The Edge of Dark

by Pamela Hartshorne

  But what if Margaret were right? What if that was the only way she would ever conceive a child? Jane was not a fool. She had given up dreaming of a husband who would care for her. Her hope now lay in a babe, a son who would satisfy the Holmwoods and give Jane someone to love. She yearned for it, but whenever Robert clambered petulantly into the great bed at night Jane could not bring herself to do anything Margaret had told her to do. Just thinking about it made her want to scrub herself all over.

  ‘There now,’ said Annis, misreading Jane’s expression. ‘It will happen. You are not long married after all.’

  ‘A year and more,’ said Jane.

  Annis looked around and then leaned closer. ‘They say old Mother Dent out on’t common can give you a potion. No harm trying, eh?’

  ‘A potion?’ Jane stared. ‘What sort of potion?’

  ‘You know, to help you conceive if that’s what you want – or not if you don’t.’

  ‘You mean she’s a witch?’

  ‘Shh, not so loud!’ Annis flapped her hand, flustered. ‘Some say she is, some say she’s a wise woman. She gave my mistress something to stop her breeding, she had that many bairns. She’ll give you a love spell for a farthing too.’

  A love spell.

  Jane turned the idea over in her mind as they carried their baskets up the steep slope of the bridge. She barely noticed the urchins chasing each other over the cobbles, or the two prosperous mercers outside St William’s Chapel, trying to negotiate over the snarls of the dogs they held on tight leashes.

  A spell.

  Could a spell make Robert love her? What would that be like? He might send his mother to the country and devote himself to Jane. Instead of setting his teeth as he climbed on top of her, he might smile tenderly and then . . . well, Jane wasn’t quite sure what would happen, but she knew it must be different to what happened now.

  She kept her eyes demurely lowered but her mind was working busily. She was sensible and devout. Witchcraft was an abomination. She could not go out and demand a potion from the old woman. And yet . . . what if the spell did work? Would it not be worth it?

  Jane glanced at Annis, who looked back at her knowingly. She liked Annis. A big, raw-boned girl, Annis had a round, good-humoured face and shrewd eyes and although she was the same age as Jane, she was the older by far in the ways of the world. Jane had seen the way she flirted with men, and the way their eyes rested on Annis’s bodice where her breasts swelled; the way they watched her walk away with that provocative swing of her hips. Jane was fairly sure that Annis would know how to make a husband want her without any need for a spell, or for abasing herself in the way Margaret suggested, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask. It was too humiliating to admit that you weren’t sure if you were still a virgin or not.

  But a spell might change all that.

  ‘Annis,’ she said, making up her mind, shifting her basket to the other arm so that she could draw closer. ‘How could I manage it?’

  They went together the next afternoon. Jane had a few coins left from the market, and Annis wrapped up an eel pie and a piece of cheese in a cloth and carried the basket.

  Annis seemed to know her way through the labyrinth of footpaths and tracks between the fields and garths outside the city walls, where the grass grew long and lush and the hedgerows rustled with chirrups and twitters. The countryside drowsed in the warmth of a summer afternoon. Out on the common, cattle ambled hock-high in buttercups, and horses stood nose to tail in the shade, tails twitching at the flies.

  Nervous about the idea of visiting Sybil Dent, Jane distracted herself by gathering herbs for her still room. She found arsesmart, which she used to drive fleas away, borage for a syrup to cool and cleanse the blood and wild daisies aplenty, to make into oils and poultices for wounds, and she tucked them all into her basket. It gave her a good excuse to dawdle, and nobody seeing her basket of herbs would question what she was doing out in the crofts. Nobody would suspect that a respectable woman and her maidservant would be on their way to visit a witch.

  ‘And this is lady’s bedstraw,’ she told Annis, stooping to lift the yellow flowers with one finger. ‘Mixed with sheep tallow, it is a singular remedy for burns and scalds.’ She sniffed at the plant, remembering the smell of the ointment they had put on her hands after she had snatched Ellen’s baby from the flames, and the memory of that terrible day rolled over her like a cloud blotting out the sun.

