The Memory of Midnight (11 page)

‘Oh, Tom . . .’ Her voice had a catch in it. ‘I will wear it always,’ she vowed. ‘I promise.’ She raised her eyes to his. ‘I thought you had forgotten
me,’ she admitted.

‘Forget you? How could I? There is nobody like you, Nell.’

He smiled but the easy familiarity was leaking out of the air between them and she struggled to claw it back. ‘What, no Easterling girls with green eyes?’

‘Some,’ he said, ‘but none as green as yours.’ He plucked a blade of grass and tickled her nose with it, making her laugh in spite of herself. ‘Your eyes are as
green as this grass, as green as the sea, as green . . . as green as emeralds!’

‘And I dare say they had beautiful brown hair like mine, instead of being fair and lovely?’

‘Your hair isn’t brown.’ Somehow he was unpinning her cap, unpinning her hair so that the plaits tumbled down her back, and she was doing nothing to stop him. He fingered them
and the bindings unravelled so that he could spread her hair over her shoulders and still she made no protest. She just sat, mouse still, and watched him.

‘It’s not brown,’ he said again. ‘It is the colour of nuts and the colour of honey. I see gold and bronze and copper here. I see the corn ripened by the sun. I see
flames, hot and red. I see no brown.’ He lifted a lock so that he could breathe in the scent of her. ‘I smell gillyflowers.’

Nell swallowed. ‘You have become a poet.’

‘I would that I could find the words for how you make me feel, Nell,’ he said in a low voice as he smoothed her hair back into place. ‘I didn’t think of you before. You
were always there. You were just Nell. But when I came back and saw you, I felt as if I had taken a blow to my stomach. You were the same, but not the same. I thought I had changed, but I
hadn’t expected you to change too.’

‘You ignored me.’ A sliver of remembered hurt speared the tremble of happiness.

‘I was angry with you for changing,’ Tom said.

There was a pause. Nell felt her hair soft against her neck. In the dappled sunlight it was very quiet. ‘We haven’t changed that much, have we?’ she said.

Tom’s smile was twisted as he lifted a lock of her hair and rubbed it between his fingers. ‘I fear we have, Nell. We are not the boy and girl we were.’

Darkness swept over her face. ‘I don’t want things to change,’ she said and his smile twisted tighter.

‘I do,’ he said and he leant closer. Very carefully, he licked his finger and pressed it against the swell of her breast where a pastry crumb clung to the edge of her shift. Nell
sucked in an unsteady breath, her eyes darkening.

Tom leant closer still, until his mouth was almost on hers. ‘There is no going back now,’ he said and then she felt his lips touch hers. It was startling, this feeling of being at
once gripped by an entirely new sensation and the certainty that she was made for this moment.

No shyness now, no hesitation. If they fumbled, it was with eagerness and inexperience, but Tom’s fingers were as deft as ever, unlacing her bodice, unwinding and unravelling her until
there was nothing but the shock of flesh against flesh. Their bodies fitted together so naturally. It was as if his hands had skimmed her many times; as if she already knew the texture of his skin,
the bone-melting delight of losing herself in the insistent slide of flesh and muscle, of hardness and heat and hunger. Nell had often wondered how it would feel. She hadn’t wanted to ask
just how it would work, although she was certain Alice would have been able to tell her. And now she knew. In spite of their lack of experience, it all made perfect sense.

And afterwards, there was no shame – only breathless, incredulous laughter that it was so easy.

And so good.

There was a ringing in her head. On and on it went, pulling her up and out of sleep, until she groped for the alarm. She didn’t want to wake up. She wanted to stay with
Tom in the sweet grass, their limbs tangled, her hand on his belly, feeling the rise and fall of his breath while her body hummed with pleasure.

She didn’t want it to be a dream.

Her flailing hand hit a mug, knocked it over. Cold coffee pooled on the desk as she straightened groggily. She blinked at the mug on its side, at the puddle of liquid, not understanding.
Everything looked profoundly alien. The metal boxes with their uncannily shifting patterns. The piles of glaring white paper. The unnaturally regular shapes. She picked up a strange, slender
object.

