Ferney

by James Long

  Praise for Ferney

  ‘Long’s unpretentiously told time-slippage romance is played out against a bewitchingly bucolic setting’ Independent

  ‘A story of love and self discovery that resonates across the ages’ Nicholas Evans

  ‘It has been compared to The Time Traveler’s Wife, but I think Ferney is much better’ New Books Magazine

  ‘The book is a lovely puzzle . . . an enthralling, ambitious novel with distinct echoes of Hardy’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘An historical novel, a love story and a tale of time slippage, just the tale you need when you want to escape into a book and forget the world. Fresh and intriguing, the detail is done with a master’s touch. There’s many a current bestseller in this vein that can’t hold a candle to Long’s involving story’ Publishing News

  James Long, a former BBC correspondent, is the author of historical fiction, thrillers and non-fiction.

  Also by James Long

  Hard News

  Collateral Damage

  Game Ten

  Sixth Column

  Knowing Max

  Silence and Shadows

  The Lives She Left Behind

  The Balloonist

  Writing as Will Davenport

  The Painter

  The Perfect Sinner

  With Ben Long

  The Plot Against Pepys

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins, 1998

  This paperback edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2016

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © James Long 1998

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of James Long to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

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  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-47114-314-4

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-47114-299-4

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

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd are committed to sourcing paper that is made from wood grown in sustainable forests and supports the Forest Stewardship Council, the leading international forest certification organisation.

  Our books displaying the FSC logo are printed on FSC certified paper.

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Penselwood, also called Pen Selwood, is a real village and has, through geographical accident, provided the setting for the major historical events described in this book. It is an extraordinary place and has played a role quite disproportionate to its size or present importance. I have wandered through it many times during the twenty years that this book was in the making. I would like to thank those people who, with very little persuasion, have taken me in and told me parts of the story of their village.

  Jock Baker and Michael Shiel wrote an excellent local history booklet which filled in many gaps. The staff at the Somerset County Archive led me through dusty files to the true story of the discovery of Monmouth’s drum and much else besides. I have read many books in the course of researching this one, unfortunately too many to list, but I would like to acknowledge one which I turned to often, Keith Thomas’s excellent Man and the Natural World. The Dovecote Press’s superb range of books on Somerset history and archaeology was also extremely useful.

  I would like to thank Victoria Hobbs and Joanne Dickinson for giving this story its third chance.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was no accident. A single point of red winked in the distance. It was joined by a second and a third, then the road ahead was a string of red beads. Almost too late, the car slammed to a stop. Gally, who had been lost in thought, looked across at the man she had married.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asked.

  His mind had been on next week’s lectures.

  Someone’s crashed, he thought. He could see a truck, far ahead in the traffic, angled oddly across the road, but there were diggers and traffic cones and men in reflective jackets – a plausible excuse to keep that explanation at bay for another minute or two. ‘Roadworks?’ he suggested.

  She said nothing, but stared ahead intently and he could hear her starting to breathe more deeply. In the short time they had been married, Gally had been Mike’s pride, joy and, increasingly, a source of concern. He had become used to her mild claustrophobia, which, on a bad day, could force them to break a car journey every twenty miles, but what was starting to happen to her now showed every sign of being considerably worse.

  Gally was a poem with a missing line, a symphony with a discordant phrase. Mike was fascinated by her quirky reactions to everyday events. He was starting to get used to her nightmares, or at least starting to recognize the violent, thrashing commotion that would burst around him two or three times every week. Harder by far was the creeping absence which would invade her life for a few days at a time, a slow tide swamping every normally carefree corner of her self. He wanted to help her weather these personal storms. He wanted the smiling Gally, but he knew full well that nothing they had said, no part of the talking, had penetrated a single inch towards the hidden devils she faced.

  Her breathing was louder now. ‘Do you think someone’s crashed?’ she asked.

  ‘Roadworks,’ he repeated, ‘I think it’s just the roadworks,’ trying to make it true. An uncomfortable fact surfaced in his mind. It was the second time today that she had shown signs of panic and he now realized it was at exactly the same place. They had passed these roadworks on the way down and there had been no sudden traffic jam, no brake lights to generate fear that time. She had been frightened all the same, gripping her knees and breathing in this same heavy way until they were well past.

  A man in a safety helmet and a donkey jacket stumped towards them down the column of cars with a spade over his shoulder. Gally wound the window down. ‘Has something happened?’ she asked.

  He had small, angry eyes and looked set on walking straight past until he registered Gally. He swung the spade down and leant on the handle. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘something happened all right. Stupid bloody man walked right in front of that truck, didn’t he?’

