The Edge of Dark

by Pamela Hartshorne

  Reaching down, she plucked the baby’s body from the straw and held him by his heels. He dangled from her hand, still bloody from her womb, still dripping. A piece of rotten straw from the trough clung to his crumpled face. Jane felt vomit rise in her throat once more, and she retched.

  ‘Listen to me!’ Ellen took her arm in a vicious grip with her free hand and shook it until Jane lifted her head wretchedly. ‘No one else must know, do you understand? You must promise that you won’t tell anyone. You must swear on your life.’

  ‘But the babe . . .’ Jane was gulping back sobs. ‘You have denied him Christ!’

  ‘Do you think I wanted to kill him?’ Ellen spat. ‘Do you think I wanted your father heaving on top of me? He was rutting with me while your mother lay dying, and now I must bear the bairn, and I must dispose of it, or he will dispose of me. There must be no evidence, Jane, or they will hang me. Is that what you want?’

  ‘No,’ said Jane, but she kept seeing Ellen’s expression, the grim set of her mouth as she held her baby under the water.

  ‘If they find the bairn, they will hang me,’ said Ellen brutally. ‘You must help me. If you cannot stomach the pigs, go into the kitchen and stoke up the fire, as hot as you can, and when it is ready, come and call me.’

  Jane dragged her forearm across her mouth. ‘All right.’

  ‘Do you promise not to tell anyone?’ Ellen caught her by the arm again as Jane turned to leave. ‘Swear to me, Jane, that you will not tell a soul. And if you break your oath, know that you will burn in hell for it.’

  ‘I will not tell,’ Jane managed shakily.

  ‘Go then, and be quick.’

  A lifetime had passed since she had stepped out to gather thyme. As if in a dream, Jane walked unsteadily back through the amiably clucking hens and let herself into the kitchen. The fire glowed in the grate, and the smell of pottage simmering in the cauldron turned her stomach. Lifting it from its hook, she set the cauldron aside and added more logs to the fire. Dully she watched as the fire sucked greedily at the wood. The flames flickered, caught, leapt higher, and the logs crackled and spat as they settled, and she threw on more and more and more until the blaze roared and her face burned from the heat.

  Then she went to call Ellen, who was squatting in the straw, her child limp and lifeless by her side like so much offal. ‘The fire is ready,’ Jane said.

  Stiffly, Ellen got to her feet. ‘There’s no one around?’

  Jane shook her head. Her father was still out, and anyway, he wouldn’t come to the kitchen. Nor would Juliana, who had no interest in cooking and preferred to sulk in the parlour.

  ‘Come, then.’ Ellen made to pick up the baby, but Jane stopped her. She couldn’t bear to see him dangling from Ellen’s hand like a piece of meat hung from a hook in her father’s shop window.

  ‘I’ll take him,’ she said.

  He was so small he weighed almost nothing. Swallowing hard, Jane wrapped him in the clean cloth she had brought from the kitchen and carried him to the house. She had worn away a path by now, and her clogs squelched through the mud. Ellen followed, her face set like stone.

  She nodded when she saw the fire, how fiercely it blazed. ‘Good,’ she said. She glanced at Jane. ‘Burn him,’ she said.

  ‘I . . . can’t.’ Instinctively, Jane took a step back. This was wrong. The child should have a Christian burial. There must be some way to arrange things. She would pretend that she had found the babe. Something. He mustn’t burn.

  ‘Then I will. Don’t look at me like that!’ Ellen cried savagely as she snatched the body from Jane’s arms and, turning, threw the baby onto the fire.

  ‘No!’ she cried out, starting forward to rescue him from the flames, but there was something between her and the fire, something solid blocking her way: a wall, a window. Then a clatter of plastic slats rattling into place, and shock jolted her back to herself.

  Trembling, Roz sank to the floor and covered her face with her hands. The sour taste of vomit was raw at the back of her throat. ‘No,’ she said again, shaking her head in her hands.