Pen
. The word materialized in her brain, but it didn’t make sense. It wasn’t like any pen she had ever seen. There was a wrongness to it that made her drop it back onto the
table with a shudder.

Her eyes skittered from side to side. She was frightened. This wasn’t right. She’d thought she was waking from a dream, but she didn’t recognize anything. Instinctively, she
reached for Tom’s hand, but Tom wasn’t there, and desolation tore through her.

Tom had gone.

A monstrous headache was pressing behind her eyes. Tess put her head between her hands.

‘What’s happening?’ she whispered. She could hear the ringing again. Was it real or in her mind?

Phone
. Like pen, the word formed itself unbidden, but this time it made sense. Fumbling, she found the phone on the desk and somehow managed to press the right button.

‘Hello?’ Her voice wavered horribly. She had remembered where she was,
who
she was, but the transition from dream to wakefulness had left her feeling sick and shaken, and
still uncertain as to what was reality.

‘Hello,’ she said again, but there was no reply. There was a deadened quality to the silence at the end of the line. ‘Who is this?’ she said more sharply, but the only
response was the muffled click as the phone at the other end was put down.

Martin?

Tess dropped the phone back onto the desk as if it had bitten her, and slumped back in the chair. She felt boneless, fuzzy, on the brink of tears. The endlessly circling screensavers blurred
before her eyes. She didn’t want to be there. She wanted to be back in the dream, with Tom beside her. She was still tingling and throbbing in the aftermath of making love but at the same
time there was a hollowness inside her, an aching void of loss. She felt wretched. Perhaps she was coming down with something? That would explain her pounding head and the lingering, faintly
feverish feeling of frustration, of something lost and nearly found.

And the hallucination.

Tess struggled to her feet and went to find a cloth to mop up the mess on her desk.

It had to be a hallucination. What else could it be?

Somehow she had taken last night’s dream and the names in the records and woven them together into a story in her mind.

The records must have triggered some kind of fit. She had been reading them just before she had blanked out. Tess swallowed a couple of paracetamol and stood looking at her laptop, remembering
how the sight of those names had made her head ring with recognition; how one minute she had been sitting at the desk, the next walking out of the barbican with Alice.

Would it happen again?

Did she want it to?

Of course she didn’t. What was she thinking? She was a historian. It hadn’t been
real
.

Drawing a deep breath, she pulled out the chair and sat back down at the desk. She took hold of the mouse, and after a moment’s hesitation, she clicked. The screen sprang back to life.
There was the record, just as she had been reading it.

Tess made herself read it again. Nothing happened.

Straightening the second laptop so that she could see the other screen, Tess placed her fingers carefully on the keyboard,

poised to snatch them away if anything untoward happened, but the cursors on both screens just blinked stolidly back at her.

She started to type. Nothing happened.

She transcribed to the bottom of the screen, and pulled up the next image as Ashrafar padded back into the room. The cat leapt up onto the desk and settled down to a thorough wash. Sticking her
leg straight in the air, she cleaned carefully between her spread toes, barely pausing to lift her head when Tess laid a hand on her back. Her warm, living presence was insensibly reassuring.

She had just been tired, Tess decided. Not enough sleep, that was all, she told herself again, but even as she tried to reassure herself, she was aware that it was an excuse that was beginning
to wear thin.

Luke was hammering in the study when Tess let herself back into the flat after walking Oscar to school the next day. She put her head round the door to wish him a brief good
morning, unwilling to admit to herself how pleased she was to have somebody else in the flat.

It had been another disturbed night. She hadn’t dreamed again, as she had half-expected that she would, but the scrabbling in the wall came and went until she had to put a pillow over her
head to block out the sound. Then there was the phone that rang at odd times in the evening after Oscar had gone to bed, only for Tess to get the dialling tone when she answered, or that horrible
steady breathing.

‘Please stop calling me,’ she had said, hating the way her voice had teetered on the edge of angry tears, but in the end she had had to unplug the phone altogether.

