The Edge of Dark

by Pamela Hartshorne

  And there, haunting the air, the smell of smoke.

  The chair slammed back against the wall as Roz jerked to her feet, both hands flat on the desk, danger drumming in the back of her mind, but when she sniffed again, the smell was gone.

  ‘Enough.’ Her voice sounded raspy in the room’s dead air but she made herself open her briefcase, scowling at the tremble of her fingers. She wasn’t going to let herself be spooked again.

  She found her tablet with its stylus and held it in her hand, reassured by its sleekness. Nick rolled his eyes whenever she got it out to make notes, and insisted on using paper and pen as a matter of principle, but Roz thought it was important to keep up to date with technology. ‘ I’m not afraid of progress,’ she would jibe when she wanted to annoy him. She prided herself on being forward-looking, cutting-edge. The past was over and done with, she’d insisted to Nick.

  Which made these dreams of farthingales and ruffs doubly disturbing.

  Taking only the tablet and stylus, Roz left everything else behind in the office and headed down the narrow stairs to the great hall on the ground floor, more relieved than she wanted to admit to have a good excuse to leave her office so soon. But she had planned to take notes room by room. She wasn’t running away, Roz reassured herself. She wasn’t frightened by her own office.

  The great hall was shadowy, with a green pall cast over it from the netting swathed over the scaffolding. Roz paused in the passageway entrance and for a moment the air seemed to swirl and stir and solidify so that she sucked in a sharp breath, but even as her heart tripped, she saw that someone was moving from the shadows.

  The caretaker she had met the day before, carrying a broom. Roz searched her memory for his name. ‘Oh . . . Jeff . . . it’s you,’ she said, wincing inwardly at the high, precarious note in her voice. ‘Hi.’

  Who had she been expecting to see? he wondered. She looked startled. No, frightened. He could see the quick rise and fall of her jacket, the pulse hammering in her throat.

  ‘Morning,’ he said. He was prepared this time, and able to look at her more closely without his head ringing.

  Little Boo, all grown up.

  She looked like their mother, but sharper, smarter, not as soft. The mother he longed for and hated for abandoning him.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting anyone to be here,’ she said. ‘It’s so quiet, I thought I was the only one here.’

  ‘The house is bigger than you expect,’ he agreed. ‘You can get lost in it.’

  ‘Yes.’ He saw a shiver race down her spine, but then she smiled. ‘How long have you worked here, Jeff?’

  Jeff. He’d chosen the name – or it had chosen him – but it sounded odd in her mouth.

  ‘I’ve been with the Foundation more’n ten years now, but only in this house since the contractors finished.’

  ‘Have they finished?’ Roz looked dubiously out at the scaffolding. ‘It looks as if they’ve still got a lot left to do.’

  ‘Nah, it’s just snagging now,’ he said, pleased to know more than she did. ‘They’ll come back and fix the little things – doors that stick, boards that creak, that kind of thing – but it’ll all get done before the launch.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Roz. ‘It won’t be much of a launch if we’ve still got the scaffolding up.’ She walked into the middle of the hall, looking around her. ‘It’s got a definite atmosphere, hasn’t it?’

  So she felt it too. He had wondered. But he could do stolid when he wanted to. ‘Atmosphere?’

  ‘I mean, it’s hard to believe that this is all basically new. It’s recreated, rather than restored, but it feels old.’

  He shrugged. ‘The fittings are new, but the house has been here a long time. Since the fourteenth century, they reckon.’

  ‘I thought it was a sixteenth-century house?’

  ‘It’s been recreated as it was in the time of Sir Geoffrey, but there was a house here long before that. He was the one who made the Holmwood fortune, and he transformed the house, but they were an important family in York long before that.’ In spite of himself, he couldn’t keep the note of pride from his voice, and Roz noticed.

  She looked at him, her head cocked on one side, the way their mother had used to do when she was interested. Jeff was used to people’s gazes sliding over or away from him, but Roz looked right at him, as if she saw everything about him.

  But not quite everything.

  ‘You know a lot about the history of the house,’ she said.

