The Memory of Midnight
For Diana, best of friends, with love
York, August 1561
She had to hide.
‘One . . . two . . .’
Nell didn’t wait to hear more. Dashing across the yard and through the main door, she skidded to a halt in the dim passage while her eyes darted around in search of somewhere Tom
wouldn’t find her.
A wooden staircase led up to the first floor, where Mistress Maskewe was lying in, and a door to the right opened into the buttery, the pantry and the kitchen, but otherwise the passage offered
nothing in the way of a hiding place.
‘Three . . . four . . .’
Instinctively, Nell headed towards the kitchen, only to hesitate with her hand on the latch. There would likely be servants there: Joan, the Maskewes’ rabbit-faced maid, perhaps, and
certainly Fat Peg, the brawny cook whose temper was unpredictable, to say the least. If she caught a glimpse of Nell, she might laugh her fat laugh and offer a scraping from the sugarloaf. Or she
might buffet Nell’s ears till they rang and raise a clamour that would bring Tom running straight to her.
Which would mean that Nell would lose
again.
She always lost to Tom. Her face darkened at the thought. It wasn’t fair. This time she was determined to show him that she was just
as good as him.
‘Five . . . six . . . seven . . .’
Dropping her hand to her side, she nibbled at her bottom lip. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come inside? Outside there were stables in the garth at the back, and a hay chamber, a wood store
and a dairy. Good places to hide, all of them, but the first that Tom would look.
No, she needed somewhere different. Somewhere small and secret. Somewhere he would never find her.
She put a foot on the bottom stair. Did she dare go up? If her stepmother saw her, she’d be scolded and made to sit quietly in the stifling chamber where the gossips were cooing over
Tom’s new brother. Nell had hunched a shoulder uncomprehendingly when called upon to admire it. It was only a baby, she thought. It just lay in its cradle and cried sometimes. No need for
everyone to sit around and make a fuss about it. She had slipped away as soon as she could to find Tom.
They weren’t supposed to play upstairs. Nell knew that. But didn’t that make it the perfect place to hide? Tom would never think she would be brave enough to go up there on her
own.
Outside in the yard, he was beginning to gabble through the numbers and Nell’s soft mouth set disapprovingly. He was cheating, but she couldn’t tell him so or she would give herself
away.
Her shoulders straightened. Enough! This time,
this
time, she would hide so well he would have to admit that she was cleverer.
This
time she would win.
Without allowing herself to think any more on it, Nell grabbed her skirts and ran up the stairs, remembering just in time to jump over the fifth step from the bottom that always creaked and
groaned horribly if you trod on it. The house was quiet apart from an occasional murmur of desultory conversation from the great chamber, and the slap, slap, slap of her small leather soles rang
loud in the silence, but it was too late to change her mind now.
Her heart was beating hard when she reached the top and she paused, the sound of her breathing loud in her ears, waiting for one of the women to look out and demand to know what all the noise
was about. But no one bothered. Perhaps it was too hot for them to move.
The summer heat was slumped over the city, as it had been all week, and the air was so thick and soupy it was an effort to drag it in for breath. Everyone except Tom and Nell seemed to be seized
with a kind of torpor. They moved lethargically, plucking at their collars and wiping the sweat from their foreheads. Even the dogs lying in the dust could barely rouse themselves to bark.
At the top of the stairs, Nell hesitated, one hand on the intricately carved post, before tiptoeing across the threshold of the great hall. She loved this room, so different from her
father’s cramped hall where despondence seemed to hang next to the cheap painted cloths. Here the walls were covered with richly coloured tapestries, their edges thronging with flowers and
birds and insects, the way the hedgerows did in June when the grass grew long and lush and the air was soft and humming with the promise of summer to come. It was Nell’s favourite time of
year and she couldn’t resist reaching out and touching a butterfly. The tapestry rippled beneath her fingers, and the butterfly’s wings seemed to beat in flight.
Tom’s father was an important man, an alderman, one of the warmest in the city, they said. You could see it in the pewter that gleamed on the cupboards and the Turkey-work carpets spread
plush and vibrant on the tables; in the glazed windows and the cushions embroidered with gold thread. You could smell it in the opulent air.
A burst of laughter from the women’s chamber along the passage made Nell start just as she heard Tom sing out ‘One hundred!’ down in the yard.
‘I’m coming to ge-et you, Nell Appleby,’ he called. ‘Ready or not!’
Nell stiffened. She mustn’t let herself be diverted. What if Tom came running inside after her? He would find her in an instant.
But then she heard him clatter through the passage below and out into the garth and her shoulders relaxed. So she had read him right. Sidling over to the window, she peered down to see him
running towards the stables.
He wouldn’t find her there.
That meant she had plenty of time to look for a really good hiding place.
Pleased, Nell turned back to survey the hall, only to still once more at the sound of sharp footsteps in the yard below and a voice calling for ale.
Ralph Maskewe.
