The Memory of Midnight (7 page)

She couldn’t see the river, but she could smell it: dank and rank, all fish and slimy mud.

On King’s Staithe, the keelboats loomed ghostly in the mist. They were drawn up against the quayside, waiting for the tide, watched over by a lone seagull hunched beadily on a post. The
staithe, normally bustling, was quiet. The mariners had taken refuge from the damp in the alehouse, and only Jack Brown, beaten to the colour of his name by the sea winds, was sitting on an upright
barrel, a clay pipe clamped between his teeth, watching Tom wrestle with a rope.

The tight band around Nell’s chest loosened at the sight of Tom. The air seemed less dense, less threatening, and she breathed easily again. Tom knew that she was afraid of dark, tight
places, but he never teased her. When a loutish apprentice had tried to push her into an empty barrel for his amusement and she had screamed and screamed and screamed, Tom had leapt at him with his
fists even though the apprentice was twice his size. The boy had ended up with a black eye and cut lip and a thrashing from his master, but Nell had been able to wriggle free.

She was safe as long as Tom was there.

‘What are you doing?’ The fog forgotten, Nell stepped over a pile of fish guts and peered at the rope in Tom’s hands. He was twisting the cord carefully around itself.

‘Tying a monkey’s fist.’ Tom was used to the way she appeared without warning and he barely glanced up.

Nell didn’t mind. She liked watching his frown of concentration. When Tom wanted to learn something, he was fierce with focus. The bright eyes would narrow and his smiling mouth would set
in a firm line, the restless energy that was so much part of him directed at the task in hand.

‘Look.’ He held up the rope with its misshapen lump to show her when he had finished. ‘What do you think of that?’

She took it and weighed it in her hands. It was heavier than she expected. ‘What is it for?’

‘It gives weight to the heaving line,’ said Tom importantly. He liked to impress her with his knowledge of the ships that plied between Hull and the great ports of the Low Countries.
Taking the rope back, he swung it around his shoulder and made as if to throw it from a deck to a quay. ‘See?’

Five years had passed since Nell had shut herself in the chest, and now she too was in service. At eleven she had joined the Harrison household, and since then she had been learning to wash and
to brew and to bake, to dress meat and to cast accounts, but Mrs Harrison was an indolent mistress, unlike Anne Appleby, and it was easy for Nell to slip away when she was supposed to be running
errands.

It had been strange at first to leave home and her two small brothers, but she knew she was fortunate. Mr Harrison was a rich draper, although his wealth could not compare to Mr Maskewe’s,
and the house was much more comfortable than Nell’s father’s. There were two other maids to giggle with and, best of all, the Harrisons lived in Ousegate near William Todd’s
house, so she saw Tom nearly every day. Nell was well content with her lot.

She had known she would find Tom at the staithe. Even when he had nothing to do in Mr Todd’s warehouses, Tom would be hanging around by the river, as if by wishing hard enough he could
magic up a ship. For years now, Tom had yearned to go to sea, but so far his master had only taken him to Hull on the riverboats. Still, it was further than Nell had been.

Tom showed the rope to Jack, and at his brusque nod of approval began to loosen the knot with deft fingers so that he could start again.

‘Got anything to eat in there?’ he asked Nell, nodding at her basket. Tom was always hungry.

‘No,’ she said regretfully. She was always hungry too. ‘My mistress just sent me for some pins and thread and . . . oh, Tom, I heard hard news at the pinner’s,’ she
said, remembering the reason she had come to find him. ‘Do you remember your mother’s little maid, Joan?’

‘The clumsy one?’ Tom grunted, intent once more on the rope in his hands. It was five years since he had lived in the house on Stonegate. The Todd house on Pavement was home to him
now. ‘What’s she broken now?’

‘Nothing,’ said Nell. ‘She’s dead.’ Distress puckered her face. ‘They’re saying that she killed herself last night, God rest her soul.’

‘What?’ Tom’s head jerked up in shock. Death could come calling at any time, but to kill oneself was a mortal sin. ‘
Why
?’

‘Who knows why anyone does such a thing?’

Jack took the pipe from his mouth. He hawked and spat, and the seagull flapped its wings as if affronted. ‘’Tis common enough,’ he said. ‘There’s many a servant as
doesn’t like the way life is.’