  He shrugged. ‘Just what I’ve picked up working here.’

  ‘Would you be interested in being a guide?’

  Out of nowhere, rage surged through him. He, a guide? Reduced to showing doltish strangers around his house? And then, just as suddenly, the feeling was gone, and Jeff shook his head to clear it. It happened like that sometimes. He’d be minding his own business and then without warning his muscles would clench with fury and there would be a grip like ice around his mind, and he’d find himself staring into a terrifying darkness. He didn’t tell anyone about it now. Schizophrenia, they’d said at first. A bad reaction to the drugs. They didn’t know. It was best not to mention it, he’d learnt. It never lasted long and he could control it.

  ‘I’m happy doing what I’m doing,’ he said. Because it was all right having a murderer sweeping your floors and cleaning your toilets and clearing up your messes, but engaging with the public? Jeff didn’t think so.

  Roz wasn’t bothered anyway. She was already walking away, her heels clicking on the new oak floorboards. The sound made her stop in consternation. ‘Oh, I’ve just remembered I’m not supposed to be wearing these shoes in here.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Helen said they would damage the floorboards.’ She looked ruefully down at her shoes and Jeff snorted.

  ‘Helen! What does she know? The only problem is with stilettos – and that’s more health and safety than anything else – in case you get your heel stuck between the boards and go arse over tit. Them shoes you’ve got on are okay.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Roz lifted first one foot then another to inspect the heels. They were high, but not needle-fine like some Jeff had seen. ‘That’s a relief. I’ll try and wear something more practical tomorrow.’ She smiled at him, a flash of sunlight in the gloomy hall, and the smile was so familiar that his gut twisted painfully and his breath stumbled in his throat.

  But she was already moving away once more and pulling out some fancy gadget. ‘I wanted to go round all the rooms to get a proper feel for them,’ she told him, and he saw her tap something into the tablet she held in one hand with a stylus. ‘This was the great hall, so it’s the natural place for the launch,’ she said, turning slowly to study the room. ‘But we could have a range of events in here.’ She shot him one of her disconcertingly direct looks. ‘How do you imagine the hall being used?’

  Jeff held on to his broom as he looked around. He could see the hangings, glowing in the candlelight, the long table set with goblets and basins, with silver and pewter. With jugs of the finest wine and, ah, the food! Dish after dish of meat: beef and pork, veal and venison, peahens and partridges and pigeons, baked and boiled and roasted. Pies and tarts, sugar comfits . . . And the air, ringing with voices, rank with sweat and reeking of grease and wine. He lounged in his chair, enjoying the beautiful blaze of fire at the end of his hall, enjoying the admiration and envy of his guests, his contentment only curdling at the memory of how she would have shaken her head and prated of plainness, of decency and modesty and honour – pah!

  Jeff started, realizing too late that he had exclaimed aloud, and his knuckles tightened around the broom. Control, he reminded himself. He had to stay in control.

  ‘Feasts,’ he managed, his voice hoarse with the effort of keeping it steady. Sometimes when he’d watched the trains careering round the model railway, back in the days when the hall had been a shop, they had gone so fast they’d started to blur before his eyes, and he’d glimpsed the hall as it had once been,
but he’d never seen it as vividly before. He shifted from foot to foot, dismayed in a way he didn’t quite understand. It was as if Roz was changing things, just by standing there. There was an edge to the air, an unease swirling around her. Could she feel it?

  She didn’t seem to, or at least not at first. ‘Feasts. Hmm, yes, banquets would be an obvious money-spinner,’ she said. ‘You could get, what, a hundred people in here? Say we had a long table here, and one here . . .’ She stopped, head poised at an angle, listening. ‘What’s that noise?’

  A train, chuff-chuff-chuffing round and round the track. A coldness stole over Jeff. ‘I can’t hear anything,’ he lied.

  ‘We’re not near the station, are we?’

  ‘It’s not that far.’ But already he could see Roz shaking her head, puzzled.

  ‘Weird. It sounds like a steam train. Or, no, a toy train. It’s sort of rattly . . .’ She fixed Jeff with her eyes. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, but he did.