  She must have fallen asleep. Standing at the window? a small, uncomfortable voice in her head queried, but Roz pushed it aside. It had just been a dream; what else could it have been? But so stark and vivid a dream that she was still disorientated and nauseous. A blinding headache was pounding behind her eyes and she tipped her head back against the blank cream wall and took a deep, shuddering breath.

  A nightmare, that was all. Her senses were still jangling with the smell of damp straw and blood, with the spit and greedy suck of the flames, the way their heat had battered her face. She could still hear the squelch of her clogs in the mud, the cluck of the hens.

  The sound of the baby dropped lifeless in the straw.

  Roz pressed her knuckles against her mouth as her stomach heaved at the memory of the child so casually killed before it had a name or a chance to know the comfort of its mother’s breast. What dark corner of her mind had produced an image that horrific? It disturbed Roz to think that she was capable of even imagining such a thing.

  But it hadn’t felt imagined. It had felt real. That was even more disturbing. It was as if she had really been there in that stable, had held the baby and felt it warm and slippery from Ellen’s womb. Roz lowered her hand from her mouth and held both palms out in front of her. They were shaky but clean. Carefully, she turned her hands over. Not a trace of blood beneath her fingernails, or engrained in the lines over her knuckles.

  Of course there wasn’t, because it had been a dream. Irritated with herself, Roz struggled to her feet and staggered into the bathroom. Splashing cold water on her face, she groped for a towel and pressed it against her nose and mouth for long minutes while she kept her eyes squeezed shut and concentrated on breathing slowly, in and out, in and out, until her heart rate slowed. When she lowered the towel at last, she opened her eyes to stare at her reflection in the mirrored cabinet above the basin. She was very pale, and her eyes were huge and dilated, but she was unmistakably Roz Acclam. She was not a twelve-year-old girl, and she hadn’t just witnessed the birth and brutal murder of a baby.

  Then her eyes dropped to her throat and her heart stuttered, for around her neck, like a necklace, lay a circle of blistered red marks.

  Roz reeled back from the basin with a stifled scream of shock, her hands going instinctively to her neck as if she were about to strangle herself. She couldn’t catch her breath, and darkness roared at the edges of her mind. She thought she was going to pass out but after a moment the feeling disappeared, leaving her light-headed and nauseous, and she dropped her hands to clutch the edge of the basin and lean over it, breathing very carefully.

  There was a logical explanation for this. There had to be.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Nick the moment he heard her voice.

  Roz held the phone away from her ear and frowned at it. It had taken a considerable effort, but she had pulled herself together. She had rationalized the whole incident: she was tired; it had been a disturbing dream, but a dream nonetheless. Quite why her subconscious had chosen to act out various issues in costume had been harder for Roz to explain away. She remembered the feel of the linen smock against her skin, the warm weight of the wool skirt that hung to her ankles. Her feet had been thrust into sturdy wooden clogs that kept her out of the mud. In the dream, of course, she had been barely more than a little girl. Her figure had been childish and unformed, but the bodice fit snugly around her chest, and there had been a plain frill around the collar, something that was not quite a ruff.

  So in her dream she had been wearing Tudor costume. That was hardly a surprise given that she had spent the afternoon in an Elizabethan house, was it? As for the burn marks on her neck, they were clearly psychosomatic. She was obviously more anxious about coming to York than she had thought she was.

  Roz had convinced herself it made a kind of sense. She had taken her case into the bedroom and unpacked briskly. She had arranged her moisturizers in a
line in the bathroom. She had found a supermarket nearby and bought tea and milk and a ready-made salad for supper, although her stomach still churned with distress and she couldn’t imagine ever wanting to eat again. She had let herself back into the flat and made a cup of tea and taken some aspirin to ease the headache that thudded against her skull. She had practised speaking out loud so that her voice didn’t wobble and Nick wouldn’t guess how desperately she wished that she could go home.

  And after all of that, all she had had to say was, ‘Hi, it’s me,’ and he was asking what was wrong.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said automatically, turning her back to the window, which nagged at the edge of her vision like a toothache. ‘I’m just a bit tired. You know what it’s like starting a new job. I went to Holmwood House, and it’s quite something. I can see lots of potential for some fabulous events,’ she rattled on. ‘I don’t think Adrian’s assistant likes me very much, though.’

