Englishwoman in France Read online

  Table of Contents

  Recent Titles by Wendy Robertson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One

  Chapter One: Starr

  Chapter Two: Siri

  Chapter Three: The Great Bear

  Chapter Four: Blue Murder

  Chapter Five: Beside the Great Middle Sea

  Chapter Six: Starr at the Maison d’Estella

  Chapter Seven: The Boy on the Boat

  Chapter Eight: Entertaining Mae

  Chapter Nine: Healing Processes

  Chapter Ten: Madame Patrice

  Chapter Eleven: Nightingales

  Chapter Twelve: Pilgrims

  Chapter Thirteen: Punishment

  Chapter Fourteen: Philip and the Small Red Hat

  Chapter Fifteen: Billy Asks a Favour

  Chapter Sixteen: Virgo

  Chapter Seventeen: An Enchanting Place for Exile

  Chapter Eighteen: The Monk’s Cell

  Chapter Nineteen: Walking with Misou

  Part Two

  Chapter Twenty: The Feast of Pentecost

  Chapter Twenty-One: The Old Soul

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Pestle and Mortar

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The Search

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Intruders

  Chapter Twenty-Five: The Governor’s Wife

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Empire

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Remembering Forwards

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Fish Mark

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Fox

  Chapter Thirty: Long Journey Home

  Chapter Thirty-One: Cessero

  Chapter Thirty-Two: On the Ridge

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Salt and Sandalwood

  Chapter Thirty-Four: The Swarm

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Into the Now

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Starr Bright

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: And in the Beginning

  Afterword

  Recent Titles by Wendy Robertson

  FAMILY TIES

  HONESTY’S DAUGHTER

  THE LAVENDER HOUSE

  NO REST FOR THE WICKED

  A WOMAN SCORNED

  THE WOMAN WHO DREW BUILDINGS

  AN ENGLISHWOMAN IN FRANCE

  Wendy Robertson

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published 2011

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2011 by Wendy Robertson.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Robertson, Wendy, 1941-

  An Englishwoman in France.

  1. Extrasensory perception–Fiction. 2. Murder victims’

  Families–Fiction. 3. English–France–Fiction. 4. Agde

  (France)–Fiction. 5. Love stories.

  I. Title

  823.9'14-dc22

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-337-2 (epub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8031-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-344-1 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  Starr

  England 2009

  My name is Estella, sometimes known as Starr. I’m thirty-two years of age and my partner Philip thinks I’m barmy. No, seriously, he thinks I’m mad. In fact I’m very normal – or as normal as any of us ever is. And the older I get the more I realize no one is really normal. Aren’t we defined by our abnormality and therefore normal in our own way?

  Of course, like most people, I have my own play on what is considered normal. There is this family tradition of seeing the dead. My grandmother’s sister, Great-aunt Lily, was a medium – you know, one of those people who stand in front of a crowd and call up the dead. Me, I see the dead in the more ordinary way of things. I just see people who shouldn’t be there, in that place at that time. For me this is the ordinary way of things.

  These visions can appear in the most ordinary places: the park, for instance, where I used to walk hand in hand with my mother and once saw a soldier in full First World War battle gear. In fact I saw right through him to the dusty privet hedge behind. Then there was that time, in the Spar shop on the corner, when I saw this woman standing behind the woman at the till. She was very old and wore a red sari with gold edges. I could see through her to the serried ranks of cigarettes on the wall behind her. She was like smoke in the air.

  And I would regularly see my father standing behind my mother in the bathroom. Not so unusual, you might say. But he wasn’t there either. She and I subsequently decided the person I saw must have been my father, but she wasn’t sure who that even was. It could be one of four men, she said. ‘There were those four wild weeks in 1977 on this campsite in Brittany. They were all nice guys. But, you know . . .’ she added vaguely. ‘Ships that pass in the night and all that.’

  My mother often relished our shared gift, but she taught me very early on to keep it a secret. ‘That kind of thing used to happen to me, love, when I was young,’ she said. ‘But it kind of faded away.’

  When, in the early days, people showed their concern for me, she would explain away my first visions as ‘imaginary friends’ – a normal part of childhood. But then one day, when I was eight, she sat me down and suggested I should keep my observations and descriptions to myself, as my strange habit unsettled people and made them think I was odd. ‘Anyway, Starr, it’s kind of bad manners. Makes people uncomfortable. Like talking to poor people about how much money you’ve got.’

  She said I should even give up sharing my visions with Mae Armitage, my best friend. It seemed that Mae’s mum had talked about it with my mother and said that all this stuff had to stop. Apparently it gave her nightmares, even if it didn’t bother Mae. Of course Mae and I took no notice of her mum. We still told fortunes with the cards. Mae was usually better at it than me, because she could make up exotic and bizarre stories. I just told what I really saw – which was sometimes quite boring stuff.