‘That’s awful,’ sympathized Richard when she rang him. ‘You do sometimes get cold calls at odd hours, but if it’s bothering you, of course I don’t mind at all
if you disconnect the landline. Everybody who matters has got my number here anyway. Presumably you’ve got a mobile you can use?’

Tess wished she could reassure herself as easily as she reassured Richard. The idea that Martin had tracked her down already was disturbing, but if it
was
him ringing from London, then
unplugging the phone ought to put a stop to it. He would surely have a harder time tracking down her new mobile number.

‘Richard, did you ever notice anything odd about the back bedroom?’ she asked him.

‘I can’t say I ever spent any time in it. I used to put guests in there.’

‘And they never said anything about a noise or anything like that?’

‘A
noise
? What sort of noise?’

‘A scrabbling, or sometimes a banging, but it’s very faint. Like there’s something in the wall.’ Her shoulders twitched at the memory of it. ‘I think it might be
rats.’

‘Oh, my dear, how ghastly!’ Richard was horrified.

‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ said Tess. ‘I just wondered if anyone had ever mentioned anything to you.’

‘No, not that I remember. I’d have called the council at once if I thought there were rats around. You must get something done about it.’

‘I will.’ Tess wanted to ask Richard about the way the air pulsed sometimes, about the way the flat seemed to be waiting for something, but she didn’t know how. Richard was an
eminent historian. He had written magisterial tomes on the social history of the Elizabethan period. He pored over documents and analysed the evidence. He wasn’t interested in feelings or
atmospheres. He wanted facts.

‘It’s a great flat,’ she said instead. ‘Do you know anything about the history of it?’

‘Only in as much as it relates to Stonegate. As far as I know, there’s no documentary evidence about the house itself before the late seventeenth century.’ Richard wasn’t
interested in anything more recent. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘No reason,’ she said. ‘Just interest.’

‘How are things going otherwise? Has Luke started work on my shelves yet?’

‘He has. He’s here right now, in fact.’

Tess thought her voice was perfectly neutral, but Richard picked up on it straight away. ‘It’s not a problem him being there, is it? He seemed nice enough when I met him, and he came
highly recommended.’

‘No, no, not at all. He’s fine.’ Hastily, Tess changed the subject. ‘I’m enjoying working on the records. I came across a case of suicide yesterday.’

‘Really?’ She could hear him sitting up in interest. ‘That’s unusual.’

‘I think the folio has been bound in with the others by mistake. It’s in a different hand, but the same date. I don’t know anything about suicides in that period,’ she
went on, hoping she sounded suitably casual. ‘What would have happened to the body? It is true it would have been buried in unconsecrated ground?’

‘Absolutely.’ Unconsciously, Richard shifted into lecture mode. ‘There was very little compassion for people desperate enough to take their own lives in the sixteenth century.
They were considered to have committed a sin, an act of violence against themselves, and they were commonly believed to haunt the site of their suicide. So there was a macabre ritual of driving a
stake through the heart of a corpse before it was buried. It’s quite well documented. It’s an interesting link with later popular mythologies of vampires, isn’t it?’

‘Very interesting,’ said Tess faintly. She hesitated. ‘Did you ever do a lecture about burial rituals or anything like that when I was an undergraduate?’

Richard thought for a bit. ‘I honestly don’t remember. I might have done. I’ve always had an interest in death. As an academic subject, of course.’

So she might have heard about the burial of suicides from him. Or read about it in some obscure journal. Tess was feeling better by the time she put the phone down. She had read so many books
and articles for her dissertation, there was a whole mass of information stored away, ready to be plucked out of her subconscious and woven into a dream for reasons best known to a
psychiatrist.

It was called recovered memory. She definitely remembered reading about
that
. The brain simply couldn’t deal with all the information it absorbed every day, so it filed it all
away where it wouldn’t cause the mind to overload. So everything she had ever read or seen or heard about the Elizabethan period could have contributed to the texture of those two dreams.

As for Nell and Tom and that scene by the riverbank, well, it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to interpret that as sexual frustration somehow brought on by seeing Luke again. Their relationship
might have been doomed from the start and they had had virtually nothing in common, but she had never been able to deny the physical attraction between them.