  She could picture Nick, the phone tucked under his chin as he sat at his computer. His narrow face would be intent, his brows drawn together, and homesickness gusted through her. She wanted to be there, letting herself into the house, taking Nick a glass of wine. He had a chair in his office and she liked to toe off her shoes and curl up in it and tell him about her day, and Nick would forget about his deadline and swing his chair round to sit with his back to his blinking cursor so he could focus his attention on her.

  But that was before her aunt died, before Daniel, before Adrian offered her the job in York. Before everything she’d always believed to be true had started to crumble, and their marriage with it.

  ‘You sound . . . strained,’ said Nick.

  ‘Do I?’ Roz forced surprise into her voice, but even she could hear the frenetic edge to it. Her fingers were rubbing at the arm of the chair in small, obsessive circles and she made herself stop.

  ‘Come on, Roz. We’ve been married for eight years. I can tell when something’s up.’

  She gave in. ‘I just had a bad dream,’ she said. ‘I fell asleep when I got to the flat and it was . . . nasty.’

  ‘What was it about?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Oh . . . there was a baby . . . and it died . . .’ Roz’s throat closed at the memory of Ellen’s bloodied skirts and the tiny, slippery body in her hands. ‘You can never explain a dream, can you? It doesn’t matter, anyway. But it was horrid.’

  Nick was silent a moment. ‘You know I thought you should have some counselling about your family history,’ he said carefully. ‘Maybe dreams are another way of dealing with it?’

  It had been an ordinary Sunday. They had wandered along the South Bank and had a late breakfast overlooking the Thames before taking the Sunday papers home.

  ‘You should do something about your aunt’s papers,’ Nick had said from the depths of the sports section. ‘You can’t keep putting it off.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ Roz confessed. ‘It feels like invading her privacy.’

  Aunt Sue was the only mother she remembered, and it had been a shock when she had dropped dead of an embolism. Roz had been organizing a treasure hunt for 150 primary school children when her mobile rang, and still the sound of children shrieking in the background could plunge her into confusion and grief. Her uncle had died years before and there had been no other children.

  ‘You’re all we want,’ Aunt Sue used to tell her when Roz wished for a brother or a sister. ‘We don’t want to share you.’

  They had been open about her adoption from the start. Roz had grown up knowing about the terrible accident that had claimed the lives of her parents and her sisters. She had seen the photos of herself when she was small, at the centre of a happy, smiling family. It was sad, but she loved her uncle and her aunt, and when Sue died, Roz grieved for the only mother she had ever known.

  ‘Come on, I’ll help you,’ said Nick. He carried down the big box of papers Roz had taken from the house the day her aunt died, and they sat on the floor, sifting through years of cards, letters, photographs, old bills, newspaper cuttings, and assorted official papers and certificates.

  ‘“Rosalind tries hard and plays enthusiastically,”’ Nick read out from one of her old school reports. ‘Nothing new there, then.’

  ‘Look at this.’ Roz handed him a photograph of a smiling woman with a baby. ‘That’s me.’

  Nick studied the photo. ‘You look just like your mother.’

  ‘That’s what Aunt Sue used to say.’ Roz dug out some photographs and shuffled quickly through them before passing them over. ‘These are all of my parents and sisters. I should keep them.’

  ‘Have you noticed what an odd edge some of these photos have?’ said Nick, looking through them. ‘It’s almost as if somebody’s been cut out of the picture.’

  Roz took one back to study it. ‘I see what you mean. Odd,’ she said, but she didn’t think much about it. Not then.

  It was a sad business sorting through her aunt’s life. So much that must have seemed important at the time, important enough to keep, was now tired and trivial. ‘I mean, why keep newspaper cuttings about a factory fire?’ Roz sighed, adding another piece of paper to the recycling box.

  ‘Perhaps she was a pyromaniac on the quiet,’ Nick suggested flippantly.

