The Memory of Midnight (8 page)

What had happened? One minute she had been trudging up the lane with Tom, and the next it was dark. Was she back in the kist? At the thought, horror shook her like a terrier with a rat, and her
hands shot up as if to push frantically against the lid, but they met only air.

No kist.

The panic receded and the tightness in her chest relaxed a little as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. There was a faint, fuzzy light coming through a window, and a yellowy glow striping across
the room from the open door. She wasn’t in the kist. Thank God she wasn’t shut up. She could breathe. Jerky, shallow breaths, but she could breathe.

And she could remember.

A dream. That’s all it had been.
Tess
, she was Tess, not Nell, and she was in York. She remembered now. She was in Richard’s flat, and Oscar was sleeping in the other
room.

Oscar! The thought of her son jerked Tess upright. Muddled by the lingering fear of waking and not knowing who she was, she almost fell out of the bed and stumbled along the passage, careening
off the walls in her exhaustion.

Oscar was sound asleep, his arms flung high on the pillow. Tess laid her hand lightly on his body and let the steady rise and fall of his chest calm her. She was properly awake now, but her mind
was jangling still from the vividness of the dream.

She could remember exactly the eerie light, the dampness clinging to her lashes, the smell of wet rope and river and dried fish. Tom, his thin, homely face alight with a longing to explore the
world. And herself as a girl, restless and brimming with energy. Tess could still feel the roughness of the linen shift against her skin, the weight of the sturdy clogs encasing her feet, the way
they skidded slightly on the slimy cobbles.

Tess had never dreamt that clearly before.

In her dream, she had had memories. Of poor, rabbity Joan. Of Ralph’s teeth. Of the terror of being shut up in a box. Was that normal? Tess wrapped her arms around herself and chewed the
inside of her cheek as she stood looking down at Oscar in the darkness. Dreams didn’t work like that, did they? This hadn’t felt like a dream at all. It felt as if she had been there,
lived there. It felt like a memory.

Which it couldn’t be, of course. Immediately, Tess started to rationalize. She was a historian of sorts, after all. The sixteenth century was her period, and the clothes, the houses in her
dream were familiar to her. It wasn’t surprising she had dreamt of that time, especially given the work she was going to be doing for Richard. Moving into his flat had obviously been a
catalyst. This house would have been standing in the sixteenth century. Perhaps not in the form Nell and Tom would have recognized, but it had been here.

In fact, it would have been surprising if she
hadn’t
dreamt of Elizabethan York.

How strange to muddle it up with some garbled knowledge of vampires, though. Tess wondered where all that about poor Joan’s burial had come from. As far as she knew, there had been no
belief in vampires at the time . . . but why was she trying to make sense of a dream anyway? Perhaps a psychologist could make something of it but she wasn’t going to waste any more thought
on it. It was just a dream. It didn’t matter, and she had other things to think about.

Still, she wouldn’t sleep now. She was churning with a mixture of fear and fascination. She couldn’t get the dream from her mind: the fog hanging low over the river, her horrified
fascination with the dead girl who would be buried with a stake through her heart, and how easily her young mind had jumped to other concerns.

Tess pulled a hoodie over her vest and shorts and padded restlessly through to the front room without turning on the lights. In the glow from the shop fronts outside, she booted up her main
laptop. If she couldn’t sleep, she might as well do some work.

The clock at the bottom of the screen read 03.14.
The dead of night
, Tess thought and then wished she hadn’t. Something about the word ‘dead’ struck cold between her
shoulder blades.

The street below was empty. It had stopped raining but the air was still damp and she huddled into her hoodie. She should have put on some tracksuit bottoms as well, but they were in the chest
of drawers in the back bedroom and she didn’t want to go back there.

Not in the dead of the night.

‘Stop it,’ Tess told herself out loud, but her voice came out shakily.

Pressing her lips together, she opened the document with Richard’s notes on editing conventions for the records. How to indicate text that had been omitted by the clerk, or that had been
deleted. Whether a fine was squeezed between lines, or words written in the left- or right-hand margin. Working steadily, Tess set them up on a clipboard, ready for her to start work the next
day.

