The Time of the Ghosts by Gillian Polack

Author:Gillian Polack [Polack, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, fantasy, Australia, Canberra, ghosts, cultural borrowing, Melusine, elderly women, werewolves, bushrangers, vampire cats, spirits, haunting, food, history, Jewish history, Australian history
ISBN: 9781611387193
Publisher: Book View Cafe
Published: 2018-03-13T07:00:00+00:00

Tales of Melusine #21

It was the New Year. It was England. It was the year 1591. Melusine had just been given a handsel and she was totally at sea.

She wanted to say to the young man who had given it to her, “I don’t know your customs. Do you give New Year presents to all the women you know, or only to the ones you have interest in?” She couldn’t.

She had been in London along with a group of people who were trying to play Court games. Influence and power and jockeying for position.

The Queen would die soon. Elizabeth had been old forever and she had ruled forever and she would die soon. The last of the Tudors. Every year courtiers debated the date of her death and every year potential courtiers flocked to London and to Westminster and to wherever the Queen happened to have taken herself to play the game of influence. Most of them were away from London now, because it was less salubrious than they had expected. Also, because Elizabeth wasn’t there. She was busy touring the provinces, like a player. She was busy controlling her nobility, also like a player.

Melusine had found London changed. She noted the changes as if they were pieces on an accounting table. It wasn’t just the surprising absence of the court and its entourages. Most of London was still lovely and Southwark was still a place that was not suitable for ladies, but the city had become tired around the edges. It had grown too quickly and its water supply was not going to grow with it and its sewerage already had not grown with it and its public baths had been shut down so long before that its poorer citizens had one hundred and fifty years of makeshift washing behind them. Just the thought made Melusine feel a little tired and unclean.

At the same time it was prosperous. As long as the residents of the big city mixed in the right circles, life was full of luxuries.

The problem with being French, however, was that some of the right circles were less than welcoming. Too much politics. The air of London was all about politics. So when her party split up for Christmas (in the absence of a welcome at Court) to go where they could, Melusine found herself invited to a house party near St Albans.

She handled Christmas with dignity and was able to say, honestly, that she was not a Roman Catholic, despite her nationality. “I have always been an outsider in my own land,” she explained, over and over again.

Only one of the twelve days of Christmas was a problem then, and that was New Year, with its presents and small romances.

Melusine was being wooed by two men. Both were named Henry. One was young and gave her a handsel. One was starting to turn grey and gave her a book. She wanted to shake them both off, but the quarters were too close and gossip too rampant.

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