The Turn of Midnight

by Minette Walters

  She and Eva were halfway up the stone steps when the thudding ceased and a great hush fell on the hall. They heard the sound of running feet along the walled-in corridor that linked the rooms, and even Clara’s stout heart quailed at the thought of who might appear. None expected to see Isabella Startout.

  She cried out in relief when she saw Clara. ‘Oh, Mistress Trueblood, Lady Eleanor is much in need of help and I don’t know what to do for her. I fear she’s dying.’

  ‘Is Lady Anne with her?’

  Isabella shook her head. ‘She must be in the church, but it’ll take too long for her to come.’ She descended the steps and tugged at Clara’s free hand. ‘Please make haste. Lady Eleanor will perish for certain if we do nothing.’

  Clara paused only to send one of the men in search of Lady Anne and then, together with Eva, ran with Isabella to the chamber. They found Eleanor, pale and limp upon the ground, blood and froth oozing from the side of her mouth. There was no one else in the room.

  Clara knelt to place her palm on the girl’s chest. ‘She’s still breathing,’ she said, ‘and I can feel the beat of her heart. What caused this foam and blood to come from her mouth? Did you strike her, Isabella? We heard screams and then a terrible thudding on the floor.’

  ‘It was none of my doing, Mistress Trueblood. I was in the spinning room when the cries began and I was sorely afraid the voice was Milady’s. I crept to this door and pushed it wide but all I could see was Lady Eleanor flinging herself about the floor and banging her head and heels on the planks. She’s so pale. What should we do for her?’

  Eva Thurkell knelt on Eleanor’s other side and used the hem of her kirtle to wipe the blood and foam from the girl’s mouth. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘She has bitten her tongue is all and the pallor comes from her swoon. It won’t last long. There was a boy on my last demesne who suffered the same.’

  ‘What made him do it?’ asked Clara.

  ‘The priest said it was heat in his brain. He was an excitable child—keen to dance and play one moment, angry the next. He fell and twitched most often when he was thwarted. He always slept afterwards. Lady Eleanor will do the same.’

  ‘Was he able to speak when he came out of the swoon?’

  Eva nodded. ‘It was as if it had never happened. See? Lady Eleanor’s lids are beginning to flutter. I expect she’ll ask us why she’s on the floor and what we’re doing here.’

  Clara answered as well as she could when Eleanor did precisely that. ‘You swooned, milady. Isabella summoned us to help you. I’ve sent for your mother. She’ll be with us shortly.’

  Eleanor stared at her in confusion. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘In the church, milady.’

  ‘Is she in her coffin?’

  Clara’s surprise was obvious. ‘Of course not. Whatever made you think such a thing?’

  Eleanor turned on her side, unable to fight sleep. ‘Her silk gown is gone,’ she slurred. ‘I thought she must have died . . .’

  As her voice faded to nothing, Clara turned to Isabella with an enquiring frown. ‘What did she mean?’

  Isabella was equally puzzled until she saw that the lid of a small chest in the corner was open. She walked across to look inside. ‘It’s quite empty,’ she said.

  Clara motioned to Eva to lift Eleanor’s legs while she placed her hands beneath the girl’s arms. ‘What did you expect to find?’

  With an anxious expression, Isabella watched them carry the inert body to the bed. ‘The embroidered blue gown that Lady Anne stitched for her wedding day. It’s her finest and most beautiful. Lady Eleanor has tried many times to persuade her to wear it but she always refuses. She says it would be a shame to reduce it to tatters before it’s needed.’

  ‘You’re talking in riddles,’ Clara declared bluntly, as she placed a feather pillow beneath Eleanor’s head. ‘What does a missing gown have to do with death?’

  Isabella clasped her hands together. ‘Everything,’ she said. ‘Milady told Lady Eleanor she was keeping it for her burial.’

  Eleanor watched Isabella through half-closed lids for several minutes. She thought it was Lady Anne perched on a stool before the tapestry frame, making tiny French knots in a pattern of fleurs-de-lis, because the maid sat in silhouette against the bright spring sun which shone through the latticed windows. Her soft brown curls were tumbled about her face as she leant over her work, just as Lady Anne did, and Eleanor felt a surge of relief that her earlier anguish had been misplaced.