It was just the mindless task she needed, she decided, but as she worked she kept stopping to lift her head and listen to the silence. She couldn’t shake the conviction that it was
thickening, growing denser by the second, until it became a tangible thing that was creeping up behind her. Several times she actually glanced over her shoulder.

Her palms were damp. She wiped them on her thighs, just as the shrill of the phone beside her ripped through the heavy silence without warning. Tess’s whole body jolted in shock, and it
was a moment before her lungs started to work again and she could remember how to breathe.

Brrr, brrr. Brrr, brrr. Brrr, brrr.

It had to be an emergency for someone to ring at this time of night. Tess stared at the phone as if it were a living thing, her heart still jerking frantically. It was Richard’s landline,
she realized. What if a relative was trying to get in touch with him? Shakily, she picked up the unfamiliar phone and struggled to focus. Her thumb was so unsteady that it took several goes before
she pressed the right button firmly enough to answer.

‘Hello?’ she croaked.

In reply she could hear breathing, quiet and steady.

‘Hello?’

Nothing, just a dull burring in her ear as the connection was cut and the line went dead.

As dead as the dead of night.

‘I didn’t tell Martin anything!’ Sue Frankland’s voice rose plaintively.

‘Then how did he know how to get in touch with me?’ Tess knuckled her eyes. They were gritty from lack of sleep. Oscar was safely at school, and she was walking back towards Monk
Bar, her mobile pressed to her ear.

She should have known her mother would be the weak link.

‘For heaven’s sake, Theresa! You said there was nobody on the other end of the line. It was probably a wrong number.’

‘At half past three in the morning?’

‘Exactly. Why on earth would Martin ring you at that time and not say anything?’

To scare me. To let me know that he knows exactly where I am.

‘I know it was him,’ said Tess stubbornly.

She had a new mobile phone. She had changed her email address and shut down her Facebook account. She had done everything she could think of to cover her traces. And yet within a few hours of
her moving out of her mother’s house, somehow Martin had been able to find out Richard’s number, which meant he not only knew how to contact her, he knew where she was.

If it
had
been him.

Maybe it hadn’t. Even Martin couldn’t have access to that kind of information that quickly, could he?

Could he?

‘Have you spoken to him at all?’ she asked her mother, who huffed and puffed and finally admitted that Martin had rung the night before.

‘So he knows we’re still in York?’

‘Of course he knows you’re still here. I had to tell him that, at least.’ Her mother sounded huffy. ‘Martin’s very concerned about you, Theresa, and about
Oscar.’ Sue was the only person apart from Martin who called her Theresa. ‘He’s Oscar’s father. He has a right to know where his son is.’

‘You said you didn’t tell him!’

‘There’s no need to snap. I didn’t give him your address, since you made such a fuss about it, but it was very awkward. I don’t know why you’ve got it into your
head that you can’t trust Martin. He was charm itself when he rang yesterday, even though I could tell how disappointed he was not to be able to talk to you.’

‘He
can
be charming when he wants to be,’ Tess said wearily. She was never going to convince her mother that Martin wasn’t the best thing that had ever happened to
her. And that was her fault. For the first couple of years she had believed it herself.

Sue sucked in a breath. ‘I don’t understand you sometimes, I really don’t. You had a wonderful life in London. Martin
adores
you.’

‘Mum . . .’

‘It’s true! You can tell by the way he talks about you.’ Her mother’s voice began to wobble in distress. ‘You had that lovely home, everything you could ever want .
. . if you ask me, you’re spoilt! And now you throw it all away just because you’ve got some idea in your head about Martin being controlling.’

Tess was wishing she hadn’t called her mother, but she needed to know what she had told Martin. She set her teeth. ‘It’s not an idea, Mum,’ she said.

‘The trouble with you, Theresa, is that you’ve always been overimaginative,’ Sue went on as if Tess hadn’t spoken.

That was always Martin’s line too.

Tess pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Mum, I was a historian. I deal with facts, evidence. I’m the least imaginative person I know.’

‘You were
always
imaginative,’ Sue insisted. ‘It could be quite embarrassing at times. Remember that time we took you to Rievaulx Abbey?’

