The Edge of Dark

by Pamela Hartshorne

  Gilbert was an honourable man. He did not touch her, except by accident, when their fingers brushed on a goblet, or when he bent to kiss one of his daughters on her lap, and whenever he did Jane’s flesh would flinch as if from a burn. Sometimes their eyes would meet and then it was as if all the air was sucked out of the room, so there was not enough to breathe.

  Oh yes, she had considered it.

  And why not? Jane asked herself after Annis had gone. She had told Gilbert that she had made her husband a vow to stay faithful to his memory, but why should she not change her mind?

  The idea fretted away at her, making it hard to concentrate on anything else, and she was clumsy and distracted all that day and the next. The maids stared at her when she forgot to add spices to the stew, and the girls giggled when she poured wine into a bowl instead of a goblet and dropped a trencher, spilling bread all over the floor.

  Her fingers felt just as thick and unwieldy the next day, and she fumbled as she measured out fine liquorice powder and gum arabic. ‘What is the matter with you today?’ said Bess, who had come to beg one of Jane’s remedies for her daughter’s dry cough. Normally crisp, Jane’s conversation had been disjointed, and she kept stopping to refer to her book of remedies even though she had made the remedy many times before.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Bess lowered her voice. ‘Is it that time of the month? I know I’m all over the place when I get the curse.’

  ‘No, it’s nothing like that. I don’t like the wind,’ she improvised, and indeed, it had been blustering around the house all morning, hurling itself at the windows to rattle the shutters and bang furiously against the glass before falling away in frustration. The constant noise had frayed Jane’s already tattered nerves. ‘I’ve been on edge all day.’

  ‘It is often windy,’ Bess pointed out. ‘I’ve never known you react like this before.’ She settled herself more comfortably on her stool. ‘You’ve got something on your mind, Jane. I can tell.’

  Jane pressed her lips together. She could hardly tell Bess that she was having lascivious thoughts about her brother. Carefully she stirred the liquorice and gum arabic into the water strained of wheat and barley she had boiled earlier and set it on the fire once more while she tried to think of a suitable excuse.

  ‘It’s Geoffrey,’ she said at last. She was never quite easy about him so it wasn’t a complete lie. ‘He’s so quiet. He doesn’t play with the other children. I’m worried that he’s unhappy.’

  ‘He’s not like other boys,’ said Bess bluntly. ‘You’ve spoilt him, Jane. I’ve told you that before. You know what they say: spare the rod and spoil the child.’ Bess was always ready with a cliché, and it normally amused Jane, but between the wind and this unwelcome obsession with Gilbert, her temper was short.

  ‘I can’t beat him when he hasn’t done anything wrong,’ she snapped. ‘He’s a good boy.’

  ‘He’s sneaky,’ said Bess. ‘That’s why the other children don’t like him. Always creeping around.’

  ‘He doesn’t creep!’

  ‘You’re his mother so you don’t see it. I’m only telling you for your own good. You’re blind to the fact that he’s not like other children. Try to smother him less is my advice.’

  ‘He’s only six,’ Jane objected.

  ‘Time for him to start making himself useful. You mollycoddle him.’

  Was it true? Jane felt chilled when she thought about Margaret and her obsessive pampering of Robert. She didn’t want to be that kind of mother, but nobody else liked Geoffrey and if she did not look after him, who would? Outside, the petulant wind threw handfuls of rain like pebbles against the windows.

  ‘The liquor is not ready yet. It must boil awhile and then I will strain it and seal it in a clean vessel,’ she told Bess. ‘I will send it round when it is done. Give Joan some to drink morning and evening until her cough is better.’

  When Bess had gone, huddling into her cloak, Jane came back from saying goodbye at the door to find Geoffrey standing silently in the shadows and she jumped. ‘Geoffrey, I didn’t see you there!’ Always creeping around. Bess’s words echoed in her head. ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, those cold black eyes fixed on her in a way that made her nerves twitch.

  ‘Why do you not go and play with Cecily?’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ he said flatly. He turned to watch the fire. ‘She’s a girl.’

  ‘Girls can play too.’

  ‘She doesn’t like my games.’