  Annis nodded, but she wasn’t interested in remedies, and went back to chattering cheerfully about the latest gossip in the street. But Jane wasn’t particularly interested in that. She brushed her hands along the high grasses in the verge, looking for plants she could use, listening with only half an ear while Annis told her about Jack, assistant to the notary who had moved into the house next door.

  ‘He’s from London,’ she said, impressed. ‘I don’t believe half the stories he tells me, but ooh, he’s got a look in his eye that makes me come over all melty!’ She winked at Jane. ‘Maybe I’ll get me a love potion too!’

  But even Annis grew silent as they left the fields behind and made their way across the scrubby common to a scattering of trees. Tucked away inside, on the edge of a little clearing, looking as if it had grown out of the ground, was Sybil Dent’s cottage.

  By unspoken consent, they paused. Somewhere in the distance a sheep was bleating, but in the clearing it was very quiet, so quiet that the silence beat at Jane’s eardrums. ‘Do you think we should be here?’ she whispered, eyeing the cottage dubiously.

  ‘We’re not doing no harm,’ Annis whispered back.

  Jane bit her lip and her fingers tightened around her basket. She could hardly believe that she was here, at a witch’s cottage. They should go. Witches were evil, an abomination before God. She should run back to Micklegate and throw herself on her knees in the church to beg forgiveness for her sins.

  But running back to Micklegate wouldn’t make her husband want her. It wouldn’t give her a child. It wouldn’t change anything, and oh, how she longed for something to change!

  The clearing was still as glass. All the way out the country had been teeming in the summer warmth, but here no bees blundered through the air, no swallows swooped, no blackbirds squabbled and sang amongst the trees. No coneys sat up on their back paws, noses twitching, before lolloping back into the grass with a flash of white tail. Only a solitary crow sat on a branch overhanging the cottage, watching Jane so beadily that when it flapped its wings and croaked, she started as if it had shouted at her.

  ‘Look.’ Annis dug an elbow in Jane’s ribs, and Jane’s heart jerked again when she followed Annis’s gaze and saw an old woman in front of the cottage, leaning on a stick of ash. Where had she come from? A moment ago Jane could have sworn there had been no one there at all, and Sybil was too bent and gnarled to have run round from behind the cottage.

  But there she was, dark and twisted and knotted like an old tree, her eyes bright as a hedgepig’s as they settled on Jane. ‘You’re here then,’ she said, as if she had been expecting them.

  Jane cleared her throat. ‘Good day to you. I . . . I have heard that you have some skill with remedies,’ she managed awkwardly.

  ‘Remedies, is it?’ Sybil spat on the ground. ‘Better come in then, hadn’t you?’

  Jane and Annis glanced at each other, then both started forward, but Sybil stopped and pointed at Jane. ‘Just you.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you out here,’ Annis whispered, unable to disguise her relief.

  So Jane had no choice but to hand Annis her basket of herbs, take the one with the pie and the cheese in return, and go on alone. The little cottage seemed to draw her in across the clearing. Ducking under the doorway, she stood blinking in the dim light. The roof was low over her head, the mud floor covered with fresh rushes. A pot hung over the hearth in the middle of the floor where a few coals burned dully. Smoke drifted up to the hole in the sagging roof, but the air was green and it smelt of the woods.

  ‘Sit.’ Sybi
l jerked her head at a stool, and Jane sat obediently. Now that she was here, she felt strangely calm. She put the basket on the floor by her side, watched unblinkingly by a cat whose green eyes glowed in the shadows.

  Muttering to herself, Sybil poked at the coals. ‘Tell me what you want,’ she said abruptly without looking round.

  ‘I . . . well, I . . . I would like something to make my husband love me,’ said Jane in a small voice. She didn’t like having to say it out loud. It made her sound like a foolish servant girl, not a married woman. She couldn’t believe that she was really there, sitting on a stool in a witch’s cottage, asking for a love spell.

  For answer, Sybil hobbled over to Jane and took her chin in her hand to force her to look into her face. Her fingers were rough but surprisingly strong. ‘Tell me what you want,’ she said again. ‘What you really want.’

  Jane looked into the ancient eyes and felt her stomach drop away, as if she were falling, falling. ‘I want a child,’ she heard herself say.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I am sure.’ Jane’s voice grew in confidence. ‘I have been married a year now, more than,’ she confided, ‘and I still don’t . . . I still can’t . . .’

