The Memory of Midnight by Pamela Hartshorne Page A

Ashrafar rather than go to his new school, and
Tess had underestimated how much time it would take to walk there with him dawdling all the way. Then the conversation with her mother, unearthing memories of monks and severed heads. Was it any
wonder her head ached?
    Her pulse boomed and thudded in her ears, adding to the thumping in her skull. She would lie down for a bit, close her eyes.
    Sometime later, Tess woke with a panicky sense of suffocation. There was a great weight pressing down on her, and she struggled up, only to find that the cat had made itself at home on her chest
and was regarding her with great yellow eyes, mildly irritated by her wriggles. In the end she had to lift her off bodily before she could sit up.
    She felt better. Her headache had mostly gone, and by the time she had washed her face and made herself a cup of coffee, she was feeling almost normal and ready to start work. Settling at the
desk in the window, she opened both computers so that she could see them side by side and called up a photograph of the first page of the manuscript. The yellowing pages were covered in a typical
sixteenth-century scrawl. The ink was a little faded but otherwise the manuscript was in remarkably good condition.
    These fragments of the coroner’s inquest records had been discovered in the city’s archives only the year before, and would be an important new source for Richard’s study on
Tudor crime. It was Tess’s job to transcribe them accurately and translate from the Latin where necessary.
    Drone work
. She could almost hear Martin spitting out the words. He’d been contemptuous of her work –
It’s not as if copying is a real job
– and
she’d let him persuade her that there was no need to carry on working after their marriage.
We don’t need the money. If you loved me, you’d want to be there for me. My work is
so stressful, I need you at home.
    Determinedly, Tess shook off the memory. Martin was a distraction she didn’t need.
    It was slow going until her eyes adjusted to the unfamiliar script.
Anno regni Elizabeth regne viii mo . . .
1566. Well, a date was a start. Tess wriggled her shoulders and
settled more comfortably in her chair.
    Ashrafar had found a patch of sun by the window and was sitting sphinx-like on the desk, watching the tourists taking photographs below. The ends of her black fur shimmered gold in the sunlight.
Every now and then Tess reached out to run her hand along her back, and she would flex her spine and vibrate with a purr. She made for a peaceful companion.
    Tess worked to the end of the page, closed down the image, and pulled up the next one, and then the next. It became easier as she got used to the vagaries of the clerk’s hand, and she was
able to work faster. It felt good to be using her skills again, and she was feeling confident as she pulled up the fourth page and the name Maskewe leapt out at her like a punch from the screen,
driving the breath from her lungs in a cough of shock.
    Coincidence
, she told herself as she patted her throat and got her breathing back in order.
    Focusing on the entry, she made herself work through it carefully, transcribing word by word and translating as she went along. The inquest jury had been sworn in to enquire into the death of
one Joan Beck. Joan was servant to Mr Henry Maskewe, merchant, and her body was found on the riverbank at St George’s Close.
    Joan had drowned.
    The tiny hairs on the back of Tess’s neck lifted. She took a steadying breath and read the lines again, checking that she hadn’t made a mistake, but no, the names were clear.
    Coincidence
, she reassured herself again.
It must be.
She had never read this account before. As far as she knew, no one had looked at it properly since the sixteenth century.
The records had been shoved in the back of another manuscript and lost in the city’s archives for four hundred years.
    But if that were the case, how was it that she could remember so vividly standing