  Once when Mae was sleeping over and my mother was away we chalked an ouija board on our kitchen table and had a go. But we quickly scrubbed out the chalk letters when the air started to smell of incense and the room started pulsing like a bomb.

  But really, my mother’s ban started to wear me down – effectively turning me from a bubbly, wide-awake child into a quiet, reserved one. This ban started to make me feel odd in my own eyes as well as the eyes of others. Mae was my only relief from this. We still shared some secrets that bound us together. But to tell the truth even Mae herself didn’t really want me to go on seeing these dead people. In the end I thought it best to keep it a secret, even from her.

  Tib: Good Fortune, 301 AD

  A warm, salty breeze lifted the bright reddish hair of the boy, sometimes called Tib, who was sitting with his legs dangling from the flat roo
f of the house of his father, Helée, governor of this city which was now laid out below the boy like a map.

  In front of him the neat road – square blocks of basalt – led straight down to the busy river harbour, widening halfway where it joined with both the straight road down from the barracks to his left and the narrower road to his right that led from the graceful temple of Venus. The clusters of houses on either side of the road were laid out in a grid, their black stone walls relieved by clumps of wild fig and straggling, bulging garden plots.

  Tib raised his eyes and watched closely as the elegant ships hauled down their sails and resorted to the power of muscle and oar to manoeuvre their vessels into the teaming river port finally to squeeze into spaces alongside vessels already drawn up at the long harbour wall.

  But however fast or elegant the ships were in reaching and tying up at Good Fortune, they had to wait their turn to be unloaded by the labourers and slaves working for the long-haired man – looking more like a pirate than a harbourmaster – who goaded them on with a combination of roars and threats which they answered in good measure. Even up here on the hill Tib could hear the deep, gravelly sound of their throaty curses.

  Tib felt proud of the order and efficiency of hundreds of years of harbour routine that drove the port to such success. His father’s tax scrolls were witness to that. Now he watched the shouting workers on one part of the dock heaving ashore great jars containing fine goods – silverware, spices, pottery and wine imported into Gaul from lands across the Great Inner Sea. Then he leaned sideways to see slaves manhandling racks of equally tall earthenware jars now containing wine and grain, salt and oil, ready to take them in the other direction, to the Imperial City of Rome.

  TWO

  Siri

  True to the family tradition, my own daughter Siri was the outcome of a rather arresting one-night stand. Not quite ships-that-pass-in-the-night, but something similar. (More about that anon.) In fact by the time Siri was born my mother was living in Scotland, married to a very steady teacher she’d met on the Internet. The two of them grew vegetables and kept pigs and were very Green. Siri and I sometimes went up there for Bank Holidays. On occasions I left Siri with them for the long summer holidays so that I could bank up a pile of work to make both of our lives easier.

  In those days I worked as a kind of dogsbody on a women’s magazine and by the time I was pregnant with Siri I’d actually managed to turn my strange habit of seeing the dead into a saleable commodity. One day the regular journalist went on maternity leave and they added her astrology column to my more mundane tasks. I took a deep breath, did this lump of research into the nitty-gritty of astrology and – using those conventions – wrote some pretty inspired copy which entertained the editor, even though she thought it all nonsense. Then when the proper astrologer had twins and didn’t return, the job was mine. Perhaps that was something she hadn’t seen in the stars.

  I even posted my astrology column right through my very short maternity leave, to make sure I kept the job. Then, when Siri was three months old, I came back into the office to do the astrology columns and the other usual running-around tasks at the magazine. But of course the cost of childcare in London swallowed up half my salary, so after seven months I began to take Siri into the office with me. It was nice having her there, first barricaded in a corner with chairs and then beside me on the desk, her fat legs swinging. Later she would sit under my desk playing with shiny kitchen utensils from the props cupboard. But then we got this new editor who was very edgy about Siri being in the office. You’d have thought women working on a women’s magazine would be more understanding, wouldn’t you?

  In fact, the column was very successful with advertisers and readers, who relished its quirky tone. In the end, my editor – marginally embarrassed – told me perhaps I should write the column from home. ‘Such good feedback on the piece every week, with your kooky slant on all things stellar, darling, but . . .’ Her glance dropped to Siri who was on the floor, chewing a corner of last month’s edition. ‘Perhaps from home? Easier for you I’d think?’

  The woman must have felt a bit guilty because she got me this contact on a men’s magazine, where I became ‘Joe Black’, who could see into the future for a whole band of men who liked luxury and had mundane, if expensive, tastes. Then the column – appropriately modified – was syndicated in a series of magazines here and abroad. So in the end I actually made a better living working from home.

  You might think it was an isolated life working alone with Siri in our little flat, but it was fun, creating columns, filing them, then going to the park and the play group, having coffee in cafés and thinking up new takes on Saturn being in the ascendant. The two of us lived on our own, on our own carefree island, in our own world.