  ‘It’s not you who cannot,’ said Sybil with a harsh crack of laughter. ‘You will bear no child while your husband is unmanned with you. You don’t need love,’ she told Jane. ‘You need his yard to rise. But love will help. I can give you something to make him want you.’

  Turning away, she began poking around in the bowls that sat on the rough shelves, mumbling to herself again. Jane watched her, wishing she dared ask what Sybil was doing. She had some skill in the still room herself, but her room was nothing like this. Hers was light and airy, while the cottage was dark and dreamlike and strangely powerful.

  Jane kept her feet planted on the floor. She felt that if she lifted them, the stool would unyoke itself from the ground and float upwards, and she with it.

  ‘Here,’ said Sybil at last, handing her a twist of paper. ‘Take this, and give it to your husband and no one else. Put it in a dish and serve him at the edge of dark. It is the most powerful time, twixt day and night, so mark it well. And at night, let him come to your bed. His yard will be hard by then, but remember, he must spill his seed in you if you are to have a child.’

  Jane stared down at the paper in her hand, twisting it between her fingers. If. She lifted her eyes to Sybil’s. ‘Can you tell?’ she asked with difficulty. ‘Will I have a child?’

  Sybil regarded her for a moment. ‘Show me your palm.’

  Jane turned her right hand upwards, and Sybil took it. Her old fingers seemed to burn into Jane’s skin anew as she traced the old scars with surprising gentleness. Her toothless mouth worked strangely, and her eyes were glassy.

  ‘Fire,’ she said at last, and an expression that sent a fast little jerk down Jane’s spine slid over her face. Something almost like anguish. ‘I see fire.’

  Well, it was not so hard to tell from the scars after all. Jane nodded, trying to disguise her disappointment. ‘The fire was a long time ago,’ she said firmly. ‘I wish only to know if I will have a child.’

  ‘Aye, there will be a child,’ said Sybil, giving Jane her hand back, suddenly all briskness once more. ‘But be careful what you wish for,’ she said.

  But the promise of a child had Jane getting to her feet before Sybil had finished speaking, clutching her twist of paper, smiling, not listening. ‘I thank you,’ she said, and bent to pick out the pie and the cheese and set them on the small table with some coins. ‘These are for you, for what you have done for me and for my maid. Can she come in now?’

  Sybil hesitated, almost as if she would have said more, but in the end she just turned her hand in a gesture of acceptance. ‘If she will,’ she said.

  ‘Did you get it?’ Annis whispered when Jane went out, blinking in the light.

  ‘Yes . . . yes, oh, Annis . . .’ Jane couldn’t keep the news to herself. ‘Annis, she says I am to have a child after all!’

  Annis beamed. ‘That’s grand! Now for me . . .’ She looked at the door doubtfully. ‘She didn’t have no familiar in there, did she?’

  ‘There’s a cat, but it will not hurt you.’ Jane could laugh now that she was out in the air and knew that she might have a babe very soon. She took the basket of herbs from Annis and shooed her towards the cottage. ‘She is strange, but I think she is kind. Go on, and find out if you will have your Jack after all.’

  Annis came out looking disappointed. ‘She wouldn’t give me no potion,’ she complained. ‘Just this to hang round my neck.’ She held up a piece of paper in disgust. ‘It’s got Jack’s name on it, is all. She said I didn’t need nothing but my smile.’ Annis’s face creased with suspicion. ‘I wish I hadn’t cut her so much cheese now!’

  Jane couldn’t help laughing. ‘Annis, it is good that you need no help from her. Put that piece of paper under your pillow, and smile at Jack. If Sybil thinks that is all you need, perhaps she is right.’ She had tucked her own twist of paper carefully beneath the herbs in the basket. ‘Now come, we must go home.’

