The Memory of Midnight (18 page)

She had allowed herself a little hope that he might come home when his father died, but he had his apprenticeship to complete, and besides, he was not needed here. Or not by anyone except her.
Ralph had taken over the family business, and cut a fine figure these days in his fur-trimmed robe and velvet cap.

Her father’s eyes slid away from hers. ‘Nell, it cannot be.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Ralph Maskewe has asked for you, and I have said yes.’

‘Ralph?’ Nell stared uncomprehendingly at her father. ‘No!’ She half-laughed, it was too absurd. ‘You cannot mean it!’

He didn’t answer. He just looked at the rush matting and his face worked.

‘No,’ she said again, surging to her feet as she realized that he
did
mean it. ‘No!’

‘Yes, Nell.’

‘I refuse.’ Everything in her recoiled at the idea of it. It could not be true! ‘Tell him I am betrothed to Tom. I will not forsake him while breath is in my body! Ralph knows
well there is an understanding between us.’

‘He does know, and he will not allow it.’

‘Not allow it? It is not up to him!’

‘Nell, please!’ Hugh Appleby’s voice rose, cracking in desperation, so that she stopped and stared at him. ‘You do not understand how it is,’ he said after a
moment.

His expression sent dread crawling up Nell’s spine. ‘What?’ she said, twisting the apron between her hands. ‘What is it?
Tell
me!’

‘I . . . I owed Henry Maskewe everything,’ he said, stumbling over the words, forcing them out as if each one hurt his mouth. ‘I lost it all on an unwise speculation soon after
I married Anne. I went to Henry and begged him to help me. I said I would repay his loan, but the interest has grown greater and greater. Not even the house will clear it. And now Ralph has the
books and he wishes to call in the loan. It is his right. I . . . I begged him not to. I asked him to think about my sons, my wife.’

‘Your daughter?’ Nell asked, her voice not quite steady. She could not believe this was happening.

He nodded. ‘You too.’ He swallowed. ‘There is no dowry, Nell. Not any more.’

‘Tom will not care for that,’ she said stoutly.

‘Nell,’ he sighed heavily. ‘This friendship you have with Tom, it is all very well for children, but you are a young woman now. You know sentiment has no place in marriage. It
is time to put off childish things. Marriage with Tom Maskewe will never be. You must accept that.’

‘No!’ Nell backed away from her father, both hands clenched to her bodice. ‘No, you do not understand . . .’

‘It is
you
who do not understand,’ he interrupted her, his face abruptly twisted into a stranger’s. ‘If you do not marry Ralph Maskewe, your stepmother and your
brothers and I will lose everything.
Everything
. We will be beggars, living on the street and hoping for alms. Ralph has made the deal clear enough. He will forgive the debt, if you
agree.’ His voice rose again, this time in anger. ‘Is that clear enough for you, Nell?’

Nell squeezed her eyes shut. Panic was darting around inside her, seeking a vulnerable spot so that it could seize her completely. She told herself that when she opened them again, she would
find this was just a terrible dream. She would be in bed up in the attic, and Alice would be snoring beside her, the moonlight seeping in through the casement.

But when she lifted her lids, her father was still there, sitting defeated on the settle. She couldn’t bear to look at him. She stared instead at the cupboards, at the pewter she had
polished only that morning while Alice straightened the cushions. Nell had grumbled at the tedious task. Now she wished with all her heart that she could go back to rubbing the dishes with a cloth,
back to the time before her father had knocked at the door and split her world asunder.

‘Why me?’ she whispered. ‘Why does he want me if I have no dowry?’

‘You are fair. More than fair.’

‘I?’ she said in astonishment.

‘You have never had eyes for anyone except Tom Maskewe. You do not notice the way men look at you, Nell. Perhaps you are not as graceful as some, but there is something about you . . .
something that makes men feel more alive when they look at you.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Your mother was the same.’

‘Even if it were true, Ralph Maskewe is not interested in my fairness,’ she said flatly. She didn’t know how, but she knew that it was true.

‘Come, Nell, he is a fine man. He is sober and civil and prosperous, and he is comely, as your stepmother bids me remind you. What more do you want in a husband?’

Dark eyes. Warm laughter. Warm hands. A body that fitted into her own.