  It was true. The few occasions when Geoffrey had played with Gilbert’s daughters had always ended in tears. Catherine had been shut in a chest and screamed and screamed until Jane came running to let her out. Cecily had been tied up and left alone in an attic room all afternoon, a scarf tied round her mouth so that she could not call for help. Mary’s best lace had been snipped to pieces with shears. Each time Geoffrey had been soundly beaten, but the beatings had little effect other than to distress Jane and leave Geoffrey oddly triumphant.

  ‘Why was she here?’ Geoffrey asked abruptly as Jane went to stir the liquorice liquor.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mistress Simpson.’ The words were innocuous but the malevolence in his tone was not, and Jane felt her colour rise. Was it possible Geoffrey had heard what Bess had said? Always creeping around. Ridiculously, she felt nervous.

  ‘She just came to talk. You know what she is like.’

  ‘She said you should beat me.’

  So he had heard. ‘You shouldn’t listen to other people’s conversations, Geoffrey,’ Jane remonstrated. Reaching for a spoon, she tasted the cough remedy cautiously. ‘Eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves.’ See, she could pull out a cliché just as readily as Bess.

  Geoffrey only hunched his shoulders. ‘She’ll be sorry,’ he said spitefully.

  ‘Geoffrey!’ Jane put down the spoon and turned to frown sharply at him. ‘You must not speak so of Mistress Simpson! You are in need of occupation, I see. You may take this remedy round to her later when it is cooled. Perhaps that will give your thoughts a better direction.’

  ‘Fire!’ Gilbert’s servant, Tom, ran into the hall just as they were sitting down to supper. He stumbled to a halt, dropping his hands to his knees and heaving air into his lungs. ‘Fire at your sister’s house in Tower Street!’

  Gilbert’s chair scraped over the stone floor as he threw down his napkin and stood up. ‘Is Bess safe?’ he asked urgently. ‘Her husband and children?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Tom shook his head, still gasping for breath. ‘I came without staying to hear more. I thought you would want to know.’

  Gilbert nodded. ‘I’d better go.’

  Outside the wind was still snatching and grabbing, and tussling with the tiles on the rooftops. Three had already smashed into the yard, and Jane heard another crash to the ground as she hurried to get Gilbert his cloak. ‘Take care,’ she said anxiously. They all dreaded fire, and the wind could throw it from one house to the next in the blink of an eye.

  Gilbert touched her cheek. ‘It has been wet all day. Things may not be too bad but I must see how my sister does.’

  ‘Can I go with you?’ Geoffrey had scrambled from his stool, his usually sullen face alight and eager, the black eyes gleeful. A feeling like a cold breath on her neck made Jane shiver suddenly. She had sent him round to Bess’s house with the cough remedy only an hour or so ago.

  Just enough time for a fire to take hold.

  She’ll be sorry.

  But what was she thinking? That a six-year-old, a child, had deliberately set fire to a house? She must have windmills in her head. Jane shook the thought aside.

  ‘No, Geoffrey.’ She put her hands on his thin shoulders and he tensed as always at her touch. ‘It may be dangerous. You are too young to go.’

  ‘I am not! I want to see the fire!’

  ‘Your mother said no,’ snapped Gilbert, swinging on his cloak, and although Geoffrey fell silent, Jane could feel hi
s small body stiffen with hostility beneath her hands.

  ‘Bring your sister and her family back here if need be,’ she said to Gilbert. ‘We will find somewhere for them all to sleep.’

  But when Gilbert did come back, he was alone. Jane had sent the children and the servants to bed, but she couldn’t settle until Gilbert returned. She sat up by the fire, listening to the wind tap-tap-tapping at the windows to find a way in, and throwing a sharp rattle of rain against the glass every now and then in frustration. The trees tossed and swayed in a great rush and rustle of leaves. They would be bare the next day, Jane thought, stoking the fire and wishing Gilbert would come back.

  She hoped Bess and her family were safe.

  She hoped she was wrong about Geoffrey, but she couldn’t rid herself of the memory of his gleeful expression when Tom panted out news of the fire.

  She’ll be sorry.

  ‘What are you still doing up?’