Nell and Tom knew that. They had had their share of beatings, but they had families behind them. Girls like Joan had no one to speak for them, and some masters were harsher than others. All the
same, Nell had never known anyone to kill themselves before.

‘They say she threw herself in the Ouse and drowned.’

Nell shivered as she looked at the river. It lay oily and still under the weight of the fog, and out of nowhere horror flapped in her face like a great black bird, making her reel back with a
gasp and grope for the wall.

Tom didn’t notice. He was staring down at the rope, pulling it between his hands, a muscle in his cheek working convulsively. ‘Joan,’ he muttered. He didn’t know what
else to say. ‘She never did anyone any hurt except herself.’

With difficulty, Nell nodded. The feeling had lifted and she could breathe again, but her heart was still galloping. She remembered the last time she had seen Joan. The Maskewes’ maid had
been scuttling down Stonegate with her basket. She was a pale, timid girl with protuberant eyes that slid away from you when you talked to her. Nell wouldn’t have said that she was unhappy,
but what did she know?

Something had made Joan walk into the implacable grip of the Ouse. Its stillness was deceptive. Only the night before it had been running high after the recent rains, and once the current took
her, Joan would have had little chance. Did she change her mind as the cold brown waters closed round her? Nell wondered. Did she try to go back? Or had she been seduced by the Devil and condemned
herself to haunt the riverside forever?

Nell swallowed and crossed herself surreptitiously at the thought. They wouldn’t bury Joan in the churchyard now. They would take her out to a crossroads at midnight and drive a stake
tipped with iron through her heart to stop her rising again. Nell tried to imagine Joan with a stake embedded in her, but she couldn’t do it.

She couldn’t imagine feeling such despair. True, there were times when work was hard, times when life was cruel and uncertain, but for Nell there were more times when it was good. When the
rooftops rimed with glassy frost glittered in the winter sunlight, or one of her small brothers squealed with delight as she swung him round and round. When there was laughter in the market, or Tom
to meet down by the river, and her blood ran quick and eager.

True, the Maskewe house must have been a dull place since Tom’s mother died with his little brother. Mother and babe had succumbed to the fever barely a week after Nell had been shut in
the chest, and Mr Maskewe had not married again. He was comfortable enough with Fat Peg to run the house, and with no mistress to harry her, Joan’s day couldn’t have been so hard, could
it? Nell herself could think of lots of things she would do if her mistress wasn’t waiting for her to come home. Indolent as she was, even Mistress Harrison would notice if Nell spent all day
there on the staithe with Tom.

Abandoning his knot, Tom sighed and brushed his hands on his breeches. Nell wished she could wear breeches too. She would much rather be a boy. As a girl she had to be clean and neat. She had to
lower her eyes and walk slowly. She had to wear stiff skirts and lace a bodice across her flat chest.

She would have to stay home, while Tom went adventuring. One day before too long he would go, and she would be left behind.

She wouldn’t think of it. Not yet.

‘I’d better go and see my father,’ said Tom. ‘And Ralph, too, I suppose,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘It is a poor homecoming for him.’

Ralph had been in Antwerp for the past two years on his father’s business, but the English had fallen into a great quarrel with the Spaniards, and Mr Maskewe had summoned him back to York
until the merchants of England could find a more certain home where the Spanish presence wasn’t so strong.

Nell had only seen Ralph once since he had been back. She had been visiting her stepmother and chasing little Harry and Peter round the yard, making them shriek with laughter, when the men came
out of the hall. Immediately, Anne shushed Nell and the boys, and Nell turned, her face flushed, to see her father flanked by Mr Maskewe and Ralph.

Her father always looked diminished when Mr Maskewe was there, and the strain was there for everyone to see, for all his great professions of love and friendship. Harry, his firstborn son, was
named after Mr Maskewe, who was Harry’s godfather. The connection was an important one. Still, no one was ever quite comfortable when the Maskewes were present.

Except Tom, of course. Tom was different.

Whenever Nell looked at Tom, her heart lifted. It was hard to believe that he shared any blood with Ralph. They were not at all like brothers. It wasn’t that Tom was unhandsome –
indeed, Nell liked his face – but he was small and wiry and dark, with a quicksilver smile and a zest for life in his expression, while Ralph was tall and solid with a ruddy complexion and
eyes as pale and hard as pebbles.