  He could see the model shop now, its towering shelves stacked high with boxes, miniature cans of paint and mock foliage. The long, narrow room was crammed with model boats and cars, trains and planes, with rows of tiny plastic soldiers joined together. He remembered the snap as he broke them off one by one, the little knobbles left where they had been joined, the heady smell of the glue as he laboured over the models he made. There were model houses and stations and miniature plastic people, and plastic animals to stock a plastic countryside.

  He’d liked the models right at the back of the shop, where it was dim and quiet. To get there, you had to squeeze past the elaborate train track that filled the middle of the shop. Three miniature trains had circled relentlessly, rattling round the curves, and disappearing into tunnels before emerging again on the other side of the shop. They chuffed through the tiny countryside, complete with farms and little towns and stations where tiny plastic commuters waited rigidly for the trains that never stopped.

  A miniature world with no bellowing fathers, no meaty fists crashing through the silence. None of the giggling girls who filled the house once his mother married Patrick Acclam. Patrick never bellowed. He was kind and concerned and determinedly understanding, but he hadn’t wanted to be understood. He hated Patrick, hated Patrick’s daughters, hated the fact that Patrick made his mother happy.

  And in the model shop, he had changed. After that first time he’d shoplifted, he went back again and again. The rattle of the trains was the backdrop to his transformation, and he hadn’t even been surprised when he’d heard their echo in the hall when he returned. Nobody else had ever heard them, though, except for Helen, who had stopped once to listen, frowning, before clearly brushing the sound from her mind as if it were a blowfly buzzing irritatingly close.

  Roz shouldn’t be able to hear the trains. Jeff found himself holding his breath.

  She had been straining to listen, but now she shook her head. ‘It’s gone . . . That’s odd, I must have imagined it,’ she said, to his relief. She looked as if she was about to say more, but glanced at her watch instead. ‘I’d better get on. There’s a team meeting at ten thirty. Are you coming?’

  What did she think? Jeff’s lip curled, his early dismay leaching away as a familiar contempt crept over him. ‘I’m a caretaker.’

  ‘You’re part of the team.’

  It was exactly the kind of thing Patrick would have said. Jeff sneered. Who was she kidding? Did she really think Adrian Holmwood would sit around a table with a caretaker and a murderer? ‘I just clear up the mess,’ he said curtly.

  Strange guy, Roz thought as she went up the stairs behind the hall to look in the room Adrian had called the great chamber. There was a slightly unnerving intensity to Jeff, but something about him appealed to her too. He reminded her a little of Nick, she thought. He had the same leanness, the same intelligent eyes. Perhaps that was why he seemed familiar.

  She wondered what he had been in prison for.

  She was glad to leave the great hall behind with that disquieting rattle of a toy train nagging at her, too faint to be certain where it was coming from, too loud to ignore. Roz could have sworn Jeff heard it too. I can’t hear anything, he’d said, but there had been a flicker in his eyes, a shuttering of his expression. He hadn’t even tried to listen.

  Her footsteps sounded very loud on the wooden stairs. The staircase was newly built and smelt of fresh timber, but the air was thick and musty as if the stairwell hadn’t been opened for a very long time. It pressed around Roz’s face, stifling her, and all at once the shadows at the top of the stairs seemed to be breathing, beckoning her up. Warning shrilled, a scream of instinct in her head, and Roz paused, her heart jerking, one hand on the wall.

  Everything in her told her to go back, back down the stairs, out of the house, but how could she? Jeff would be there. How could she tell him she was too frightened to go up the stairs? And what about the team meeting at ten thirty? What could she say then: I’m here to do a great job, but I’m scared of the house?

  Anyway, she was being ridiculous. It was just a staircase, and it was only shadowy at the top because there were no lights up there.

  Swallowing, Roz made herself walk on up to the top. No ghostly hands reached out for her, no monster grabbed her. There was no whispering in the shadows.