  Jane spun round from the fire. She had been so absorbed in her thoughts that she hadn’t heard Gilbert’s steps on the stairs, and now the breath leaked out of her lungs at the sight of him in the doorway. He was windblown, his face grimy with soot, his mouth stern. He looked wonderful.

  A smile of sheer relief blossomed in her face. ‘You’re back!’ She even took a step towards him before recollecting herself and folding her hands firmly in her apron to stop herself reaching for him. ‘What news of your sister?’

  ‘They are all safe, God be praised.’ Gilbert lowered himself stiffly into the chair where Jane had been sitting. ‘It could have been worse. It seems the fire started in the stable and spread to the woodstore, and then the kitchen, but that was when the alarm was raised and between us we managed to stop it going any further. But my sister will not be cooking for a while, that is for sure.’

  She had sent Geoffrey round with the remedy. He would have gone to the kitchen. He would have seen the stable. He could have . . . But no, she couldn’t think like that, Jane told herself desperately.

  ‘The rain helped,’ Gilbert was saying. ‘Bess and her husband decided in the end to stay where they were, but I said you would send round food in the morning.’

  ‘Of course.’ Jane snapped out of her reverie. ‘You must be hungry. I’ll get you something to eat now.’

  ‘I don’t want anything.’ He shifted uncomfortably in the chair and grimaced.

  ‘But you—’

  ‘I said I didn’t want anything,’ he snarled and Jane’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. She looked at him more closely, and saw that he was holding his arm carefully.

  ‘You’re hurt!’

  ‘It’s nothing. Don’t fuss.’

  Jane ignored him. ‘Let me see.’

  ‘It was just an ember,’ Gilbert grumbled, but eventually he let her see the scorch mark on his sleeve where something had burned right through. Jane clicked her tongue.

  ‘That was no ember, was it?’

  ‘Scarce more than that,’ he grunted, but now that she was close, she could see that beneath the grime there was a drawn look around his mouth.

  ‘Take off your jerkin,’ Jane ordered.

  ‘Jane, there is no need—’

  ‘Take it off.’

  Muttering, he started to unbutton the short-sleeved jerkin where it fastened at his waist, but it was awkward with his left hand, and after a moment, Jane pushed his hand away and did it herself, easing the jerkin over his shoulders as gently as she could. Even so, Gilbert couldn’t prevent a wince.

  ‘God’s blood, woman, be careful!’

  ‘I thought you said it was nothing?’ Jane laid the jerkin aside. Its velvet was stained and sooty. She would have to brush it tomorrow and see what she could do about restoring the embroidered trim. ‘Come, now the doublet.’

  ‘You are very crisp tonight,’ grumbled Gilbert, but he let her start unfastening the covered buttons.

  She didn’t feel very crisp. Her mouth was dry and her fingers clumsy as she bent over him and fumbled with the buttons. They were very close. She could smell the smoke and the sweat of the evening. She tried to focus on the buttons but the corner of his mouth kept catching at the edge of her vision, the line of his jaw above his ruff, and her breath kept tangling in her throat.

  At last it was done, and Gilbert gritted his teeth, cursing under his breath, as Jane pulled the ruined sleeve off. Now there was only his shirt to go.

  It was excruciatingly intimate to slide the linen off his shoulders. He was strong and solidly muscled, and when her fingers brushed against the smooth flesh of his upper arm his skin was warm and Jane jerked her hand away as if she was the one who had been burnt.

  The sight of the ugly burn drove such thoughts from her mind, though. It was red and raw, the flesh already puffing up angrily.

  ‘Nothing, is it?’

  ‘Did you know you sound very northern when you’re cross, Jane?’

  Gently, she touched her fingers around the burn. ‘I will get you a salve. Do you stay right where you are. I will not be long.’ She poked up the fire, took a candle and hurried down to the little room off the kitchen she used as her larder. She had a sealed jar of ointment she had made that summer with cream and boiled-up lichen from a stone wall, and stirred with yarrow and the green of elder bark and fine grass.

