The Edge of Dark

by Pamela Hartshorne

  ‘Nothing,’ she said dully. ‘It must have been nothing.’

  ‘You don’t sound yourself.’ Nick said he was worried about her when she rang that night. Roz didn’t tell him about Jane’s marriage, or about the smoke. It was too hard to explain. She just said that they had all been evacuated because of a possible fire and that she’d worked in the flat all afternoon. It was the truth, after all, but Nick knew that she wasn’t telling him everything.

  ‘Why don’t you come home this weekend?’ he said.

  Roz hesitated. A part of her wanted to go back to London more than anything else, but her pride wouldn’t let her admit that she was frightened of York. ‘I’ve only just arrived,’ she said. ‘Besides, I thought you had Daniel this weekend?’

  She heard Nick sigh. ‘You can’t keep avoiding him, Roz. He’s just a kid. It’s not his fault.’

  Knowing that just made Roz feel guilty, and guilt soured her temper and made her scratchy and unreasonable. Intellectually, of course she understood that the situation was nobody’s fault, least of all Daniel’s.

  It wasn’t Nick’s either. He hadn’t been expecting to be tracked down on Facebook by the son he hadn’t known he had. Roz knew all of that too, but something about the ease with which Nick had stepped into fatherhood grated on her. He was so calm, so accepting. It infuriated her. Having been faced with a whole new reality, he had spoken to Daniel’s mother and discussed what had happened and why. He’d come to terms with a past that had turned out to be not quite what he had thought it to be.

  He had done everything she didn’t want to do with her own story, and she resented him for it.

  She resented him for not telling her about Daniel straight away.

  She resented him for understanding.

  Roz could feel their marriage shrivelling. She wanted to get it back, to make it good again, but she didn’t know how to push past the resentment that clogged everything. It had been a relief to get on the train to York, but as soon as she got here she’d missed Nick, and now she needed him, and she resented that too.

  ‘I think I’d like to settle in here,’ she told Nick. Her skin felt too tight, as if it didn’t fit her properly any more, and she wriggled her shoulders, irritated with herself, with Nick, with everything. ‘I’ll come home next weekend and we’ll talk then.’

  As soon as she’d switched off the phone, of course, she wished she’d made a different decision, but she was feeling too scratchy to ring Nick back and admit that she’d changed her mind. The flat was very quiet, and the silence seemed to hum, a high, fine whine that vibrated in Roz’s head. She found herself moving cautiously, as if the floor was precarious. The feeling of being watched tickled the back of her neck, and several times she whirled round, certain that she would find Jane standing right behind her, but there was never anybody there, just a dense pocket of air, a shift of pressure so subtle that Roz couldn’t put a name to it.

  There was no way Roz would have admitted it to anyone else, but she was nervous about going to bed that night. In the event, though, she slept dreamlessly, and for the rest of the week she stayed firmly in the present. True, the atmosphere in her office dragged at her, tugging relentlessly at the edge of her consciousness until she stilled with her fingers on the keyboard. She would sit for minutes at a time, listening intently, her eyes moving round the room. Sometimes she could have sworn she smelt smoke, and fear would dart through her, cold and pin-sharp, but the next instant she would decide that she had been mistaken. At other times, the air would be wavery and the walls insubstantial. The more Roz stared at them, the more certain she became that they were just a screen, a stage set that might ripple and slide at any moment, and her pulse would boom and thud in her ears.

  But nothing ever happened. The walls stayed still, no smoke slithered beneath the skirting boards. It was just a room. Roz let herself believe that the strange episodes when she had imagined herself living Jane’s life were over.

  That faint, lurking whiff of smoke made it impossible to relax completely, though, and Roz booked an inspection by a fire risk officer in spite of Helen’s objections that Sir Adrian hadn’t wanted any trace of the twenty-first century in Holmwood House.

  ‘We can’t have ghastly fire exit notices all over the place,’ she had complained. ‘They’ll completely spoil the atmosphere.’

  ‘Not as much as a fire would,’ Roz pointed out, exasperated. ‘We don’t have any choice about this, Helen. You can’t open the house to the public without a fire plan. I’m amazed a risk assessment hasn’t been done already.’

