The Edge of Dark

by Pamela Hartshorne

  All in all, it was a frustrating week and Roz was glad to catch the train back to London that Friday.

  ‘You seem a bit down,’ said Nick. ‘Are you still okay about meeting Daniel? He’s coming for lunch on Sunday, but I could put him off if you wanted.’

  ‘No, I’m fine, honestly.’ She could tell him that she was missing Jane and Gilbert, but she didn’t want to get the weekend off to a bad start. ‘I’m just a bit preoccupied with work at the moment.’ And desperate to find Minchen Lane if she could. It felt like her last chance to reconnect with Jane, who seemed to have abandoned her. ‘Let’s go to Borough Market tomorrow and I’ll get something to cook for lunch on Sunday,’ said Roz, forcing enthusiasm into her voice. ‘Then maybe we could have a walk around the City or something,’ she added artlessly.

  ‘The City?’ Nick echoed in surprise. ‘I don’t think there’s much to see there on a weekend.’

  ‘There’s St Paul’s. And the Tower.’

  He shrugged. ‘All right. If that’s what you want.’

  In spite of growing up on the outskirts of London, Roz had rarely been to the City. She thought of it as a mass of high-rise buildings, a busy financial centre, and she was surprised at how down-at-heel the area outside Aldgate station seemed at first. There were boarded-up windows and lots of ‘To Let’ signs, and it was eerily empty.

  ‘It’s Saturday,’ Nick pointed out. ‘All the offices are closed. I told you there wouldn’t be anything to see.’

  Roz ignored him. She was looking around her, trying to get her bearings, but there was nothing familiar about the broad streets with their looming grey buildings or the rumble of the Underground beneath her feet, and she battled her disappointment. She had been so sure that she would find Jane again here.

  Nick was watching her with an expression that slipped from puzzlement to exasperation. ‘What’s all this about, Roz? You’ve been acting funny all morning.’

  Roz shifted the strap of her bag on her shoulder and avoided her husband’s eyes. She had thought she had been doing so well at pretending everything was normal too. A trip to Borough Market was one of their weekend traditions. Nick had sat patiently in a cafe with a coffee and read the paper while she poked around the stalls, sampling cheeses and salamis. It was so much more satisfying than shopping in a supermarket, and today it had been impossible not to think of Jane and how carefully she had shopped, digging her hand down into the sack of grain to check that none was rotten below the surface and narrowing her eyes as she inspected every vegetable. For one dizzying moment Roz had even felt herself being drawn back, as if the ground beneath her feet was dissolving like sand on an ebbing wave, and her heart had leapt in anticipation of seeing Gilbert again, but then a man with a backpack had bumped into her. By the time he had finished apologizing and Roz had finished assuring him that it didn’t matter, she had been wrenched firmly back to the present.

  She could have wept with frustration.

  The need to go back was so strong that she had dragged Nick away from his coffee and insisted on taking the tube to Aldgate. She had looked up Minchen Lane on Google and found no mention of it in the City, but Jack’s family’s inn had been close to Aldgate itself, and Roz thought she could find her way from there. She remembered arriving at the inn, weary to the bone after the journey from York. They had taken a boat the whole way, changing from the keelboat when they got to Hull to a sturdier cog that took them right to the heart of London. When Jane got off the ship, the ground had seemed to rock like the deck, and she and Annis had clutched at each other to steady themselves.

  London was so huge and so crowded it had taken Jane’s breath away at first. She was terrified of falling behind as Jack led them through the streets to his family’s inn, and she kept so close that every time Jack stopped, she would walk on his heels.

  Roz remembered the inn too. She could see the busy cobbled courtyard, and smell the horses and the straw; she could picture the low-ceilinged room with its guttering tallow candles and the way the benches and tables were partitioned off for privacy. She remembered the stickiness of the floor and the taste of the ale, the times she had laboured up and down the stairs to the chambers, sweeping and cleaning, evading the groping hands.

  Roz had been staring around her, willing herself back to the city Jane had known, but it was like trying to fall asleep. Just when you thought you might be about to drop off, you would jerk back from tumbling over the brink into unconsciousness.

  But now Nick’s eyes were fixed on her face, and her shoulders slumped in defeat. ‘Jane lived around here. I just wanted to see what the area looked like now.’