They said Ralph was a fine-looking man, and perhaps he was, but something about him curdled the blood in Nell’s veins. She hadn’t forgotten the day she got stuck in the chest, or the
way Ralph had smiled when the switch lashed across her palm, when she flinched in pain and had to bite hard on her lip to stop the tears.

The sight of him suddenly in her father’s yard after his years away was jarring and Nell sank into a curtsey and lowered her eyes so that she didn’t have to look at his teeth.

Her stepmother apologized for the noise. Mr Maskewe grunted, but Ralph was charming. Who could object to the sound of happy children? he had asked. Or to the sight of a pretty maid?

Nell kept her eyes lowered but she could feel his eyes on her. She could hear the lie in his voice, imagined him moving the words about his mouth, turning them like pebbles until they dropped
smooth and deceitful from his lips. She was not a pretty girl, she knew that. She was too boyish with her flat chest and her freckled nose and the wild brown hair that no amount of pins could tame.
Tom would scoff if he heard Ralph say that she was pretty.

There was something sly about Ralph, for all his fair features, and Nell remembered again the careful footsteps that crossed the floor while she hid in the chest in Mr Maskewe’s closet,
the leaden thump of the ledger on the lid. Had that been Ralph? Or had she imagined it all, as Tom and her stepmother had said?

Anne Appleby would hear nothing against Ralph after he and his father had gone. He was a sober, sensible man, she said. He was comely and full of compliments. ‘And he will be rich,’
she added with a meaningful glance at Nell, who looked blankly back at her.

‘He is twenty-one,’ Anne said to Nell’s father. ‘He will be looking for a wife one of these days.’

‘Nell is only twelve. Too young to be thinking of marriage.’

‘She will grow older. It would be a great connection for us. If she catches Ralph’s eye . . .’ Her stepmother trailed off significantly.

Nell had been following the conversation with dismay. ‘I’m not going to get married!’ she burst out.

‘Go to, Miss Eleanor! Then what will you do?’

She stuck out her bottom lip. ‘I will stow away on a ship and make my fortune at the cloth markets in Antwerp.’

‘Antwerp is overrun by the Spanish,’ her father sighed. ‘You will have no luck there as an Englishwoman.’

‘Do not encourage her to think of it,’ Anne scolded. ‘Eleanor is not going anywhere. Her life is in York.’

‘I will look after Harry and Peter,’ said Nell defiantly, her eyes falling on her little brothers.

‘Harry and Peter will have wives of their own, God willing. You must marry to have a home of your own.’

Nell sighed. ‘Then I will marry Tom if I must marry someone.’

‘Tom is a younger son, and still but a child. He will be in no position to marry for years.’

Nell was thinking of this conversation as she and Tom climbed the lane up from the staithe. The cobbles were uneven and slimy beneath their feet but the fog didn’t feel as menacing with
Tom there.

‘Tom,’ she said, ‘do you think you will ever marry?’

‘Marry?’ Tom stared at her as if she had asked if he would grow a head with a single eye in the forehead, like the Cyclops in the book of travellers’ tales Mistress Harrison
sometimes read out loud in the evenings. ‘What makes you think of marriage?’

‘Oh, it was just something my stepmother said.’ She scuffed at the edge of a pothole with her clogs. ‘She said you were a younger son and that you wouldn’t marry for a
long time.’

‘I dare say I won’t,’ said Tom cheerfully. ‘I will be adventuring overseas. I will join Captain Drake and sail to the Indies and bring back sugar and spices and Spanish
gold. What use will I have for a wife?’

‘I wish I could go with you,’ Nell said, her green eyes wistful.

‘Well, if I do come home a rich man and want a wife, I will marry you,’ Tom offered generously, and her face lit up.

‘I wish it could be so!’

‘I’ll have to finish my apprenticeship first, mind,’ Tom warned. ‘And then I’ll go to sea. It won’t be for a while.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Nell. ‘It’s not as if anyone else will want to marry me.’ An image of Ralph watching her in the yard slithered into her mind, and she
twitched it off as she would a fly. ‘I have little dowry, and it’s not as if I’m pretty.’

Tom didn’t bother to correct her. ‘You can run fast for a girl,’ he said. ‘That’s something.’

Her eyes snapped open and she stared into the darkness, aware only of the blood drumming in her ears. And the fear snapping and crackling under her skin.