangled, and she had a broken finger, but there is no evidence as to how the older individual died. There was some damage to the finger bones and, horrifyingly, it’s possible that she was walled up alive and starved to death, but again, we can’t be certain.’

  Beyond that, Landrow says, everything has to be speculation. ‘Stonegate was a high-status street in the Tudor period and there’s no sign of malnourishment, which suggests that these two females were members of the civic elite.’ However, the evidence from the artefacts discovered with the skeletons is confusing, Landrow admits. While some of the surviving objects such as buckles and fragments of girdles are clearly high status, the only ring found with the older skeleton was set with a cheap garnet. ‘We would expect a wealthy woman of her age to be wearing jewellery of a much higher quality. It’s a puzzle.’

  Landrow, who lives in the house where the bodies were discovered and has a particular interest in the case, has been unable to identify them further. ‘York has extraordinarily rich archives, but sadly we are still missing a lot of documentary material for the period, and there is no way to trace the ownership of this particular house.’ Nor are there any accounts of two members of a family abruptly disappearing. ‘It’s possible that whoever was responsible for their deaths simply put it about that they had run away,’ Landrow suggests. The bodies were hidden so successfully that it must have been done with the collusion of the head of the household, he thinks. ‘As historians, we can speculate,’ he says, ‘but we have to accept that much of the past is unknowable and that there are some things that can never be explained.’

  This horrific case shines a light on the darker side of England under the Tudors, says Landrow. ‘Whoever they were, these two women died a horrible death that was most likely connected to domestic abuse.’

  Today we are often horrified by the level of abuse and cruelty reported by the media. ‘We tend to blame these on social changes and look back to a simpler and happier time,’ Landrow says, ‘but the fact is that “merry England” could be a brutal place, marked by violence at every level of society.’

  Elizabethan England might have been the ‘Golden Age’, but the society that produced Shakespeare was also one that would press a pregnant woman to death for her beliefs. (Margaret Clitherow, a butcher’s wife who lived in the Shambles, was executed in 1586 and canonized in 1970 as St Margaret of York.)

  According to Landrow, casual violence was common on the streets, and an argument or scuffle could quickly lead to daggers being drawn. Vagrants were treated with particular brutality if they were caught begging in the city. They would be stripped naked, tied to the back of a cart (‘the cart’s arse’) and whipped through the streets before being banished out of one of the city’s four main gates.

  In the home, too, says Landrow, abuse was prevalent. It was common to send children into service in another household, where they were supposed to be treated as part of the family but where it seems many endured brutal treatment, from beatings to worse. The suicide rate for children and adolescents in early modern England was far higher than today’s, in spite of the fact that suicide was considered with a lack of compassion that seems to us shocking. Blamed for giving in to despair and the temptation of the Devil, the bodies of those who killed themselves were denied burial in consecrated ground and were commonly buried ignominiously at crossroads, and the belief that their spirits would return to haunt the living often led to the macabre practice of driving an iron-tipped stake through the heart of the corpse.

  Leaving service to marry and train their own servants did not necessarily improve the lot of women. Wives had little recourse against abusive husbands. A man had the right to beat his wife, but not to kill her. Landrow cites the case of Alice Clarke, who was subjected to her husband’s drunken assaults as well as to sadistic rituals when he would tie her to the bedpost and whip her. For women like Alice, Landrow points out, murder must have seemed the only means of escape.

  ‘The poison of choice seems to have been ratsbane,’ says Landrow, who has made a study of surviving assize court records for the period. ‘In a world where there was no support for victims of domestic abuse, and women literally had nowhere else to go, it’s surprising that there aren’t more cases of wives murdering their husbands.’

  For others, like the women who lived and died so horribly in the house in Stonegate, there was no escape. We will never know who was responsible for their deaths. Tess Nicholson, whose husband was killed in the explosion that led to the discovery of the bodies, thinks that they were victims of an evil and sadistic husband and father but admits that she has no proof. ‘It’s just a feeling,’ she says. ‘There are countless individuals like these two females whose stories will nev
er be told, but we should never forget that they were real. They lived and they loved. They knew joy and sadness. They were bored and they had fun. In so many ways, they were just like us,’ she believes. ‘The records aren’t always reliable. They tell us the stories that those who wrote them wanted us to hear, but it could be that the most interesting stories are those that never got told.’

  Acknowledgements

  Writing a book is a team effort. I am grateful as always to my agent, Caroline Sheldon, and to Louise Buckley, Wayne Brookes and the rest of the team at Pan Macmillan for their enthusiasm and encouragement. I’d particularly like to mention the copy-editor, Lorraine Green, who read the text so carefully and who made such perceptive comments.

  For their help with The Memory of Midnight special thanks are due to Diana Nelson, Lisa Liddy, Steve Hodgson, and Ailsa Mainman, and to Jeanette McMillan who shared her memories of growing up in York.

  Finally I need to thank all those friends who, as always, put up with the hair-tearing crises that accompany the writing of every book, and supply perspective, support or wine as required – often all three at the same time – especially John Harding, Stella Hobbs, Mary Hodgson, Steve Hodgson, Diana Nelson, Julia Pokora, Richard Rowland and Paul Sparks. I rely on them all more than they know.

  After an earlier career spent working and travelling around the world, including stints as cook on an outback cattle station, interpreter on an expedition in Cameroon and English teacher in Jakarta, Pamela stumbled into writing as a way of funding a PhD in Medieval Studies. Settling at last in York, for several years she combined academic research with a successful career as a romance writer. Her thesis on the streets of later medieval and early modern York was finally completed in 2004 and she continues to work (very slowly) on a scholarly edition of the wardmote court records that formed the basis of her research. The Memory of Midnight is her second novel based on her study of Elizabethan York and written under her real name.

  For more about Pamela, please see her website www.pamelahartshorne.com, find her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter @PamHartshorne.

  By Pamela Hartshorne

  Time’s Echo

  The Memory of Midnight

  First published 2013 by Pan Books

  This electronic edition published 2013 by Pan Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-230-77128-4

  Copyright © Pamela Hartshorne 2013

  The right of Pamela Hartshorne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The Macmillan Group has no responsibility for the information provided by any author websites whose address you obtain from this book (‘author websites’). The inclusion of author website addresses in this book does not constitute an endorsement by or association with us of such sites or the content, products, advertising or other materials presented on such sites.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.