  Nick sighed. ‘Oh God, this isn’t still about Jane, is it?’ He dragged a hand over his face in despair. ‘I thought Rita explained the Jane thing was just in your subconscious? You said you accepted that.’

  ‘I did . . . I do,’ said Roz, switching her shopping bag to the other shoulder. ‘But I just need to check.’

  Standing in the middle of the pavement, she told Nick how Jane had found a home at the sign of the golden lily in Minchen Lane. ‘Gilbert Harrison looks fierce but he isn’t really,’ she said, and her lips curved reminiscently. ‘He is all bluster but beneath he is a good man. He makes me smile,’ she said, oblivious to Nick’s darkening expression. ‘When he’s there, I feel so . . . I feel in a way I never did before.’ She laid a hand flat on her ribcage as if trying to stop her heart bursting out of her chest. ‘It’s like I’m tingling all the time – ’ She broke off as she registered Nick’s expression at last. ‘What?’

  ‘Jane is tingling, not you.’

  ‘What? Oh . . . yes, Jane.’ But the lovely flutter in her blood was still there, the trip of her heart, the throb between her legs.

  ‘Unless you’re saying you’re in love with a man who may or may not have died over four hundred years ago?’ Nick’s voice was hard, flat, his eyes cold. ‘I didn’t realize you were into necrophilia, Roz.’

  Dull colour crept along Roz’s cheekbones. ‘No, of course not,’ she said, struggling to explain. ‘You’re right: it’s Jane, not me. I suppose it’s like reading a novel when you’re really involved with the characters and you can’t wait to read on. I can’t leave Jane in the middle of her story. I can’t settle until I know what happened next.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Why couldn’t Nick understand? ‘Jane’s had such a terrible time,’ Roz said. ‘I want her to have been happy.’

  ‘It hasn’t occurred to you that if Jane ended up living happily there would be no need for her to be haunting you?’ said Nick harshly.

  ‘If Jane’s just a creation of my subconscious, she’s not haunting me, is she?’ Roz watched him push a hand through his hair in frustration. ‘Look, I know I’m a bit obsessed at the moment, and the truth is that I don’t really know what’s going on. But you’re the one who keeps saying that Jane’s story is somehow connected with my own – the one I don’t remember. I can’t explain it, Nick, but I have to know what happens to her next. I can’t concentrate on my own issues or anything else until I do.’

  ‘Anything else including our marriage?’

  It was Roz’s turn to sigh. ‘I know how it sounds, Nick, but it’s like this relentless tugging in my head. Please, let me see if I can find Minchen Lane. If I can just see what happens next, I’ll go back to Rita or see a psychiatrist or a priest or whoever you like.’

  ‘All right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘But I’m staying with you. Is this Minchen Lane in the A to Z?’

  ‘No. I’ve googled it, but there’s no street with that name now.’

  They were standing at a crossroads where a modern structure made of a skeleton of timbers marked the spot of the original Aldgate. ‘Do you recognize anything of this?’ asked Nick, reluctantly fascinated.

  Roz squinted up at the sky through the timbers. ‘Nothing. I remember Aldgate, of course, but it was nothing like this. It was a big stone gateway, a bit tumbledown, but it did the job of funnelling people in and ou
t of the city, I suppose.’ She remembered how cold and dank it had smelt under the archway and how glad she had always been to reach the sunlight on the other side.

  She turned slowly. ‘If Aldgate was here, then down there, where the road divides, that must be Fenchurch Street. There was a tollbooth there, and the inn was just down there on the right.’ She paused, hoping that Jane might come then, but there was just a low hum of anticipation in her head.

  ‘Where do you think this Minchen Lane was?’

  ‘Off Fenchurch Street, down there.’ Roz set off, eager to find it. Perhaps Jane was waiting for her to find the right place? But her disappointment grew as they walked down Fenchurch Street. Gone were the jettied houses, the workshops with their stalls jutting into the street. Gone were the barrels and the piles of timber and the occasional dung heap. Gone were the good-wives gossiping in the doorways and the street sellers and the boisterous apprentices. The clamour and cacophony of the Elizabethan street had vanished, and in its place were austere office buildings, looming grey and intimidating on either side of the road and cutting out the sunlight. There were hardly any shops. It was all very dull and Roz couldn’t find a single thing to remind her of the past and pull her back to where she wanted to go.