  Her last clear memory was of screaming in terror when she believed her mother dead, but she realised now that she must have been mistaken. There was some other reason for Lady Anne’s possessions to be missing and her bed not to have been slept in. Eleanor had no recollection of how she came to be in the bed herself, or when Lady Anne had returned to the chamber, but she took comfort from her presence. Her grief at the thought of losing her had been very great.

  She had so many apologies still to make to Lady Anne, but anxiety had kept her mute, for she feared seeing reproach in Lady Anne’s eyes if she talked of things best forgotten. Eleanor’s greatest shame was that she’d believed her father’s lies about Milady. Robert said it wasn’t her fault—Sir Richard had twisted her mind for his own purposes—but Eleanor guessed the boy only said this to lessen her feelings of guilt. Robert would never accept another’s judgement on a person without questioning whether it was true. He proved it every day through his continued friendship with her, despite being told by others that he should open his eyes and remember that the acorn didn’t fall far from the tree. Eleanor was Sir Richard’s daughter and no amount of teaching could change her vicious nature.

  Eleanor took comfort from Robert’s scornful rejection of such ideas. Even the numbskulls who mouthed them were capable of learning from their mistakes, and the same was true of Eleanor. Look how far she’d come already through learning her letters with his and Lady Anne’s help. Before Sir Richard’s death, she had thought reading and writing beneath her; now she was striving hard to become as proficient as Robert. And what of the cats? Her father would have ordered them killed but Eleanor preferred to love and nurture them. Did these choices not suggest she was more like Lady Anne than Sir Richard? All Eleanor needed was the courage to embrace her mother and trust that nothing she confessed would be betrayed or greeted with disapproval.

  Sleep might have taken her again had Isabella not turned to look at her. This time there was no mistaking the girl for the woman, and Eleanor’s eyes widened in shock. Fearing more screams, Isabella rose from her stool and came to kneel beside her. ‘Try to be calm, Lady Eleanor. You will bring on another swoon if you allow yourself to fret.’ She took a cloth from a bowl of water and wrung it out to press the cool fabric against Eleanor’s brow. ‘Your tongue may hurt where you bit it but, when you’re able to sit up, I have medicine that will soothe the pain.’

  Her words made no sense to Eleanor until she tried to form a response. Her lacerated tongue rubbed against her teeth and the pain was such that her shock gave way to tears. With a sigh of concern, Isabella replaced the cloth in the bowl and reached her hands beneath Eleanor’s arms to pull her upright. She plumped the pillow and urged Eleanor to shuffle backwards while she tucked the coverlet about her legs.

  ‘The medicine is salt, Lady Eleanor. I will add it to a beaker of water and you must keep the brine in your mouth for as long as you are able before spitting it out. If you swallow it, you will be sick. Do you understand?’ Receiving a nod, she took a spoonful of salt from a wooden box on the table beside the bed, stirred it into some warm water and then held the beaker to Eleanor’s lips. ‘The longer you hold it, the more easily you will be able to speak afterwards,’ she said, placing a clay bowl in Eleanor’s lap for the spit. ‘When you’re ready, you may ask as many questions as you like. I will answer each as best I can.’

  Eleanor did as she was bid but it took three doses of brine before the stinging was numbed enough for her to speak. All the while she felt Isabella’s stre
ngth and wondered how the girl had grown so much in half a year. Gone was the timid maid who been the victim of Eleanor’s tantrums since she was eight years old, and in her place stood a composed and confident young woman who seemed as adept as Lady Anne at alleviating suffering. Her prettiness was startling yet, far from feeling jealousy, Eleanor knew only regret for the careless disregard she’d had for Isabella in the past.

  She spat the last of the brine into the bowl. ‘You shouldn’t be alone with me,’ she managed. ‘Lady Anne made me promise to keep ten paces between us at all times.’

  ‘And so you have, milady. I choose to be here, which is what I shall tell your mother if she asks.’

  ‘Do you still think of her as my mother?’