  ‘We did get a notice from the council,’ Helen allowed grudgingly. ‘But Sir Adrian knows the chief executive. He was going to have a word with him about it.’

  In other words, Adrian wanted to bypass the regulations. Roz’s lips tightened. Clearly, the rules were for other people, not for the Adrian Holmwoods of this world.

  Helen’s pudgy face was set in stubborn lines. ‘You’ll need to talk to Sir Adrian,’ she insisted, but Roz wasn’t prepared to wait.

  ‘I need to do my job,’ she said crisply. ‘Adrian’s employed me to set up a programme of events, and nothing’s going to happen until we’ve got a fire plan in place. If you don’t know a risk assessment officer, I’ll find one myself.’

  A quick google and Roz had identified a fire risk assessment service without any assistance from Helen. She shouldn’t have bothered going to the office at all. Helen was determinedly unfriendly, and Roz was getting tired of trying to win her over. She talked to a retired firefighter called Alan Martin, who said he would come and inspect the house the following week so they could discuss an effective fire plan.

  Reassured, Roz put the phone down. It was good to talk to someone so sensible. If there was any risk of fire, she was confident that Alan Martin would find it.

  Still, the click of the phone sounded very loud in the silent room. Lucy was out, as she often was, and Roz was alone on the top floor. She hadn’t seen Jeff at all that day. Not that she needed to know that he was in the house, but the attics were always so quiet. No wonder she got odd fancies up there. The street seemed a very long way away, almost another world.

  And here it came again, that insistent, needling conviction that she had forgotten something important, that the answer lay in this room.

  On an impulse, Roz set her fingers to her keyboard again and looked up the phone number for Charles Denton, the psychic she had been reading about when the room had filled with smoke.

  ‘Do a psychic reading in Holmwood House?’ he said when she had introduced herself. ‘Yes, I could do that. What makes you think the house might be haunted?’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Roz feebly. ‘At least, not really. It’s just . . . the house has a funny atmosphere.’

  Charles Denton paused. ‘What exactly is it that you want me to do?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She was beginning to feel foolish. What was she doing, ringing a psychic? It wasn’t even as if she believed in ghosts. She was a sceptic. Or she had been. ‘I suppose, could you tell if there’s anyone – anything – there?’

  ‘You mean apart from Jane?’

  Her pulse spiked, stopping the breath in her lungs. ‘What?’

  ‘I’m getting a very strong sense of her,’ said Charles Denton. ‘Does the name Jane mean anything to you?’

  Roz held the phone away from her ear and stared at it. Her mouth was dry. There had been no sign of Jane for the past few days. She had thought it was over.

  She had hoped it was over.

  ‘No,’ she lied instinctively, not wanting to admit it to herself.

  Charles Denton said nothing, but his silence was eloquent with disbelief. Roz’s face warmed as if he could see her, but she couldn’t go back on the lie now. She didn’t believe that Jane was real. Didn’t want to believe it.

  There was a fine tremor in her hands when she put down the phone after making arrangements for the psychic reading. She had wanted Denton to be a charlatan, so that she could
present the idea as no more than a marketing exercise, but it was as if his question was reverberating in the still air.

  Does the name Jane mean anything to you?

  Coincidence, Roz told herself. A fortune teller’s trick, no more. Jane wasn’t an uncommon name. He had guessed and struck lucky, that was all.

  Chapter Eight

  Roz had a drink with Lucy on Friday night, but Saturday found her at a loose end. She was glad not to be going into the office, but there was nothing to do in the flat, and she wished again that she had gone back to London, where there were always little jobs around the house to do, where she and Nick could have gone shopping in Borough Market and then read the papers over coffee, or arranged to meet friends that evening. Where the world was solid and she was never afraid to look in a mirror in case there was someone standing behind her.

  Where Nick would be preoccupied with Daniel.

