The Edge of Dark

by Pamela Hartshorne

  Jane didn’t dare look round. She kept her eyes fixed on Geoffrey, who looked back as if disappointed by her impatience. Annis perched on the meagre roll of possessions they had brought with them while Jack bantered with the mariners preparing the keelboat. He had an apparently inexhaustible supply of jokes, but when she risked a glance Jane saw that his eyes were scanning the staith for any sign of suspicion or pursuit.

  ‘Make haste, make haste,’ Jane muttered under her breath.

  ‘Easy now,’ Annis murmured in return. ‘People will notice if we seem in a hurry. We don’t want them Holmwoods knowing which way we’ve gone.’

  They were so nearly there. Jane couldn’t bear to look now, but at last Jack was turning, gesturing them forward. The boat rocked alarmingly beneath her as she clambered forward with the basket to sit in the prow with Annis.

  ‘Keep them women out of the way,’ the mariner ordered, and Jack winked.

  ‘Always,’ he shouted back and Annis rolled her eyes.

  One of the mariners pushed them away from the quayside, and there was some jumping and shoving as the others hauled up the sail. It flapped and snapped in the wayward breeze, only to collapse a moment later.

  The captain cursed and spat. ‘Wind’s teasing like a whore today.’

  Jane clutched Geoffrey closer. ‘What happens if the wind drops?’

  Annis didn’t answer. She was watching the sail as it sagged against the mast and her expression was worried.

  Then out of nowhere, the breeze lifted again. Jane felt it brush her cheek, and the sail stirred. She sat up straighter, seeing the expectation in the mariners’ faces. Another sigh of breeze, and then a gust came down the river, puffing out the sail and sending the boat scudding out into the middle of the water.

  ‘There she blows,’ said Jack, standing by the mast. He grinned back at Jane and Annis. ‘We’re on our way.’

  The boat felt small and unsteady, but Jane’s heart lifted in relief. The river was deep and powerful around them, a brown serpent gleaming in the light. She could hear the rush of water against the hull, the creak of the ropes and the snap of the sail. Perched in the prow, holding Geoffrey close, she watched Ouse Bridge recede into the distance. It is the last time I shall see it, she thought, hardly able to believe that she had escaped after all. The Minster slid away, the houses clustered down to the river. Away went the Skeldergate ferry and St George’s Field, where the laundresses were spreading the linen out to dry. Away went the last signs of the city, and then they rounded a bend in the river and there was only the tangle of trees and weeds and the sky and the water. York was gone.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be arriving at King’s Cross. Please ensure you take all your belongings with you when you leave the train . . .’

  Roz came to with a jolt. One minute she had been gazing out of the window as the train sped through the countryside, the next she was in the churchyard with Annis, the sunshine warm on her back, her jaw set with determination, watching the sign of the red boar. Roz could still smell the neckerchief they had bought from a bemused countrywoman on the road to York, and the coarseness of the woven hemp was so vivid a memory that she lifted a hand to her face to pull it from her nose.

  Disorientated, she blinked and her surroundings came into focus. She was on a train. She held on to the arm rest, fingering the plastic, the metal button you could use to push the seat back. Around her people were standing up, putting on coats, pulling down bags from the overhead. Taking it for granted that they could be whisked from York to London in two hours.

  Roz drew a careful breath. Wrenched from the slow drift of the keelboat down the river to the train shooting down the tracks at a speed beyond her comprehension, she felt sick and a little dizzy. Across the table, her eyes met those of the passenger opposite, an elderly woman who was just folding her magazine. She smiled at Roz and nodded her head at the other passengers, already queuing to get off the train.

  ‘Everybody’s in such a rush nowadays,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ Roz’s voice was husky and she cleared her throat.

  ‘I mean, the train’s not going to get there any quicker, is it? They’re still going to have to wait for the doors to open.’

  Roz used to be the first to leap up. She liked to be ready to get out the moment the doors opened. Impatient, Nick called her, but she had preferred to think of it as being eager to get on to the next thing. Now she sat as if pinned to her seat, watching the queuing passengers as if they were an alien species, acting in a way she couldn’t understand.