  ‘I find it hard not to, milady. She’s always loved you as a daughter and treated you as such.’ Isabella took the bowl from Eleanor’s lap and placed it on the table. ‘Would it please you better if I called her your guardian?’

  Eleanor shook her head. ‘I have no wish to deny her a second time.’ She stared at her hands. ‘I remember being frightened to discover that her gown was gone . . . also her comb and her hand mirror . . . but I don’t recall anything else. Why did I bite my tongue? And who put me in this bed?’

  Isabella pulled forward her stool and described the seizure Eleanor had suffered. ‘Eva Thurkell says it’s nothing to worry about, milady. It was just a faint. She says fear for your mother made your brain overheat.’

  ‘You said I was throwing myself about the floor.’

  ‘A boy on Mistress Thurkell’s last demesne did the same, which is how she knows so much about it. He always recovered afterwards.’

  ‘How often did it happen to him?’

  ‘Hardly at all,’ Isabella lied, ‘and only when he became overexcited. He was very young and liked to dance and shout.’

  ‘I remember screaming.’

  Isabella nodded. ‘That will have been the cause, milady.’

  When Eleanor made no response, Isabella wondered if she believed this excuse or was looking to blame others for her strange condition. In truth, it was hardly a convincing explanation. Isabella couldn’t count the number of times Eleanor had thrown tantrums and screaming rages in the past without ever dropping in a swoon afterwards.

  Eleanor reached for Isabella’s hand and raised it to her cheek. ‘I was afraid,’ she whispered. ‘My mother gives me an hour each morning to teach me my letters, but when I awoke at dawn she wasn’t here. I listened to the sounds of people rising in the house, thinking she’d been called away, but when the sun had been up for some time and she hadn’t returned, I decided to read our book alone to show her how much I’ve improved. It’s the record she makes of Develish’s history. She brings it to this chamber at the end of each day and places it beside her pillow—but I couldn’t see it, and nor did her pillow look as if it had been used.’

  ‘And that frightened you, milady?’

  ‘Not so much as finding that everything personal to her was missing. Her washing cloth, her comb, even the small jar of rouge that she kept for when my father had guests. I became truly frightened when I opened the chest that holds her wedding gown and slippers. I have such dread of her dying, for she is all I have left in the world.’

  Isabella’s warm heart was moved. She understood now why Eleanor had thought Lady Anne had passed to the next life. Everything she’d mentioned spoke of preparation for the coffin. A cloth to wash the body. A comb to draw the hair about the face. Rouge to give colour to dead skin. A gown to be worn for burial.

  She took both of Eleanor’s hands in her own to warm them. ‘She’s not dead, milady. She rides to Blandeforde with Edmund Trueblood in the hope of freeing Thaddeus Thurkell from imprisonment. If she fails, he will likely be hanged for imposture.’

  Fourteen

  Blandeforde, Dorseteshire

  THADDEUS SNAPPED AWAKE WHEN THE first grey fingers of dawn lifted the gloom inside his prison. He looked to see where the light was entering and saw an unglazed slit in the wall to his right. He guessed he was in a storeroom for ale because the air smelt strongly of fermented grain and yeast, yet his brief glimpse of the chamber in the flames from his guards’ torches the night before had shown it to be empty of barrels. The only piece of furniture had been a narrow bench against one wall, and when the door slammed shut, plunging him into darkness, he had stretched himself along it, preferring the discomfort of unforgiving wood to the risk of disturbing rats amongst the litter of straw on the floor.

  He’d been confined the first night to a six-foot-square cell in the soldiers’ barracks outside. Shackled and chained to a bar on the wall, he’d been able to squat on the floor, but not lie down, and he viewed the bench as an improvement. He still wore the shackles on his wrists but, since they weren’t tethered to anything, he could tolerate their discomfort more easily. No explanation had been offered for his removal from the barracks, but he guessed his guards’ increasing friendliness had had something to do with it.