  ‘This is hopeless,’ she said after a while, near tears. ‘I don’t recognize any of this. There’s no Minchen Lane here.’

  ‘The City was bombed,’ Nick reminded her gently. ‘And before that there was the Great Fire of London . . . You can’t expect it to be the same.’

  ‘I know,’ sighed Roz. ‘I just thought there would be something – ’ She stopped outside a jeweller and looked up at a street sign.

  Mincing Lane.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  Nick followed her gaze. ‘Minchen, Mincing . . .’ he said. ‘Say Minchen quickly enough and you can see how it might have changed.’

  Roz let out a long breath. ‘This is it,’ she said, feeling a warmth brush past her, a subtle shift in the air, a settling as if to say, yes, yes, this is home.

  Mincing Lane. There was a jeweller on one side, a local supermarket on the other, both deserted.

  Roz’s heart was beating hard as she looked down the lane. It was just a road, nothing unusual or interesting about it at all, but just for a moment it shimmered like a mirage, and overlaid on it she could see Minchen Lane, bustling with life. The houses jostling together, big and small, broad and narrow, their jettied upper floors leaning over the street, glass windows winking in the sunlight. The gutter in the middle of the street where a cat crouched over a scrap of something it had found, uncaring of the bustle around it until it looked up with great yellow eyes as if sensing Roz’s gaze. Its fur puffed up and it spat and fled, leaving its morsel for a pigeon.

  It was all so familiar. John Morrison, purse-mouthed, shortsighted, peering over his stall. A cart, pulled up outside the Clothworkers’ Hall, two apprentices leaning against it, a glimpse of dice in their hands before a shout from their masters made them straighten hurriedly. Janet Moore and Agnes Phillips arguing again. The high brick tower built by an alderman, punished for his pride, they said, with blindness.

  And on the other side of the road, a little further down, beckoning her, was the sign of the golden lily, where a little dog scampered out of sight with a joyful bark and she just caught the whisk of a skirt turning into the passage.

  Roz took an eager step forward, and the lane was gone. Tears of disappointment crowded her throat and she swallowed hard.

  ‘It’s not going to work,’ she said miserably. ‘Perhaps it’s because you’re here?’

  ‘Well, I’m not leaving you,’ said Nick. ‘I was watching you just now, and for a moment you just weren’t here. You could wander out into a road if you were on your own. I know there isn’t much traffic around, but it’s too dangerous. Come on, let’s go and find somewhere to have lunch. It might still happen.’

  They walked all the way down Mincing Lane, but the road stayed stubbornly tarmacked, the buildings bland and flat. They kept turning at random, right, left, right, until they came across a cafe with a row of little tables lined against the wall opposite the sandwich bar. Two young women sat at the table in the window, a pushchair beside them. Their table was littered with coffee cups and plates and baby paraphernalia. Roz chose the table behind them and sat looking listlessly out of the window while Nick went up to order.

  She had to snap out of it, she knew, but the absence of her life in Mincing Lane was a leaden weight crushing her heart. She was desolate. She had been so certain that it was Poppet she heard, that a moment more and she could have followed him as he scampered down the passage and into the yard. She could have stepped into the hall and seen the wainscot crisscrossed with sunlight through the windows, the dust glinting golden in the beams of light. She could have walked across to Gilbert’s closet and scratched on the door. She just wanted to hear his voice again. Was that too much to ask?

  The baby in the pushchair in front of her woke with a wail, and its mother bent down to pick it up. She bounced it on her knee, trying to cajole it into a better humour and give herself a little more time to talk.

  ‘Here.’ Nick set down a tray with two coffees on it. ‘They’re bringing the sandwiches over.’ He stopped. ‘Roz?’

  But Roz didn’t answer. Her eyes were fixed on the baby on its mother’s lap.

  ‘Good morrow, my sweeting!’ Jane took Isabel from Annis and held her up, making faces until the baby giggled and squealed. ‘Who’s a bonny baby?’

  Annis smiled. ‘She loves her godmother.’