  Pain jabbed behind Roz’s eyes, and she threw down the paper she had been trying to read in exasperation with herself. She was sick of moping around. She would go for a walk, get some fresh air and pull herself together. She had chosen to come to York, and she had chosen to stay here this weekend, so it was time to get on with it, as her aunt had used to say when Roz was a teenager and finding it hard to get motivated.

  The memory of her aunt brought another pang of mingled loss and hurt, but Roz pushed it away. She couldn’t let her aunt’s one lie taint all the other memories she had of the woman who had been the only mother she could remember.

  Shrugging on a jacket, Roz let herself out of the flat. It was a soft September day with a glowing, golden light that poured down into the streets like liquid and threw long blocks of shadow. The autumn sun hung low in the sky, making Roz squint and wish she’d thought to bring her sunglasses. She headed for the river at first, walking into the sun, so that people coming towards her were no more than black silhouettes outlined with a hazy aureole of sunlight.

  She wouldn’t think about anything, Roz decided. She would just walk and enjoy the sunshine. But familiarity nagged at her as she glanced up at the lantern tower of All Saints Church on Pavement or studied the rise of Ousegate before it dipped down towards the river. This was the way she walked to Holmwood House every day, but she had never looked at the church properly before, never wondered why it should appear both strange and familiar at the same time. And the street was the same as always, a little more crowded, perhaps, with Saturday shoppers, but no different to the day before. So there was no reason to suddenly feel this disquieting sense of déjà vu.

  Perhaps she had come here as a small child, Roz thought. She had read somewhere that the brain processed and retained every experience, filing the unimportant ones away to avoid overloading the mind, but that none were ever truly forgotten. Who was to say that she hadn’t been brought to Ousegate in a pushchair one day? Or hanging on to her mother’s hand, perhaps, with her half-sisters beside her, and Mikey scuffing along behind them, none of them knowing how soon or how terribly the family would be destroyed? She might have seen the church then, seen the rise of the road, Roz reasoned. That would explain this uncanny sense that she had been here before.

  On Ouse Bridge, she stopped to peer down at the river. Sunlight was flashing on the water, exploding in tiny, flickering bursts of light, like paparazzi bulbs flashing, so bright that it hurt Roz’s eyes to look at them straight on. A buzz of laughter and chatter rose from the crowd outside the pub on King’s Staith, enjoying the unexpected warmth. Pleasure boats were tied up against the quay, and Roz frowned a little, watching them. There was something odd about those boats, something distorted in the scene that set a memory rising, unfurling, almost there, but just out of reach. The boats. The river. Something missing. Something wrong. If only she could remember . . .

  ‘Mistress?’

  She started. ‘Oh . . . Annis.’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘What was I saying?’

  ‘You were talking about them keelboats.’ Annis regarded her closely. ‘You sickening for something, mistress?’

  ‘No, no . . . at least . . .’

  She did feel a bit strange, Jane realized. It was as if there was something tugging at her mind, something that she was trying to remember. For a moment when she had gazed down at the staith, something had stirred at the back of her mind, but before she could remember, she was distracted by the glitter on the water, by a subtle shift in the air, so that it seemed that the river changed before her eyes and the boats clustered by the staith wavered and vanished. But then Annis had touched her arm, and everything snapped back to normal.

  ‘I’m just worried about my sister,’ she improvised, and it was true enough. She had met Eliza Dawson from St Andrewgate in the market, and Eliza had shaken her head over Juliana’s antics. Jane should speak to their father, she had said, else Juliana would lose her reputation.

  Jane couldn’t imagine her father listening to her. Juliana was his pet still, and he would brook no criticism of her, but Jane fretted that without her restraining influence, Juliana’s wildness was increasing. Her temper, always erratic, swung wildly from dazzling good humour to the black depths of misery. Jane didn’t understand how hard things were for her, she complained. How dull it was to live on her own with their father. She needed excitement. She needed attention. She needed rich clothes and jewels and dancing. It was all right for Jane, with her big house and her handsome husband.

