The Ghost Tree by Barbara Erskine

Author:Barbara Erskine [Erskine, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008195830
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2018-08-23T07:00:00+00:00

Thomas

In January 1776 I became what was known as a Fellow Commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge. As, at the same time, I was studying at Lincoln’s Inn and was a pupil successively of two top counsel, I exercised my right, as the son of an earl, not to attend lectures or take an examination to obtain my degree. But I had to pay for everything, even the bedmaker who looked after my rooms, and those rooms were a haven of peace after the chaos of my home life, so when I could I took time to travel to Cambridge and go to a few lectures, where I studied English composition, and I am sorry to say I felt not a moment’s guilt in leaving Fanny and Abi to take care of my family while I enjoyed those short interludes of the kind of academic rigour I could only dream of when I was a boy.

I was leading an exhausting double life. I found it hard to study at home, reading late into the night and growing ever more cross and irritated with the children and their noise. Abi would take them out all day, attempting to tire them out, but at night when I was sitting with my candle and a tankard of porter, trying to read, one or other of them would begin to cry. Though I would clamp my hands over my ears to block out the sound, I could hear Fanny’s urgent whispers as she endeavoured to soothe them, and the patter of Abi’s feet as she ran up and down the stairs on her pittance of a wage, which sometimes was nothing at all. Even though my door remained closed I lost the thread of my reading and would have to go back to the beginning of the page yet again as the ink scattered droplets across the page or dried on the nib of my pen.

One day when I came home with my usual package of cheap meats for our supper, the house was empty and I found a note from Fanny on the table. ‘I have found the perfect solution. The children and I are staying with my cousins near the Fleet Ditch. We are welcome there and we will return home when you go up to Trinity again. Call in on your way to Lincoln’s Inn and we will kiss you good morning. Enjoy the peace, my darling.’

I smiled with relief and fervently kissed the note. My perfect wife who understood all and everything about me had solved our problems at one brave stroke. Her cousins, the Moores, lived in a chaotic crowded house at the foot of Ludgate Hill. They were successful jewellers and the most charming and kindly people who used to refer to me as ‘our Tommy’. I had no idea how they would accommodate Fanny and Abi and the children, but I tried not to think about it beyond giving thanks to the Almighty and blessing them all as

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