‘I want Tom,’ she said bleakly.

Her father sighed. ‘It cannot be.’ And then, ‘I am sorry.’

It seemed there was no more to say. They looked at each other in silence, her father slumped on the settle, Nell on her feet, her hands fisted to her breast as if to keep her pummelling heart
from bursting through her ribs.

‘This deal he makes with you,’ she said in a low voice at last. ‘It is wicked.’

‘I know,’ he said heavily.

‘How can he want a wife who goes to him under such a threat to her family?’

Hugh Appleby just shook his head.

‘He is willing to hurt you for me.’

‘If it were just me,’ he said, ‘I would say him nay. Of course I would.’ Weariness deepened the lines in his face. ‘But there is your stepmother, and your
brothers.’

Aye, her brothers. What would happen to them if she said no to Ralph Maskewe? Nell dropped her hands to her apron in defeat.

They were dear to her, those boys. Harry was a quiet lad, gentle, a dreamer, while Peter was merry and rough, but they were close all the same. Harry was the elder, at twelve, already four years
older than Tom had been when he went into service – but Harry was not Tom. Tom would take whatever came at him and if he was floored by a blow, he would get back up again, fists raised.
Harry, Nell feared, would just lie there, stunned and unmoving.

Her father had done nothing to get them into service. How would they manage if they had to beg for charity?

‘Would it be so bad?’ her father asked after a while.

Nell wound the apron tighter and tighter, twisting it around her fingers until they hurt. How could she explain to him about Ralph’s teeth? About the light in his eyes that made her
stomach curdle? About the wrongness she sensed in him?

‘I have lain with Tom,’ she said, a last desperate bid for escape from this terrible thing her father asked of her.

‘He knows.’ Hugh would not meet her eyes. ‘He does not regard it. He says he loves you.’

‘Fine love, to be bought with blackmail!’

Nell’s mind was scurrying like a little wood creature, frantic for a hole to hide in. But if she hid, what would happen to her brothers? She thought about Harry’s gentle smile, about
the mischief in Peter’s eyes as he came in from some devilry. How could she abandon them to beggary and blows? And her father and stepmother, they too deserved her loyalty.

She closed her eyes again, tried to see things from her father’s point of view. If there wasn’t Tom, she wouldn’t think twice about a marriage such as this.

But there
was
Tom, everything in her cried. There was. There always would be Tom.

‘Nell?’

A rock was lodged in her throat. She could hardly swallow past it. ‘May I at least think about it?’ she managed, and her father nodded and placed his hands on his thighs as he got
heavily to his feet.

‘Think about it,’ he agreed, ‘but not too long. Ralph is waiting for an answer.’

After he had gone, Nell stood in the middle of the hall, turning Tom’s ring round and round and round on her finger while the wind knocked at the window. Somewhere a shutter was bang,
bang, banging but in the hall it was utterly still, as if time itself had stopped. A single shaft of sunlight pierced the gloom and she stared blindly at the dust motes trapped there. They hung in
the light, unmoving, as weightless and insubstantial as she felt.

Reaching out, she made a fist in the beam. She imagined her fingers closing around those tiny specks, crushing them the way her dreams had been crushed.

Oh, she had been a fool! A fool living in a fool’s paradise, she understood that now. No one was free to wed where they may. Everyone had to think about money and connections, and the
value each partner brought to the marriage. Why should she and Tom have thought it should be any different for them?

And all at once the truth plummeted through her: she would not marry Tom. She would not be able to wait until he came home. She would never hold him again.

She would marry Ralph.

The horror of it made her double over, her arms wrapped around her stomach. It was like being back in that chest. The panic was suffocating her, pressing over her mouth and nose, cracking her
ribs even as she struggled for breath.

‘Nell? What are you doing down there?’ Dimly she was aware of Alice peering down the stairs. ‘Do you not hear Mrs Harrison calling for you?’ Alice broke off as she saw
Nell’s distress, and she hurried down the last steps. ‘God’s bodkin, what has happened? Are you ill?’

‘No.’ With an effort Nell straightened and sucked in a reedy breath. ‘No, but I have to get out. I have to, Alice.’