  ‘And her godmother loves her.’ Jane sat down, cuddling Isabel on her lap, distracting her with the rattle of a spoon on a pewter plate. She loved the warm weight of the baby, the sweet milky smell of her. Isabel was a happy baby, happy to be handed from person to person, always giggling and flirting with her lashes. She squealed with laughter when Jane played peekaboo behind a cushion or blew raspberries on her fat tummy. Jane had only tried that once with Geoffrey when he was a baby. The resulting tantrum had left him puce-faced and Jane convinced that he loathed being played with in such a way.

  Annis had settled into comfortable motherhood. She was plump and content, but she still kept a proprietorial eye on Jane. Now she leant forward confidentially. ‘There is news from York.’

  After four years, Jane had stopped looking for the Holmwoods around every corner, but the thought of York still made her heart lurch. ‘News? How?’ she asked with difficulty as Isabel was standing on her lap now and pushing her little hand into Jane’s mouth.

  ‘Isabel!’ Annis tsked. ‘Here, give her to me,’ she said, but Jane shook her head. ‘Leave her. I like it that she’s so lively.’

  ‘Well then, on your own head be it!’ said Annis, settling back onto the stool.

  ‘So, what is this news?’ Jane reminded her.

  ‘You know Jack’s old master came back to London last year? A friend of his from York is in the city to buy a licence from the court, and told him all the news from up there. Andrew Trewe is Lord Mayor this year, it seems, and there was a big quarrel between Mr Fawcett and Mr Gibson as to which of them should be set down as sheriff first. What else?’ Annis rubbed her chin, pretending to think although it was obvious that she was building up to something important. ‘Oh yes, Mistress Weatherby has married her husband’s journeyman, who must be at least thirty years her junior. Can you imagine? And Barbara Simpson has been whipped around the city at the cart’s arse again.’

  ‘And?’ Jane prompted dutifully, recognizing her cue.

  ‘And it seems that Sir Robert Holmwood is married again,’ said Annis with assumed casualness.

  ‘Married!’ Jane stared at her. ‘But he cannot!’

  ‘He does not know that, does he?’ Annis pointed out. ‘You have hidden well. He has taken you for dead, and the boy, and is trying again for the inheritance.’

  Jane drew a breath. Relief was dazzling at the edge of her mind, beckoning so brightly that she hardly
dared look at it straight. ‘Who has he married?’

  ‘Anne Sanderson. That family would not care that Robert’s wife ran off and might not be dead at all. They have daughters to spare, and though there won’t be much of a dowry, perhaps the Holmwoods only care about having a son now.’

  Jane remembered Anne, a pale, thin girl with milky eyes that blinked nervously.

  ‘Poor lass,’ she said with feeling. How would Anne cope with Robert’s impotence and Margaret’s jealousy?

  ‘You know what this means, don’t you?’ said Annis.

  ‘That they have stopped looking for Geoffrey and me.’ Jane let out a long breath. ‘I am sorry for Anne, but so happy to know that we can relax now.’ She laughed a little unsteadily. ‘Who would have believed that we could get away with it, Annis? Thanks to you and Jack, I am free.’

  And free to marry again,’ Annis pointed out.

  ‘I am still married in the eyes of God,’ said Jane.

  Annis waved that aside. ‘You know that, but the rest of the world does not. And more importantly, Gilbert Harrison does not.’

  Colour stole along Jane’s cheekbones. ‘Annis!’

  ‘Come, Jane, I have seen how he looks at you. And he is a fine-looking man, is he not?’

  ‘It would not be right.’ Jane’s eyes slid away.

  Annis leant over and put a hand on her knee. ‘There was a time when I called you mistress, and now I am happy to call you my friend. Why should you not call Mr Harrison husband?’

  ‘There is no question of it,’ said Jane, flustered.

  ‘You do not have to marry him,’ said Annis. ‘I’ll warrant he could show you some pleasure even so. Tell me you have not considered it.’

  Jane’s colour deepened. She was all too aware of Gilbert, and she despised herself for a lewd woman, but there were times when she could not wrench her eyes away from his hands or his jaw, and when he smiled at her, her belly would knot with an urgency that took her breath away. She found herself waiting for the sound of his step, and when he came into the room, all at once her senses would leap. It didn’t matter if she looked at him or not, she would be excruciatingly aware of her skin, of the brush and slide of the linen smock against her nakedness, the press of her bodice against her breasts, and her blood would roll and thump and there would be a warmth and a tingling pulse in her privy place that left her edgy and disturbed.