  She must have spent longer in the cottage than she had thought. It was cooler now, the summer warmth leached from the air, and she pulled her gown closer around her, puzzled by the smell of fallen leaves. It was only June. The trees were in full leaf, not lying in yellowing piles. She turned to ask Annis if she smelt it too, but Annis had gone and all at once the world was shifting, tipping, and the herbs and grasses and flowers that thronged the edges of the track slid away, dissolving into brick and metal and a solid lifeless grey beneath her feet. Stumbling in horrified disbelief, she thrust out a hand to stop herself falling, and grazed it against rough bark. The shock of it jolted her into awareness, and she clutched at the tree to anchor herself as the world steadied and settled.

  She had no idea where she was. Roz stood frozen, braced against the tree trunk, while her heart thundered and her mind swerved giddily between past and present. A woman walking a dog passed her with a curious look; two teenagers in hoodies and scuffed jeans ignored her as they slouched past in the other direction. Roz didn’t dare let go of the tree at first, but when another dog walker approached and looked at her in concern she took her hand away and managed a weak smile. Perhaps he thought she was drunk. It felt a little like that, as if her head wasn’t properly connected to her body.

  Cautiously, Roz looked around her. She was clearly in the suburbs, on a main road lined with mostly semi-detached houses. How in God’s name had she got there? Ice pooled in her stomach at the realization that she must have crossed busy roads without any awareness of where she was or what she was doing. She could have been killed.

  She had thought Jane was gone. At least, she had wanted to believe that she was, but she couldn’t fool herself any longer. Roz wrapped her arms about herself, fighting a wave of self-pity. For one treacherous moment she felt so lonely and lost that she wanted to weep, and it was that thought that made her pull herself together. She had never been a crier, and she wasn’t going to start now.

  But what was she going to do?

  For want of a better idea, Roz started walking again while she tried to think clearly about her options. Jane’s ability to take over her head terrified her, but at the same time she was fascinated, and part of her wanted to be back in Jane’s skin, living Jane’s life, seeing the world through Jane’s eyes. A world that was more vivid and immediate and familiar than the one Roz was walking through now.

  Could it be true? Was she really possessed by a ghost from the past? The rational part of Roz’s mind wanted to scoff, but the memory of Jane’s encounter with Sybil Dent was so real. She hadn’t dreamt it, she had lived it, she knew she had.

  Roz walked along a wide suburban road, remembering the common with its rutted tracks, the lush, lovely grass and the dizzyingly pure air. As if to underline the contrast an old van passed her, billowing fumes from its exhaust.

  Digging her hands in her pockets, Roz w
aited to cross the next main road. Beside her, a mother leant down to tuck a blanket around her baby in its pram, and a familiar envy twisted in Roz’s gut like a knife. She looked away. All those years longing for a baby, letting Nick persuade her that the time wasn’t right, that he wasn’t ready, and it turned out that he had been a father all along.

  She thought about the little twist of paper she had tucked out of sight under the herbs, and how her heart had leapt at the prospect of having a child.

  Jane’s heart.

  That hadn’t been her, Roz Acclam. She wasn’t reduced to hocus-pocus or trapped in a marriage with an impotent bully. Poor Jane, trying so hard to make the best of it. Roz hoped she had the baby she wanted so much.

  Anyone would think she wanted to go back.

  Roz gathered her jacket closer at the neck, worried by the wistful train of her thoughts. She had to get a grip. She would ask the psychic Charles Denton to come earlier. Ghosts were his business, so perhaps he could help her. Or she would find a vicar. Roz didn’t relish the idea of stumbling through an explanation of what was happening to her, but she couldn’t carry on like this.

  The sun was still bright, and a breeze was hustling the first of the fallen leaves along the gutters. Roz kept walking, as if she could somehow outpace the sense of dislocation that swirled in her head, and gradually the queasy, disconnected feeling faded to be replaced by something that was not quite unease, more a niggling conviction that she was missing something important, a buzzing in her head that was growing inexorably louder.

  Her steps slowed and she looked about her more carefully. She was on what seemed a very ordinary suburban street. It was familiar, Roz thought, but only because she had grown up in a semi-detached house in the London suburbs.

  But when she reached a junction, and glanced at the street sign, the name jumped out at her like a shout: Millingham Road.

  Roz stood looking at it for a long time. Millingham Road, where she was born. Where her parents and sisters had died. The one place in York she had planned to avoid. Roz saw no point in making a pilgrimage. She had had no intention of coming out to see the house.