She was already halfway to the door when Alice grabbed her arm. ‘Wait! I’ll tell her you’ve gone to the orchard to pick up apples, but you can’t wander around the streets
like that! Take off your apron, and I’ll find you a gown.’

What did it matter? Nell thought wildly. What did any of it matter compared to this weight that had dropped on her without warning? But she untied her apron strings with clumsy fingers and let
Alice help her into a brown gown trimmed with black velvet, standing like a child as Alice fastened it, clucking under her breath.

‘And take this.’ Alice thrust a basket at her. ‘You might as well get some apples while you’re at it.’

‘Thank you,’ Nell roused herself to say. Alice was right: she needed a job to do. ‘I . . .’ But she couldn’t put into words what she wanted to say. ‘Thank
you, Alice,’ was all she said in the end.

The wind grabbed at her as soon as Nell stepped outside, and she had to put up a hand to keep her cap in place. Above the stalls the pentices rattled and the shop signs creaked and groaned. Folk
walked with their heads down, leaning forward into the gusty air or back to stop themselves being bowled along the street. William Buckbarrow’s apprentice was running after some ribbons that
had blown off the stall and Cuthbert Vause cursed as he gathered up the teetering pile of pails that had blown over.

Once, Nell would have stopped to help, but that day she just pulled her gown closer around her against the cold and hurried by.

Towering clouds raced across the sky. The sun kept plunging behind them, only to burst out again a few moments later in a dazzle of brightness that made Nell screw up her eyes. The constant
shift from brilliant light to shade gave the air a jagged, fractured feel that mirrored her mood.

The Harrisons had an orchard next to the garden in Paynley’s Crofts. Nell slipped through the vagabonds, carts and countrymen that clustered outside Monk Bar, unable or unwilling to pay
the market tolls. No one clutched at her today. It was as if she were invisible, wrapped in a cloak of misery.

But Nell saw them. She saw the poor with their gaunt faces and sharp, feral eyes; saw the boniness of their shoulders and the way they shivered as the wind cut through their threadbare
garments.

She saw them but she couldn’t meet their eyes for fear they would be too familiar. How many of the men there were once like her father? How many of those hard-faced women squatting with
their children once had houses to call their own like her stepmother?

If she refused Ralph, he would see that Harry and Peter ended up out there, their skin grimy, their sores untended.

I will stand true
, she had promised Tom.
I will be torn apart by horses before I break my vow.

She had no need for horses to tear her apart. She was torn already. There was a rawness inside her, like a shriek of pain, and she had to clench every muscle in her body to stop herself being
ripped open.

Head down, she cut across St Maurice’s churchyard and over the stile to one of the paths that criss-crossed the crofts. She walked to the Harrison’s orchard; she unlatched the gate.
The wind shook the apples from the trees even as she gathered them. She worked dry-eyed, unthinking. She couldn’t bear to think. She couldn’t bear to
feel
.

Desolation was a huge fist squeezing her tighter and tighter inside until there was just a pebble where her heart once was, just a small stone lodged cold and heavy where giddy joy used to dance
and twirl.

Because she knew what she must do.

She would marry Ralph Maskewe. She would learn not to shudder when he bared those big teeth.

She would do as her father said and put aside her childish dreams. She would grow up and be sensible. She wouldn’t let herself remember how a single glance from Tom could heat her blood,
how the touch of his hands set her skin afire.

How her heart swelled at the sight of him. How her senses sang when he was near. How peace settled over her as she lay in his arms.

She would forget it all.

Instead she would remember that Ralph was a wealthy man. That fine house in Stonegate was his now, and she would be mistress of it. Ralph was a good catch, better by far than Tom, the new
cold-hearted Nell tried to tell herself. Many maids would be glad to have him.

And what, after all, did she know of him to object to? An expression she caught in his eyes sometimes? A feeling? Perhaps she had just imagined it, as she imagined the book being placed on the
chest where she hid so long ago. She was a child, with a child’s fancies, and she had panicked, just as her stepmother had said. Ralph had simply been the easy person to blame, and she had
held it against him ever since.

Nobody else had aught but good to say of Ralph Maskewe. She could not sacrifice her brothers because she didn’t like the teeth everyone else admired so much.