  ‘I like to wait comfortably and get off in my own good time,’ the elderly woman said. She looked at Roz with open curiosity.

  ‘You’ve been miles away,’ she said.

  Roz smiled feebly back at her. You have no idea, she thought.

  It was only three weeks since she had left, but it felt more like three years. Three hundred years. Roz wandered around the flat touching things, trying to reconnect with her old life, but part of her marvelled that she had ever lived there. She could remember, but it was like remembering a film she had once watched, with an actor playing her part, saying her lines. They didn’t feel like her own memories. Not like the flashing sunlight on the river, or the shouts of the mariners. Not like the hard wooden seat in the prow or the weight of Geoffrey on her lap.

  She told Nick about the séance while he made her a gin and tonic. He frowned as he twisted ice cubes into a glass. ‘I think your psychic guy is right. It sounds dangerous to me.’

  ‘I thought that at first, but now . . . it seems to me that Jane wants her story to be told. It might turn out to be a good thing. I was thinking I could do some research and see what I could find out about her, but that was when she was in Yorkshire. Now she’s on her way to London I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to trace her here.’

  Nick quartered a lime, ran one piece around the rim of the glass and squeezed the juice in before dropping the quarter onto the ice cubes and topping up with tonic water.

  ‘You sound disappointed.’

  It was only a mild comment, but it brought Roz up short. The truth was that she was disappointed. It had been such a relief to sail away from York. She wanted to go back, to drift on down the river in the spring sunshine and feel free.

  ‘I just want to know what happened to Jane,’ she said. ‘It’s not that I want to be haunted. It’s just . . . well, I want to know that she was okay.’

  Nick handed her the glass. ‘I think she’ll be okay if you want her to be okay.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Roz, hasn’t it occurred to you that you have just escaped to London?’ Nick pulled a beer from the fridge and eased off the top. ‘It’s just another example of the parallel between your experience as Jane and what’s going on in your own head.’

  Roz was silent, swirling the ice cubes round in her glass so they clunked together in the fizzing tonic. It was true that she had been glad to get away after the séance, but that was mostly to escape the curious glances of the others. She hadn’t liked the idea of them witnessing Jane’s shame, even at second hand. Charles Denton had contacted her the next day to urge her to let him do a cleansing ritual and allow Jane to depart and Roz had been shocked at the instant, visceral jolt of resistance.

  Jane didn’t want to be moved on, and Roz didn’t want her to go.

  She didn’t tell Nick that, though. She didn’t really want to admit it to herself.

  ‘You still think this is all to do with psychological issues?’

  ‘It makes more sense to me than ghosts,’ said Nick. ‘I think your subconscious is playing silly buggers, and the sooner you see the hypnotherapist the better. I’ve made an appointment for you on Monday.’

  Roz wasn’t sure why she was so reluctant. Surely she didn’t want Jane to be real? Nobody in their right mind would want to be possessed by a ghost. But when she thought about never experiencing Jane’s life again, about never knowing what had happened to her, she couldn’t
deny how she felt. It was more than disappointed. It was bereft.

  Nick could see her hesitating. ‘I really think you should go, Roz,’ he said, and Roz chewed her lip.

  He was right. She was crazier than she thought if she would really rather keep plunging back into someone else’s life than face up to some thorny psychological issues. It was time to pull herself together.

  To put her marriage back together.

  ‘All right,’ she said to Nick. ‘I’ll go.’

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Nick asked that Monday morning.

  ‘Why, are you afraid I won’t go?’ Roz was in a snappish mood, banging the fridge door closed, clattering cutlery, shoving the press of the cafetière down so forcefully that coffee splurted out onto the counter.

  Nick held his hands up in a peaceable gesture. ‘I know you don’t want to go. I just thought you might like some support.’

  He was right. She didn’t want to go. It was all very well deciding that you were going to talk to a shrink, but the prospect of it was more threatening than Roz had expected. Her mind was twitching, and unease prowled through her, like a wild cat penned in a stable.