  ‘
Is he . . . hurt?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Someone’s looking after him. Silly bugger should be dead.’ A voice shouted from somewhere behind them and the man, frowning, picked up his spade again. ‘I’m bloody coming, aren’t I?’ he shouted back.

  Gally turned to Mike. ‘It is an accident.’

  ‘But the man’s all right.’

  ‘He didn’t say that.’ Her voice trembled on the edge of control. ‘Can we go?’

  There were perhaps twenty cars ahead, jammed into a coned-off funnel. He looked in his mirror at the van, stopped tight behind him. ‘There’s no room.’

  She moaned and it tore at his heart. ‘Okay, Gally, hang on.’

  Thirty yards ahead, there was a country lane going off to the left. He hauled the wheel over and drove on to the grass verge, glimpsing the startled face of the passenger in the car in front as they bumped past it. The exhaust pipe scraped on a stone and he looked uneasily ahead wondering what else might be hidden in the long grass. A sign, pointing down the turning, said PENSELWOOD.

  Gally’s mood changed sharply as soon as they were clear of the main road. As they drove up the lane she lowered the window and sniffed the air appreciatively.

  ‘This is better,’ she said. ‘Much better. Thank you.’

  ‘Have a look at the map, would you?’ he said. ‘It’s in the glove compartment. We need to find a way back to the road.’

  ‘Let’s go on. I’d like to see Penselwood.’ She lingered over the name. ‘You never know. This might be the place.’

  ‘I thought you wanted time to stop at Stonehenge?’ he said. ‘It’s been a long day. There won’t be time for both.’

  Gally was unhappy in towns and in the three months since she had lost the baby the search for a cottage had provided a welcome distraction. It hardly mattered to Mike whether or not they found the right house. He didn’t even know if he wanted one. The process of looking was enough. It was a search they conducted in their own different ways. Mike did everything in an orderly fashion. He would ring round estate agents, look through the local papers, read the details carefully and make an organized shortlist of the possible houses, listing their pros and cons. Gally would ruffle his hair absently as he showed her the photographs. She’d smile as they went round the houses, then suddenly, nostrils flaring like a gun-dog, she’d be off up the road, into someone else’s drive, knocking at the door, asking complete strangers if they wanted to sell. Mike found it embarrassing, but for her sake he put up with it. For her sake, most people would put up with most things.

  Gally had the power to light up those around her with a transforming energy, but that power was eclipsed all too often. There was no malice in her troubles. They were a pain she inflicted only on herself. She was unsettled by travel, but always restless, searching for new places that never seemed to give her what she sought; there was a deep hurt within her. Her mother, an elderly and bitter woman to whom her connections were puzzlingly loose, always turned away from Mike’s questions, on the rare occasions when they talked at all.

  ‘It was her father’s death,’ Gally’s mother had said, once and once only. ‘It’s a thing to forget.’

  The woman had stared at him with flat, sealed eyes that showed the depth of denial in her and promised extreme anger if he dared to press her further. It filled him with a fear that the hurt would one day claim Gally entirely.

  When they first went to bed together, she had stopped him with a hand on his chest. He thought she was having second thoughts but all she said was, ‘I have bad dreams. You mustn’t mind.’

  Seeing her in perfect nakedness for the first time, her words had passed him by until he was shocked awake by the thrashing, screaming figure at his side in the early hours of the morning.

  She had sobbed something that sounded like ‘the burn man’ as he held her and tried to calm her, but in the end she went back to sleep and in the morning she had been so embarrassed that he hadn’t asked any more.

  If that was the bad side, the good side was so good that, when his mind sprang back into the private world of organized intellectual thought from which she so often dragged him, it made him feel desiccated, dull and only half real. She was illogical, unpredictable and overloaded with intuition, but people all around her seemed to shine brighter when she came near.

  He thought back two years to the moment when he had first noticed her – only two years; a monsoon that had ended his drought, a man who feared he had missed his prime altogether, then found bestowed on him the most unexpected gift. They were both tall, but where he stilted along, stiff legs in uncertain conflict with the ground, she had flowed as she walked off the London streets into his lecture, her dark chestnut hair in liquid motion round a wide, smiling face. Most of the students arrived as they always did in little knots, buzzing with lightweight conversation until the moment when he could compel their silence and unroll a thick layer of medieval history, like sound insulation, across the lecture theatre. A few who lived only in the cerebral world came in by themselves, moving quickly, with down-turned eyes, to their isolated places where they would perform fussy rituals with pens, impatient for him to start.