  The steward could have wished for a better day to incarcerate a felon than Easter Sunday, for the Church banned the meting out of punishment on the anniversary of Christ’s resurrection. It was a time of giving, and in that spirit, Thaddeus’s guards had taken him into the main chamber of the barracks and allowed him food and water and the use of their piss-pot. He’d had little trouble engaging with them. His ease of manner, fluency in their language and genuine gratitude for their charity won him sympathetic ears. He listened to their histories and told them some of his own—his descent from Godwin of Wessex, the marriage of his grandfather to a Moorish princess and his rearing in Spain—and, by evening, many were questioning whether the steward had been right to arrest him. Given more time, he had hoped to induce the captain to accept his parole and remove his shackles, but his abrupt transfer to the house had put an end to familiarity.

  His sleep on the wooden bench had been restful. In childhood, he’d passed many a wakeful night worrying about the morrow but, as he grew, he’d come to understand the futility of so much squandered energy. The blows of Will Thurkell’s cudgel across his shoulders were no less raw for imagining them in advance. The trick of closing down his thoughts had been hard to master but, once learnt, it had stood him in good stead. Even pain became bearable when the mind was able to free itself from the body.

  This wasn’t to say he hadn’t dwelt for some time on Hugh de Courtesmain. The Frenchman had been in the great hall when Thaddeus had been brought through the imposing entranceway the previous night. The signs of Easter Sunday’s festivity lingered in the air—the redolent scent of roasted lamb, the sourer smell of ale and wine—but none of the household was in evidence. Jacques d’Amiens had sat alone at the head of a long table, the livid stain across his nose and cheek enhanced by the light of torches in sconces around the walls, his fingers playing with a garland of spring flowers on the surface in front of him.

  He had made Thaddeus a mocking bow and then summoned de Courtesmain from the shadows behind a pillar. The shock in the Frenchman’s eyes to be forced to confront the man he’d accused was very great, and Thaddeus had felt a small pity for him. It was one thing to traduce an enemy in his absence, quite another to do it to his face. For himself, he showed only indifference when de Courtesmain confirmed him as Thurkell, but in truth his relief had been huge to discover that his betrayer was the duplicitous Frenchman and not Bourne. It would have been harder to brand a peer of the realm as a liar, particularly one for whom he had developed a liking, than a hired steward who seemed unable to remain in post.

  As the light strengthened outside, Thaddeus rose from the bench and moved to the window. His view was restricted by the narrowness of the slit, but he could tell he was on the northern façade of the house because he could see the roofs of the town in the distance. He had a clear picture of the lie of the building, thanks to his study of it from the hillside two days before, and knew the entranceway opened on to a forecourt on the southern-facing side. If he wanted to escape, that
would be the easiest exit to find, but the idea wasn’t a serious one and he didn’t linger on it. He knew from his counting of the guards in the soldiers’ barracks that d’Amiens had in excess of fifty armed men guarding his lord’s estate, and to attempt to evade them all would be fruitless.

  The air was filled with the sound of the dawn chorus and Thaddeus’s gaze was drawn to a group of sparrows pecking for seeds in the grass beyond the window. There was no telling them apart, and he wondered what it was about the human face that made each so recognisable. All had eyes, noses, mouths and hair, and the position of these features never varied, yet no one who had acquaintanceship with a person mistook him for another.

  Would he be believed if he denied he’d ever met Hugh de Courtesmain?

  Only Edmund, who’d had time to think about it, listened with any enthusiasm to Lady Anne’s plan to rescue Thaddeus. The others stared despondently at their hands and questioned how entering the lion’s den could achieve anything but their own and Lady Anne’s arrest. She placed too much trust in Master d’Amiens’ willingness to obey the law and even more in her belief that Thaddeus would never admit that his claim to the title of Athelstan was fraudulent.

  She sat cross-legged on a bracken bed, sharing the cold remains of some mutton stew with Edmund, attending patiently while the youths explained that her idea wouldn’t work. Each in turn tried to persuade her that she would risk her own safety if she presented herself as Thaddeus’s advocate and demanded he be tried according to law.

  Ian Startout spoke for them all. ‘You’ll be condemned as a perjurer alongside him, milady, and he won’t want that. He has too much regard for you to see you suffer the same fate as him.’