The Edge of Dark

by Pamela Hartshorne

  She was standing on the blanket in the shed, clutching her toy dog, the one she called Pook, when the door opened, and the fireman loomed above her. He wore a helmet and big trousers and a big yellow jacket that crackled as he bent down. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’

  She hadn’t been able to speak, but when he lifted her up in his arms, she had felt safe, and she let him carry her up the garden. There were blue lights flashing and a strange orange flicker in the upstairs window.

  ‘I remember,’ she said to Nick slowly. Her mother jolting her as she stumbled through the kitchen. Promise me you’ll stay here. The damp and the cold and the fear of being left alone. ‘I remember it all.’

  It was so vivid now, Roz couldn’t believe that she had been able to wipe it from her memory.

  The fire officer’s face was sombre. Nick put his hand on Roz’s shoulder. ‘I’ll talk to him,’ he said, and Roz was glad to put her head on her knees. Geoffrey’s words kept echoing in her head. You abandoned me. Was that what she had done? She had left Jeff alone all over again.

  When Nick came back, he crouched down beside her and took her hands between his. ‘They found Adrian in the corridor. He’s on his way to hospital. Jeff must have dragged him out and then gone in again for Helen.’

  Roz’s eyes filled with tears. She knew what Nick was going to say. ‘And Jeff?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Roz.’ Nick gathered her into his arms, and held her while she sobbed out her shock and fear and grief for the brother she had never had the chance to know properly.

  ‘Are you up to answering some questions?’ he asked after a while and Roz nodded, knuckling the tears from under her eyes as Nick beckoned the officer over. Behind him, firefighters were manoeuvring two stretchers out of the door and handing them carefully into an ambulance.

  ‘Your husband tells us that you were unconscious when he found you, but that he and your brother managed to get you out before the fire really took hold,’ the officer said after he’d commiserated with Roz. ‘Then it seems that your brother went back in to rescue the two other people in the room. He was a brave man,’ he told Roz, and she nodded slowly.

  ‘He wouldn’t have thought so.’

  ‘We found this in his hand.’ The officer produced a blackened chain, dully gleaming, and Roz drew an unsteady breath.

  ‘My necklace,’ she said.

  ‘Would you like to look after it? We’ve included it on the inventory.’ He handed Roz the necklace and she took it without thinking. Jane’s necklace. She held it wonderingly. There was no burning this time, no throb of fear. Instead the jewels nestled comfortably in her palm, warm and safe, and she felt a sigh of peace brush past her ear like a blessing.

  Jane had gone.

  It was too hard to explain about the necklace. She would give it back to Adrian, but for now it was enough to hold it in her hand and feel alive. Roz looked at Nick, who had come for her as Gilbert hadn’t been able to, and she smiled unsteadily.

  ‘It does seem to have been a particularly intense fire,’ the officer went on, ‘but all the damage is confined to that one room. Can you tell me what happened?’ he asked Roz. ‘How did it start?’

  When had it started? With Mikey’s father, whose violence had left Mikey himself vulnerable to Geoffrey’s malign influence? Perhaps it had been her own refusal to accept Daniel straight away or to confront the past that had set her on a collision course with Helen’s secret and obsessive love for Adrian.

  Or perhaps it went back further than that. If Jane’s mother hadn’t made her promise to care for Juliana. If Juliana hadn’t turned away from Geoffrey as soon as he was born. If Margaret’s love for Robert hadn’t taken such a warped direction. If she hadn’t been abused in her turn, might she have had the chance to be a loving mother like any other? So many ifs, so many choices, so many turnings taken or ignored. Roz could follow the thread of every reason back and back and never find the end.

  The fire officer was waiting expectantly. How had it started? ‘I don’t know,’ said Roz. ‘It was very confused. I don’t remember.’

  ‘A boy.’ A wide grin cracked Nick’s face as the reality hit. He picked Roz up and swung her in an exuberant circle. ‘We’re going to have a boy! I’m going to have a son!’

  ‘Another son,’ Roz reminded him, smiling. She had grown fond of Daniel, who they still saw regularly, although he was more settled at home.

  Seeing the baby on the scan had been extraordinary. Roz’s throat had closed as she and Nick held hands tightly and watched their child touch his face as if in equal wonder.

  The nurse had smiled at their expressions. ‘Is this your first baby?’

  No. Roz almost said it out loud. The memory of William was still imprinted on her heart. Her medical records might not show it, but she knew what it was like to give birth. She remembered the twist and rip of her muscles, the certainty that she was going to split open, the flood of love as William snuffled into her, his tiny hands kneading her breast.

  William, her boykin, her dearest dear. Roz couldn’t think of this new child without a pang for the one she had lost and missed so terribly still.

  She summoned a smile for the nurse. ‘Yes, my first,’ she said, but she touched the necklace with her fingers, a fleeting apology for the lie.

  It was over a year since that terrible night in Holmwood House. Adrian had recovered, and although they were all shaken and distressed, they had agreed to press ahead with the opening. Apart from Roz’s office, there was very little damage to the house itself, and once the repairs had been done, there seemed no reason not to open the house to the public as originally planned. So much work had gone into it, Adrian argued, that it would be a tragedy to shut it away.