Nell wrinkled her nose. She didn’t like Ralph, for all his smiles and soft words. Tom’s half-brother was tall, and well favoured of shape and countenance. He had a smooth face with a
full, red mouth, and a set of strong teeth that were the envy of many. Nell thought they were too big for his mouth. He could barely close his lips over them, and when he smiled, instead of
admiring how white they were, Nell found herself remembering the stories old Agnes, her father’s servant, would tell about ghoulies and ghosties and bones in the moonlight. She avoided him
whenever she could.
She strained to hear what was going on in the yard below. There was a mumble in response to Ralph’s shout – doubtless Joan sliding shyly out of the kitchen. What if Ralph wanted her
to bring the ale up to the hall?
Nell bit her knuckle, thinking. She didn’t want Ralph to find her there alone. But if she scuttled back down to the yard, Tom would be bound to find her straight away and he would crow
like a cock on a dung heap again. She was only a little maid, but just once she would like to beat him.
Besides, she might meet Ralph on the stairs. Better to stay where she was.
Behind the turned chair? In the corner beside the cupboard? She could squeeze into the shadowy space, and if she stayed very still, no one would notice her.
Or there was Mr Maskewe’s closet in the far corner of the hall. The door stood invitingly ajar. It was almost as if it was beckoning her inside.
Even more than the hall, the closet was a special room. It was for men’s business. It was not a place for small children.
Tom would never think of looking for her in there.
The telltale creak of the fifth stair decided her. Ralph was coming up. Scurrying over to the closet door, Nell peered around it. The room was empty, waiting. She could hear the drone of a fly
and the murmur of women’s voices from the suffocating chamber along the passage where the babe lay, but otherwise there was silence.
The closet held a table, upon which sat a gilded leather writing box and a heavy ledger in which Mr Maskewe kept his accounts. Next to the table stood a chair and a stool. And a long cypress
chest, a kist bought at the same time as the new wainscot that covered the walls. Tom had whispered to Nell that the wainscot had been put up to hide a priest hole, but Nell thought he was making
that up to seem important. She couldn’t see any sign of a door in the walls. Besides, Mr Maskewe was an alderman, and attended divine service for all to see. Mistress Maskewe was less often
seen in church, it was true, but why would Tom’s father go to such trouble and expense to indulge his wife?
Of course, if it
were
true, the priest hole would be an excellent place to hide. Tom would never find her there. A gleam of excitement bloomed on Nell’s face. She had already
forgotten Ralph. She pushed the door open wider, but just as she went to step inside, horror dropped over her like a net, pinning her to the threshold. For a moment she couldn’t breathe with
it, but the room looked just as it did before, panelled, still. The casement window was wedged open in the vain hope of allowing in some air to stir the heavy heat, and she could make out the
sounds of Tom searching for her in the outhouses.
‘I know you’re in there,’ he called, snatching open a door.
The horror lifted from her mind as suddenly as it had gripped her, and she stepped inside the room, shaking the feeling aside as she smirked at the idea that she had got the better of him at
last.
The smell of freshly cut wood thickened the hot air. It was a smell Nell associated with the Maskewe house, where there were always new rooms, new furniture, new cladding on the walls. Unlike
her father’s house, where everything was old and worn.
The desk drew her towards it. Daringly, she opened the writing box, intrigued by its cunning little cubby holes and by the special places for the inkpot and quill. The ledger was almost as tall
as Nell herself, and almost as heavy, she guessed. Tentatively, she put her hands on either side of the book and tried to lift it, but her face reddened with the effort and she let it fall back on
the table with a dull thud. She had to make do with lifting the cover instead, and peering at the columns of figures. She wished that she could read better. Her stepmother was teaching her, but she
was still not as good as Tom, who went to school to learn his ABC.
The thought of Tom, who was a year older and better than her at almost everything, reminded Nell of her task. She had to find the perfect hiding place. She tried to imagine where she would put a
priest hole, but she had little knowledge of such things. Her father and stepmother didn’t hold with the old faith the way some did and had no need to hide a priest.
She spread her small hands over the wainscot and felt her way around the room, but she could find no sign of a secret door. Absorbed in her task as she was, the stillness of the closet started
to make her uneasy after a while. It was as if she had stepped into a different world, cut off from the women passing the baby between them in the chamber down the hall and the servants laughing in
the kitchen below, far from the street outside and the city that was all she had ever known. Distant even from Tom down in the garden, kicking the woodhouse door in frustration.
Her hands fell from the panelling and she stood very still. Only her eyes moved around the room, from the chest to the window to the desk where the massive ledger sat, and as she looked, there
was a strange ringing in her ears and a whirling in her head; the light shifted and shivered, and in place of the wainscot were shelves filled with tiny, narrow books. Where the table had stood was
now a truckle bed of some kind, its coverlet so oddly coloured and patterned that Nell blinked. A black cat was curled up on it, but when she stepped towards it, it lifted its head to stare at her
with great yellow eyes before its ears flattened in fright and it leapt from the bed.