  Jane didn’t want her to go.

  The certainty of it left Roz on edge. She was having trouble concentrating, and she was glad in the end to let Nick accompany her. It meant she didn’t have to think about where she was going or negotiate buses and tubes by herself. Once she had dashed around London without a second thought. She had spent most of her life in the city, and she had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the tube map, of bus routes, and of overground rail and tram connections. But three weeks away had turned her into a provincial mouse, gawping at the size of buses, overwhelmed by the roar of traffic, petrified by the rush and rattle of the tube.

  Like Charles Denton, Rita Panjani was not what Roz had expected. She was tiny and graceful, with beautiful dark, deep eyes and hair as black and shiny as a crow’s wing. Roz was fascinated by the tiny diamond glinting in Rita’s nostril. It seemed to be winking a message at her. Anyone would think she had never seen a nose stud before.

  Rita was unruffled by Roz’s distraction and disjointed answers to her preliminary questions. ‘Your husband mentioned that you were having some difficulty coming to terms with a trauma in your early childhood,’ she said at last.

  Roz had been so preoccupied with Jane that she had almost forgotten about her own history. ‘Well, yes . . . although I don’t remember it as a trauma. I don’t remember it at all.’

  ‘That’s quite common,’ said Rita. ‘A child will often block out memories that are too difficult to deal with. That’s a process that can often lead to phobias or apparently inexplicable fears in later life, however. By recovering that memory and facing it, the fear becomes manageable. It’s a process that may involve some pain, but should in the end help you to move on with your life.’

  The room was bright and airy, painted in neutral colours, deliberately restful, but Roz didn’t feel relaxed. She was sitting in a comfortable chair by the window, her hands like claws on the arms. Seeing Rita glance at them, she forced herself to release them and linked her fingers awkwardly in her lap instead.

  ‘Have you ever had a patient who dealt with trauma by living another life entirely?’ she asked, and Rita’s brows lifted.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  Haltingly at first, Roz explained what had been happening since she went to York. Rita listened carefully and didn’t interrupt.

  ‘Nick thinks it’s all a way of working out issues in my subconscious,’ Roz finished.

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘I . . . don’t know,’ said Roz miserably. ‘I used to be so sure of myself, but now I’m confused. I don’t know who I am or what I think any more.’

  Rita closed her notebook. ‘Few of us are certain about anything, Roz. The more we know, the more we understand we can never know everything. There has clearly been a trauma in your past. Why don’t we try and regress you to your childhood and confront those memories before we tackle the way you seem to be projecting your concerns onto another life entirely?’

  ‘I suppose so. If you think it will work.’ Roz shifted uneasily in the chair. ‘How will you do that?’

  ‘Have you been hypnotized before?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘It’s nothing to be alarmed about,’ said Rita as Roz’s voice wavered. ‘I’m just going to ask you to relax.’

  ‘What if I can’t?’

  ‘Then we will try something else.’

  There was something relentless about Rita’s calm smile. Roz was beginning to feel hunted. ‘I just don’t feel I’m going to respond very well to hypnosis.’

  ‘Well, let’s try, shall we?’ said Rita tranquilly. ‘I want you to sit back in the chair, Roz, and make yourself comfortable.’ She watched as Roz shuffled deeper into the armchair and rested her head against the back. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now close your eyes.’

  Roz let out a long breath and closed her eyes. Dazzling patterns shimmered and swirled behind her eyelids.

  ‘Good,’ said Rita again. ‘Now I want you to think back, to the first time you can remember being really happy. Can you do that?’

  The patterns behind her eyes were blinding now, the blobs and circles fading to pulsating waves of light. Roz felt as if she were teetering on the edge of a great black hole, but she kept her eyes squeezed shut and forced herself to concentrate. So many happy memories. Her wedding, the honeymoon in Morocco. Nick presenting her with the earrings. Further back, their first kiss. A party with friends, helpless with laughter. Watching the sun rise on a beach in Greece. And before that, university, and school, growing up with her aunt and uncle. She’d always wanted brothers and sisters, but it hadn’t been an unhappy childhood. She remembered a holiday in the south of France when she was ten, being sent to buy croissants and French bread from a van every morning. Dusty roads and cicadas whirring.