  Roz had agreed. While Adrian was still in hospital she had quietly arranged for a service of deliverance to exorcize any lingering spirits, but in her heart she knew that Jane and Geoffrey and Margaret were already gone. The fire in her office had purged the house and now when she walked through the great hall, she heard only the sound of her own footsteps and the Elizabethan music playing on a loop through the hidden speakers. The air was lighter now, the shadows less dense.

  Inevitably news of the dramatic fire on the night of the launch had spawned much speculation about the cause, and Jeff and Helen’s tragic deaths only fuelled rumours that the house was haunted. Mark’s prediction that a reputation for ghosts would be good for business proved correct, and visitor numbers were staggering. Roz was pleased that Holmwood House was so popular for Adrian’s sake. Since the fire she had got to know him better. The tragedy had changed him. He was less pompous and more likeable, and she wondered sometimes just how much he remembered about that night.

  ‘You keep it,’ he had said when she tried to return Jane’s necklace to him.

  ‘Adrian, I can’t, it’s too valuable.’

  ‘It’s yours,’ he insisted, and just for a moment there had been something in his eyes that reminded her of Robert. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for everything.’

  ‘Adrian . . .’

  ‘I’m not going to have any children,’ he said a little painfully. ‘When I die, the Holmwood name will die with me, and the house and Holme Hall will be broken up. Perhaps that’s as it should be, but I’d like to know the necklace is cared for and worn.’

  Roz swallowed. ‘It should really be in a museum,’ she made herself say, but Adrian shook his head.

  ‘No, I want you to have it.’

  So Roz wore the necklace, and every time she touched it she remembered Jane, who had tried so hard to keep her promises, but never again did she slip back to the past. The world stayed firm beneath her feet now, and if she sometimes caught a glimpse of a farthingale or a figure in a fine doublet out of the corner of her eye, by the time she had turned her head to look closer it had whisked away, swallowed into the past once more and leaving only a shimmer in the air. Roz was glad of it, but sometimes, it was true, she missed the house at the sign of the golden lily.
Sometimes she would remember Gilbert, and William, and the girls, or she’d see a little spaniel in the street, and the yearning was so sharp she would suck in a breath to stop herself crying out.

  Jane was part of her now, her memories entwined with Roz’s own, but Roz didn’t want to live that life again. Jane was the past, and she had a present, and a future with Nick, and the child still to be born.

  Now Nick set her back on her feet and held her face between his hands. He seemed to know when she was thinking about Jane, and he sensed that Roz was remembering the baby she had borne in the past.

  ‘Do you want to call him William?’ he asked gently and Roz was so touched by the thought that for a moment she couldn’t speak.

  ‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘No, William would have had a good life, I think. He would have been loved.’ She thought about another boy who had been less fortunate, the brother she had found too late, but who had redeemed himself at the end. Poor Mikey, who lay next to his mother now, and the family he had never meant to kill. ‘I think I’d like to call him Michael,’ she said.

  Nick nodded his understanding. ‘We’ll do better by our Michael, Roz, I promise.’

  Roz wrapped her arms around his waist and leant into him, glad and grateful. ‘Let’s not make promises we might not be able to keep,’ she said. ‘Let’s just do the best we can.’

  Acknowledgements

  Turning a nebulous idea into a published book is a long and tortuous process that involves many people, and it wouldn’t happen at all without Louise Buckley and the whole team at Pan Macmillan. I am so grateful to them, as I am to my agent, Caroline Sheldon.

  For their help with The Edge of Dark, I’d like to thank particularly: John Mackenzie for telling me about his experience as a firefighter; Steve Hodgson, always helpful on police procedure and obscure points of the law; and Lauren Marshall of the Merchant Adventurers’ Hall and Chris Tuckley of the York Archaeological Trust, who gave up their time to explain some of the practical challenges of opening a historic building to the public. Deana Naraparaju told me about working in a museum, and Laura Mason about ‘the edge of dark’, a phrase I’d never come across before. As fiction writers will, I took the knowledge and experience they all so generously shared and pillaged them for my own purposes; needless to say, any mistakes in the book are all mine.

  I’m running out of ways to thank those friends who patiently point out inconsistencies or thrash out knotty plot problems, most especially Diana Nelson, Julia Pokora and Stella Hobbs – and John Harding, who makes me stick to my schedule when I least feel like it. I couldn’t do it without them.

  The Edge of Dark

  After an earlier career spent working and travelling around the world, including stints as a cook on an outback cattle station, interpreter on an expedition in Cameroon and English teacher in Jakarta, Pamela stumbled into writing as a way of funding a PhD in Medieval Studies. Settling at last in York, for several years she combined academic research with a successful career as a romance writer. Her thesis on the streets of later medieval and early modern York was finally completed in Z004 and she continues to work (very slowly) on a scholarly edition of the wardmote court records that formed the basis of her research. The Edge of Dark is her third novel based on her study of Elizabethan England and written under her real name.

  For more about Pamela, please see her website

  www.pamelahartshorne.com, find her on Facebook

  or follow her on Twitter @PamHartshorne.

  By Pamela Hartshorne

  Time’s Echo

  The Memory of Midnight

  The Edge of Dark

  First published 2014 by Macmillan

  First published in paperback 2015 by Pan Books

  This electronic edition published 2015 by Pan Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-4472-4956-6

  Copyright © Pamela Hartshorne 2014

  Cover Images: Necklace; Royal Collection Trust /

  © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2014.

  The right of Pamela Hartshorne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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