Englishwoman in France

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

FAMILY TIES

HONESTY'S DAUGHTER

THE LAVENDER HOUSE

NO REST FOR THE WICKED

A WOMAN SCORNED

THE WOMAN WHO DREW BUILDINGS

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.

M
y 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 roof 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.

T
rue 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?'