  She also came in alone, not furtively but with total assurance, looking round at all the people, who were clearly strangers to her, with an open, interested air that said she knew exactly who she was and why she chose to be there. He was quite sure she’d never come before, because he would certainly have noticed. Though it was the very stuff of his professional life, something in him still rebelled against giving lectures, making his voice the conduit of destruction by which his perfect notes were shredded and distorted into amateur, imperfect ears. Very nice, he’d thought momentarily. Very, very nice. But then she had to take second place to the strain of keeping track of what he wanted to say.

  At the end, perfectly, she had chosen to approach him and she had shaken his beliefs. ‘Hierarchies and social order: The evidence of the Domesday Book’ had been the subject of the lecture. She had stood nearby, waiting her turn as a handful of students, more eager to make an impression than to gain knowledge, advanced ill-thought-out ideas and misunderstood his answers. When they had all gone, she finally spoke.

  ‘Would you mind if I said that people aren’t quite like that?’ she had said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was very good. I enjoyed it, but I think you were describing lists, not people.’

  He had frowned and wished immediately it had been a smile. ‘We have to rely on our sources. Domesday is the best record we could hope to . . .’

  ‘No, I know, and I really liked listening, but I just feel it’s a mistake to make it sound like the people stepped out of its pages, all fitting in columns. It’s like someone in a thousand years’ time trying to describe us now, when all they’ve got to go by is a train timetable.’

  His surprise at this unaccustomed temerity was kept in bounds by the fascination of staring into her huge eyes. He tried to hold his ground.

  ‘That’s a pretty big subject. You have to remember that society was a whole lot more rigid then. There wasn’t room for much divergence.’

  She just smiled and shook her head and said, with total certainty, ‘People don’t change. There are all sorts now and there always have been.’

  ‘They didn’t have much cultural elbow-room to be different. Not until the fifteenth century or so.’

  ‘How do you know it changed then?’

  ‘We’ve got material; the Paston letters – correspondence from then on.’

  ‘Ah. It’s the letters then, isn’t it? That’s what changed. The evidence, not the people.’

  ‘I’ve never seen you before. Are you a student here?’

  She had put her hand to her mouth in sudden alarm. ‘Oh no, I hope you don’t mind. I sometimes just pop into lectures if I’m passing. I love history, you see. Isn’t that allowed?’

  He didn’t care whether it was allowed – he only cared that it removed the ethical barrier to asking her to lunch with h
im, and he’d been warming himself in her flame ever since. There had never been any doubt on his part. A photograph might not have made her look pretty in frozen cross-section, but life showed her to be lovely, always moving, often smiling, exhaling happiness and unstinting interest, leaving behind her a warm trail of returned smiles from all those on whom she had turned that illuminating face. When her unpredictable darkness claimed her, she would battle to keep it to herself or, failing, search out a corner to hide it.

  Mike wondered almost constantly what she saw in him. Neither had any conscious recognition that there was a faint echo of her face in his. The spacing of his eyes, the geometry of his cheeks, was such that if age made her gaunt, then in thirty or forty more years she might look just a little like he did now. That and something in their scent was enough for the chemical spark. History did the rest. He responded to her passionate need to discuss what came before, understood it and could stoke the fire with facts. History was soothing to her, indeed sometimes the only way she could be calmed when her unexpected, terrible sadness would strike. At her hospital bed after the miscarriage, she had wanted him to tell her old tales of kings and queens.

  The offer from Georgetown University had been in the wind for three or four months, but he hadn’t mentioned a word until he knew it was firm. Washington seemed to offer a new start. He tried to prepare the way, shifting his tales to American history, but those stories failed to hold her interest. When he told her outright that he had been offered the teaching job he had always dreamed of, she tried to fake it, tried to pretend there was nothing she would like more than to go to America with him, but the nightmares redoubled and her anxiety during her waking hours was so terrible to see that, in the end, he asked her outright if the thought of moving scared her. After a long silence she told him that, yes, it did.

  He turned the job down for her without saying another word, but a small, bitter, irrepressible voice kept telling him that he had just given up the best chance his career would ever be offered. It was a heavy, heavy blow to him, but he tried not to add to her suffering by letting her see it, tried not to mind when it became clear, as she recovered, that moving was exactly what she did want, as long as it wasn’t away from England. He didn’t understand the sense of that, but he went along with it because he had never expected to be offered the delight of love and this was nearer than he could have hoped of getting to it, despite the price he had to pay.