  Then, late one night when Siri was four, we ran out of milk so we went to our local twenty-four-hour Spar. That was the night we met Philip Crabtree. Those two took to each other and that was that. They were entranced.

  To be honest, despite being entranced with Siri myself, I was just a bit lonely, Philip was kind and funny, and Siri was entertained. In no time at all we were a little family in his house south of the river. I still did my astrology columns and kept my independence. Philip went to the office, and Siri eventually started school.

  So far, so ordinary.

  Then one day my dear mother died very suddenly in Scotland. She’d been picking up sacks of food for the pigs. Brain haemorrhage. Pouf! She was gone and I never saw it coming. Isn’t that strange? She left me two distinct legacies. First, that joy, that sunny sense of freedom that shone from her in rays. Second, a rather substantial lump of money from an insurance she’d paid into since I was born. Oh! And her special gift of insight, of course. That’s three legacies, isn’t it?

  I only saw her once after she died. I’d mourned her in a catatonic fashion, feeling wooden and strange at her absence. It was as though my whole world – even Siri – was now rendered in sepia. I only slept two hours at a time. I often woke up, left Philip and climbed into Siri’s bed.

  Once, I woke up in the middle of the night, clasping my own neck with a strangling grasp. I blinked and there was my mother beside the bed in a bright yellow dress, watching me in that same close, thoughtful way she’d had in life. ‘It’s all right, Starr,’ she said. ‘You can let go, you know.’ Her voice sounded so normal. I have to tell you that was the first time I’d ever heard one of my visions speak.

  My hand loosened from my neck and I glared up at her angrily. She nodded and smiled. I could see right through her to Siri’s bedroom door. Then she was gone.

  ‘What is it, Mummy?’ Siri, beside me in the bed, opened a sleepy eye. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all. Everything is all right now.’

  And so it was. Then.

  Tib

  The boy raised his eyes further to where the sun-silvered water splashed up against the bright hulls of the ships on the far shore, then spurted into the air, each drop a sparkling world in itself. And now his eye was drawn to a smaller, neater galley painted in Imperial colours, as it manoeuvred itself onto the Governor’s private landing. A smart seaman jumped ashore and secured it with stout ropes which looked fresh and new.

  Tib jumped as a hand dropped on his shoulder. A voice murmured in his ear, ‘A fine sight, son, eh? The best in the world d’you think? Finest goods from the East coming through our port to trade in Gaul? How about that?’ His father’s tone was proud, affectionate but still seemed to the boy to carry a warning note, like a stone in a clod of earth that a friend throws at you in a fun-fight.

  Tib wriggled, uneasy as ever in his father’s clasp. He released himself by swinging his legs back over the parapet and standing up straight in front of his father, in the soldierly fashion he’d been taught. ‘So it is, sir. The best in the world.’

  They turned and watched together as a man disembarked from the Imperial boat and jumped across two boats to reach the governor�
��s landing. ‘There he is,’ said the governor. ‘The Corinthian.’

  The man, who was now getting directions from the piratish harbourmaster, wore dark flowing robes of a foreign cut, a round hat on his head and carried a heavy pack tied with leather thongs slung over one shoulder.

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Tib. ‘Does he visit us?’

  ‘Aye, he does, son. Well, he visits you. He’s to be your teacher. Some of our distinguished guests have returned to the court with tales of your talents. It seems that the Empress was intrigued by these tales, so she sends you a teacher to test your wits. This Greek is her man. A freedman. Said to be very clever, a doctor of many arts.’

  Tib sighed. Talk of his cleverness was always embarrassing. Since he was very small he’d endured the required ritual of performing for his father’s guests like a Barbary ape – spouting poetry, playing his flute, showing off his calculations and inventions. In his eight years of life many great men had patted him on the head and many gracious ladies had given him sweetmeats. He thought of one woman, black haired and wild eyed, who’d given him a pomegranate. He had liked her. He wished she’d come again.

  ‘My education is sufficient, Father,’ he said now in desperation. ‘With the documents and instruments you’ve had brought here, and my mother’s help . . .’

  ‘No, no, son! Your mother has the brain of a pea.’ His father was firm. ‘You need further food for that thinking miracle you have inside you. The message from the Empress says that this doctor has unique knowledge of the medical arts. Armed with those arts, and your great wisdom, one day you’ll be of service to the Empire.’ He examined his son from head to toe then back again. ‘You never were going to make a soldier, Tibery. And because of your pea-brain mother you are too tender in the mind to be a leader. But . . .’

  Tib had heard the story many times of how the Empire and the Emperor had served Governor Helée well. Here was an empire where a man like him, the Gaulish son of a mere blacksmith-turned-soldier, could rise from the ranks to the high Imperial position he held now. In this modern world anything was possible. And like many veterans, Helée was relishing the rewards of his life’s loyalty to the Empire.