  ‘Do you remember anything before that?’

  ‘I remember my uncle reading me stories.’ Roz’s eyes were still closed, but her lips curved reminiscently. ‘He used to be brilliant at doing different voices for every character. He was a wonderful mimic, and he used to make me laugh.’

  ‘How did that make you feel?’

  ‘Safe. Happy.’

  ‘Is that the first time you were happy?’

  Roz frowned with effort as she strained her memory. ‘I was happy in Minchen Lane,’ she said.

  ‘Minchen Lane? Is that where your parents lived?’

  ‘My parents?’ She was puzzled. ‘No, Minchen Lane is in London, hard by Aldgate.’

  A pause. ‘I don’t think I know it.’

  ‘I didn’t at first, either,’ she admitted. How odd to remember now that somewhere so familiar had once been strange.

  ‘It is not far,’ Annis had said. ‘Turn before you reach the church in the middle of Fenchurch Street. Go past the Clothworkers’ Hall and look for the sign of the golden lily.’

  Annis had offered to look after Geoffrey, even though she freely admitted that the child gave her the fidgets. Geoffrey was three now, walking, and talking, if just a little, and only when he felt like it. He had no interest in baby chatter or songs, but regarded the world out of glittering black eyes that seemed older by far than his years. Jane would never admit it, but sometimes Geoffrey made her uneasy too. He was not an ill-favoured child, but he rarely smiled, and he never looked to her for comfort. From babyhood, only the leap and flicker of flames had the power to soothe him, and he was fascinated still, sitting for hours by a fire while his face glowed with a fervour that Jane was at a loss to understand. She worried that he might burn himself, but he never got too close to the fire, and in truth there had been many times over the last year and a half when she had been glad to leave him in a kitchen, out of the servants’ way, while she earned a few more pennies to pay their way.

  London had been bewildering at first. Jack’s family inn was a busy, bustling place, and
there seemed to be people coming and going at all times of the day and night. Jane had clutched Geoffrey tight and shrunk against the wall as serving maids pushed past with trenchers of food and great tankards of ale.

  Jack’s family was large and cheerful and casually welcoming. Jane was grateful to them for giving her a place to stay, but the truth was she found it all overwhelming. In spite of Annis’s objections, Jane had insisted on paying her own way. She had brought little enough with her, after selling her mother’s rings to pay for their journey, but she had a fair hand with a needle, and took all the torn linen and clothes at the inn to mend. Before long she had built up a reputation as a reliable seamstress, but she and Geoffrey had been sharing a chamber with Annis and Jack for long enough. Jane closed her ears to their coupling at night, but they had a child of their own now, a bonny baby they called Eliza, and Annis was increasing already with another. Jane had been glad to help and to stand godmother when Eliza was born but she wanted to move Geoffrey away from the inn.

  Jack had a network of contacts who kept them in touch with news from York. Carriers and carters, chapmen and peddlers, merchants, servants and other travellers passed through Aldgate, and mariners and sailors made their way up from the Thames, allowing snippets of news to find their way up and down the country. Jack had a good line in guileless looks and artless conversation. From him, Jane heard that the Holmwoods were still searching for Geoffrey, that such a hue and cry had been raised that she would not escape with her life if she were ever to return to York.

  Jane kept out of sight as much as she could. The Holmwoods’ vengeance would be terrible, she knew, and they were likely to have word of London just as she had of York. Ever since she arrived she had been looking to move deeper into the city. If the Holmwoods did trace her and Geoffrey to London, an inn by one of the great gates in London’s wall would be the obvious place for them to start their search.

  ‘If only I still had my still room,’ she had sighed to Annis. ‘I could sell my remedies and earn enough perhaps for a room for myself and Geoffrey.’