  But her heart was still beating hard as she walked across the landing and hesitated in the doorway of the great chamber. The room was empty, waiting for her. Roz could feel it licking its lips in anticipation.

  The sense of oppression that had been dogging her all morning solidified into a conviction that she was being watched, and the hairs on the back of her neck lifted in a slow, shivery wave. ‘There’s no one here,’ she said out loud, but her voice came out cracked and dried. ‘It’s an empty room.’

  Deliberately, Roz made herself step inside. Her heels rang on the wooden floor. Jeff would be able to hear her below. The thought of his presence was insensibly comforting. Ex-offender or not, he was a human being.

  She got out her tablet and stylus and forced herself to concentrate. The room had been panelled with new wainscoting and the windows were glazed as befitted a wealthy house at the end of the sixteenth century. Adrian had told her that Lucy, the curator, had sourced a great bed dating from that period, and that new hangings and coverlets had been commissioned. Otherwise he thought there would have been little furniture in the room. A chest or two perhaps, a stool, some cushions. A rush mat on the floor. Maybe a chair by the fireplace.

  Which meant the room would be uncluttered. Roz turned slowly, trying to envisage the chamber furnished. It could be an intimate venue for a small wedding ceremony, with a feast to follow in the hall downstairs.

  Weddings, she typed onto her tablet. Licence?

  There would be other events where a smaller, cosier space would be more appropriate too. Poetry readings, she noted. Book launches. Parties.

  Séances.

  Roz stared down at the word that had appeared on her tablet. She didn’t remember writing it.

  But that was what happened sometimes, she reassured herself. When your mind was buzzing with ideas, sometimes your fingers got ahead of your brain. The atmosphere of the house was clearly having an effect. It wasn’t surprising that the idea of a séance had popped into her head.

  And it wasn’t a bad idea, Roz thought as she wandered over towards the window. Haunted houses were a big draw. Why not capitalize on the creepy atmosphere?

  Tapping the stylus absently against her teeth, she stared out of the window. It would be good when the scaffolding had gone. The windows were surprisingly large and on a sunny day the room would be bright, but the green netting that shrouded the scaffolding made it seem so dark in here. They should light more candles. She looked down to the street below, frowning at the sight of a bare-headed woman. And there was another, walking down the street in her shift!

  Startled, she blinked, but the woman had gone, and the street was dark and empty as it should
be at this time of night. A cur slunk along the gutter, scavenging for scraps, and the sound of the wedding feast in the hall below spilt out through the chinks in the closed shutters.

  ‘Come,’ said Margaret Holmwood, brusque as ever. ‘Why do you moon over by the window? We must prepare you for your husband.’

  Jane turned obediently. There had been something strange about the street a moment ago, but she couldn’t remember what it was. And why worry about what was happening in the street in any case? This was her wedding night, the moment she would be truly married to Robert. She shook off the feeling of sadness. There was nothing to feel sad about. She should be merry, rather. She was a bride and her husband was young, handsome, gently born.

  She had barely spoken to him. The wedding feast had been held here in the Holmwoods’ house in Micklegate, where the sign of the red boar hung above the great door. It was enough that they would be marrying a butcher’s daughter. For all his wealth, Henry Birkby could not be expected to provide a feast fit for Sir Robert’s wedding.

  Jane’s father hadn’t argued. He had purchased the Holmwoods’ gentility, and he would not tarnish it by insisting that their kin and friends mingled. Nobody asked Jane what she wanted. Nobody thought that as a bride she might like to have her friends about her. Only her father and Juliana had been invited to the feast. The Holmwoods had little patience with the traditions Jane had looked forward to. There had been no bridelaces in Jane’s hair, and she had had no maids to gather flowers to strew before her that morning when she walked from her father’s house to the church in Micklegate. Juliana, deeply envious of Jane’s good fortune, had accompanied Jane and their father, and was even now sulking downstairs at the feast.

  Still, she was married. Jane tried to absorb the thought, to comprehend the reality of it, but the idea was too huge, too slippery. No sooner did she think that it felt real than it would slither out of her grasp, like the wet soap Ellen had taught her to make all those years ago.