Ferney
Authors: 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.
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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.
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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.
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.