  Then Jane would think of the house in Micklegate, where her husband barely bothered to conceal his contempt for her and his mother watched her with a face like flint. If Juliana only knew how little Jane’s lot was to be envied, Jane thought wryly, but there was no point in trying to explain, and no point in complaining. She was married and there was nothing she could do but endure. But Jane was always glad to get out of the house like she had this morning and escape to the market with Annis. There was a wrongness in the air in the Micklegate house, a sly chill that coiled up from the floorboards. Jane shivered at the thought of it.

  Perhaps Annis was right and she wasn’t well. ‘Perhaps,’ she said.

  ‘Or perhaps it’s summat else,’ said Annis with a grin.

  Jane looked at her blankly. ‘Something else?’

  ‘My last mistress, God rest her soul, her wits would allus go a-wandering when there was a bairn on the way.’

  ‘Oh.’ Hot colour rose up Jane’s throat. ‘No,’ she said sadly. ‘It’s not that. I don’t think so.’

  She only wished it were that. She longed for a child of her own. Robert put Jane in mind of a boy forced to pick up a slug, and she burned with the humiliation of his fumbling attempts to mount her, the revulsion on his face whenever she tried to touch him back. The tendons would stand out in his neck and his jaw would clench.

  ‘I need a son, curse you,’ he muttered as he jabbed at her with his fingers, but his yard refused to rise. Sometimes in the dark, it grew stiff enough to push a little way inside her, but he had barely entered before it would wilt.

  If only she could give him a son. Jane clung to the thought. If she gave him the child he wanted so badly, surely he would look on her more kindly? It was hard to remember how astounded she had been at her good fortune when she had first seen him. She knew now that her husband’s temper was mean and petulant. He was a man grown tall and handsome, but a child still inside. He ran to his mother whenever he was crossed, and Margaret indulged him. She stroked his hair and cooed to him that he was a good boy, and Mamma would make it all right.

  Jane was little more than a servant, for all Annis called her mistress. She ran the household as she had learned to do for her father. She went to the market and she cast the accounts. She cooked in the kitchen and made sure that the silver was polished, the carpets beaten and the rushes swept. She slept in the bed in the great chamber and let her husband grunt with frustration over her before he took himself off to his closet, but she was not a real wife. Not the way she had imagined it.

  Margaret called Jane into the little parlour and told her t
hat she was disappointed in her. ‘Robert says you cannot satisfy him,’ she said, her voice sharp with disapproval, her fingers drumming impatiently on the arms of the turned chair. ‘How can you give him a son if he can take no pleasure in you?’

  Jane kept her eyes lowered, her hands clasped before her. She was outwardly calm but humiliation prickled her skin. ‘I try to please him,’ she said after a moment.

  ‘Try harder,’ said Margaret. Her lip curled as she studied Jane, standing before her in her apron. ‘We should have known that a butcher’s brat would be too coarse for Robert’s tastes. Robert is a gentleman, and he has a gentleman’s desires.’

  Her skirts rustled stiffly as she got to her feet and advanced on Jane, who had to force herself not to flinch as Margaret put her face close to hers. ‘Do you want to know how to please your husband, plain Jane?’

  Jane swallowed. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then I will tell you how you may.’ Her lips were at Jane’s ear, whispering secrets. Jane could feel the spittle on her cheek, and her face burned. Nothing she had heard from the maids in St Andrewgate had prepared her for what Margaret was suggesting. She was to take Robert’s yard in her mouth and suck on it until he was hard. She was to lick him and pat him, and bend over and let him take her like a dog. Jane’s throat closed in disgust as Margaret whispered on, perversion after perversion. Such were his gentleman’s desires.

  ‘I do not want to,’ she said without thinking and Margaret drew back to deliver a stinging slap that made Jane rock back on her heels in shock.

  ‘You do not want to?’ she echoed savagely. ‘It does not matter what you want, plain Jane. Do you think anyone asked me if I wanted to do that for my father? For my uncles? You know nothing of the world if you can prattle about what you want! Just do as your husband desires.’

  Bitterly, Jane nursed her cheek as Margaret swept out. She felt soiled, sick. She could not imagine doing any of the things Margaret seemed to think it was her duty to do to her husband, things Margaret had done to her father and perhaps to her own husband.