‘No.’

‘Yes, you do. You ran around pointing out monks and trying to talk to them.’

A memory glimmered into life. Tess holding her father’s hand, pulling him out of the way as the monks went about their business, puzzled rather than frightened when nobody else seemed to
be able to see them.

‘I was just a kid,’ she said uncomfortably. ‘I can’t have been much older than Oscar then.’

‘Then there was the time you started screaming because you could see heads stuck up on Micklegate Bar.’ Her mother seemed determined to prove her point.

Tess took the phone away from her ear and looked at it. Another incident she appeared to have wiped from her mind, but now her mother mentioned it, she did remember the bloated, rotting heads
spiked to the top of the bar, the ghastly grimaces glimpsed between clouds of flies. Her stomach heaved. No wonder she had blocked out that particular memory.

She frowned. ‘We must have been doing something at school about how they used to display traitors’ heads on the bars or something.’

‘That’s exactly what I mean!’ said her mother triumphantly. ‘Barbara Jessop always said you were sensitive, but I think you just took something you’d read or been
told, and then exaggerated it out of all proportion.’

Well, thanks for that ringing endorsement, Mother
, thought Tess.
Good to know that your own mother thinks you’re hysterical, neurotic and obsessive.

‘Now you’re doing the same with Martin,’ Sue said. ‘You’ve read some silly magazine article or something and you’ve decided that you’re a victim
too.’

‘Where have you been?’ Martin, grabbing her the moment she stepped through the door, shaking her.

‘Just the supermarket.’ Trying to free her arm so that she could manoeuvre the pram in.

‘What for?’

‘Some milk. Martin, let me go. You’re hurting me.’

Releasing her reluctantly. ‘Who did you meet while you were there?’

‘No one.’

‘There must have been someone. You met that guy, didn’t you?’

‘What guy?’

‘The one I saw you talking to the other weekend. Young guy. Earring. Ponytail.’ Spitting out the description.

And she, lacking the energy to argue, but trying anyway. ‘Martin, he was a shelf-stacker. I wasn’t talking to him. I was asking him where the caster sugar was.’

‘Don’t lie to me!’ His voice rising without warning. ‘You were flirting with him. I saw you smiling and chatting and he was lapping it up!’

Oscar, whimpering at the noise. Tess, flinching at the rage boiling in the air.

‘You’re frightening Oscar.’

‘Oscar? Oscar? What about me? You’ve had all day with the child. Is it too much to ask for you to be here when I get home after a hard day? It’s not as if you have anything
else to do. Well, is it?’

Her head throbbing with tension. Picking up the baby, who was crying in earnest now. Not knowing what to deal with first. Taking the easy way out. Agreeing with him. Telling herself she
would stand up to him next time.

It always ended the same way. Martin would retreat into a monumental sulk, until she couldn’t stand it any longer and cajoled him out of it, at which point he would beg for her forgiveness
in a voice choked with emotion.

‘It’s just because I love you so much, Theresa. You know that, don’t you?’

After a while, it was easier not to go out in case he rang. Easier to give in when he suggested ordering online so that she didn’t need to go to the supermarket at all. Easier to make sure
Oscar was in bed before he came home.

Easier to lose contact with her own friends rather than have to make excuses about why Martin didn’t want to socialize with them. Once or twice she had made the effort to go out on her
own, but she had spent the whole time worrying about whether she would get home on time, and after Oscar’s birth it had been clear that insisting on going out and leaving Martin alone with a
baby after he had been at work all day would be monumentally selfish and irresponsible.

Easier to make her life smaller and smaller until it had almost disappeared.

Tess had never told anyone what it had been like. She was too ashamed.

‘It’s not as if Martin hit you or anything awful like that,’ her mother said.

‘No,’ Tess agreed dully. ‘He never hit me.’

He never had. Not physically. It was no use trying to explain to her mother, though. Sue saw Martin as the rest of the world saw him, as Tess herself had seen him at first: bright, articulate,
successful, good-looking, oozing charm and confidence. When he looked at you, you felt you were the only person in the world he was interested in, that nobody else mattered.