  In the kitchen, she cut a slice of eel pie and poured some ale into a tankard, not sorry to have some time to steady her thumping heart and remember how to breathe slowly. When she thought she had herself under control she added a clean strip of linen for a bandage, and the salve, and took it all up to the great chamber on a tray. Gilbert was sprawled in the chair, watching the fire, his body lean and strong in the firelight, and Jane made herself take a breath before she walked briskly across the room and set the tray down on the table by his side.

  ‘I have brought you something to eat,’ she said. ‘You will sleep better.’

  Gilbert sniffed at the tankard dubiously. ‘Is the ale doctored?’

  ‘Upon my word, no. I hope that the ointment will suffice to help the pain.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was painful,’ he said quickly.

  Jane smiled a little as she pulled up a stool and opened the jar of ointment. ‘I have been burned myself,’ she said, showing him the scars on her hands. ‘Do not pretend to me that it does not hurt, for I will not believe you.’

  ‘These are old scars,’ said Gilbert, touching them with his good hand. ‘How did you come by them?’

  Jane smoothed ointment very gently over the burn on his arm and thought about the moment Ellen had thrown her dead baby on the fire. ‘I acted without thinking,’ she said.

  ‘That doesn’t sound like you, Jane.’ A smile hovered around Gilbert’s mouth but Jane wouldn’t let herself look at it.

  ‘I have learned to be more sensible,’ she agreed, tying the bandage firmly in place over the wound.

  ‘My sensible Jane.’ Gilbert’s voice had deepened so that it seemed to be reverberating over her skin. Jane knew that she should get up from the stool, but she couldn’t move. She was pinioned into place, lashed by a beating desire that thudded through her veins. She could hear the crack of a log falling into the fire, the moan of the wind, but the sounds seemed to come from another world, one outside the tiny space around the chair and the stool where she and Gilbert sat, the silence between them shouting with the thumping of her heart.

  ‘Jane,’ he said softly.

  ‘Yes?’ To her shame her voice came out as a croak, and she blushed in the firelight. She couldn’t take her eyes off the bandage.

  ‘Look at me.’

  ‘I cannot,’ she whispered.

  ‘Cannot or will not?’

  ‘Dare not.’

  ‘I never took you for a coward, Jane.’

  ‘I . . . I should go,’ she said, but she didn’t move.

  ‘Don’t.’ Gilbert lifted his good hand and ran a finger down Jane’s cheek. ‘I need you.’

  ‘I have done all I can for your burn,’ she managed.


  ‘It is not my arm that pains me,’ said Gilbert, and the smile in his voice caught at her breath. ‘You know that I want you, Jane.’

  Very slowly, she raised her eyes to his and what she saw there set such a wild sensation pumping inside her that she could barely speak.

  ‘I am your servant,’ she said hoarsely.

  ‘And because of that, I have resisted my desire for you. I told myself it was wrong and would not show you the respect you deserve, but I cannot resist any longer. What is between us burns too strong. I am consumed by my need for you, Jane. Can you tell me that you do not want me too?’

  ‘No, I can’t tell you that,’ Jane said, but when he would have reached for her, she scrambled to her feet, desperate to put a safe distance between them. She concentrated fiercely on winding up the spare bandage, and putting the stopper back on the salve.

  ‘That is what I love about you, Jane. You are so honest,’ Gilbert said from behind her. ‘So clear-eyed and so true.’

  ‘Don’t,’ she muttered, keeping her back firmly turned on him. If he knew that she had stolen Geoffrey and run away from her lawful husband, that she had lied to him from the first, he would never forgive her.

  ‘I must,’ said Gilbert. ‘We cannot go on like this, my bird. Let us be married and be done with it.’

  ‘Married?’ She almost dropped the jar of ointment as she spun round to stare at him.

  ‘I know, I said I would not contemplate it again, but that was before I knew you. Before I realized how much I had come to rely on you. Before I had started to look for you and want to talk to you when I came in, before my days seemed incomplete if I did not see you press your lips together and try not to smile.’

  Jane was shaking her head, but Gilbert pressed on. ‘I married to please my kin before, and look how well that turned out,’ said Gilbert. ‘I am a widower and of independent means. I may marry to please myself this time, as may you.’