  Roz thought of her quiet, conventional aunt and she was smiling as she pulled a letter from its envelope, not realizing that her life was about to change. ‘I don’t see Aunt Sue playing with matches,’ she was saying as her eyes skimmed over the letter. She was halfway through before she stopped, frowning, and went back to the beginning. ‘This is weird.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s from . . .’ Roz turned the letter over to read the signature on the back.‘. . . Jim Hebden. He says he’s a retired police officer and that he worked on the Acclam case. I didn’t realize my parents’ accident was a case.’ She flipped the letter back over and reread the first part of the letter. ‘It’s dated 1995 and he’s talking about somebody called Michael . . .’ Her voice trailed away as foreboding stalked down her spine.

  Nick leant forward. ‘Let me see.’

  Wordlessly Roz handed the letter over. She felt thrown without quite knowing why. It was as if the floor had tilted slightly, and she put one hand flat on the carpet to steady herself.

  ‘“Dear Mrs Miller,”’ Nick read out. ‘“I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing in contacting you, but I thought you ought to know that I saw Michael in York recently. There must have been a risk assessment before he was released on licence and I am very surprised that they would conclude that he was no longer a risk to society. I was a police officer in York for many years, and the Acclam case was the most disturbing one of my career. I was there when Michael was arrested and I do not believe that he showed any remorse at all for what he had done.”’

  Nick stopped and raised his brows. Like Roz, he turned the letter over and then back. ‘“He was the most manipulative interviewee I ever encountered,”’ he read on, ‘“and was able to switch at will between different personas. It is my belief that people don’t change and that Michael is more than capable of pretending to be anything that he wants to be. Had it not been for the incontrovertible evidence, he might never have been convicted at all.

  ‘“I am very concerned that he may try to contact you or his sister now that he is free . . .”’ Nick trailed off. ‘His sister?’

  ‘Do you think that’s me?’ Roz’s voice sounded odd in her own ears, as if it was coming from a distance.

  ‘I don’t know. This is very weird.’ Nick turned the page. ‘“I shouldn’t be speaking to you about this, but I think you should be warned that he will have been given a new identity. He will have had the opportunity to start afresh and the fact that he has chosen to return to York makes me anxious that he still has unresolved issues to do with his family and the way they died. I hope you don’t mind me writing to you, but I just want to know that you are both safe.”’

  Nick lowered the letter and stared at Roz. ‘What the hell
is that all about?’

  ‘I’ve got no idea,’ she said. She took the letter back and smoothed it on her leg, conscious that her fingers weren’t quite steady.

  ‘Do you think you’re the sister he refers to?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Roz, ‘but if I am, that means I have a brother.’

  All those years of longing for a sibling. Had she had one all along? ‘Why didn’t Aunt Sue tell me?’ she burst out. ‘She brought me up to be straight. She knew how important honesty is to me. How could she lie to me like that?’

  Nick looked uncomfortable. ‘Maybe she just wasn’t telling you everything. Maybe she was trying to protect you.’

  ‘It was lying!’ The more Roz thought about it, the more devastated she felt. Her uncle and aunt had been steady, straight-as-a-die people. Realizing that they hadn’t practised the honesty they preached knocked askew the foundations of everything that had been certain in her life.

  ‘There may have been a good reason for her not telling you everything,’ said Nick after a moment. ‘This Michael . . . the letter doesn’t say why he was in prison, does it?’

  ‘No.’ Roz felt sick.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘Well, you can’t just leave it there,’ said Nick, and it was only later that she realized how neatly he had moved the conversation on from honesty. ‘You need to find out what really happened.’

  Roz bit her nail. ‘I’m not sure I want to know.’

  ‘Roz, there’s a big question mark over your past. You can’t just ignore it.’

  Nick insisted that she ring the number on the letter, but it turned out that Jim Hebden had died five years earlier. His widow was sorry, she didn’t know anything about a letter.

  ‘There must have been something in the papers.’ There was no stopping Nick once he got the bit between his teeth, and as a freelance journalist, he was determined to ferret out what he could online. Roz left him to his computer and went to ring her aunt’s best friend.

  ‘Oh God, I told Sue she should tell you the truth!’ Karen interrupted before Roz had finished explaining about the letter. ‘We had a huge row about it when they first adopted you.’