Ferney (31 page)

The sounds barely touched him in the church. Here it was easier for him to abandon the structure of laborious, ordered, maintained memory and slip instead between the times in a reverie of
peace. It had changed, of course. They’d mucked around with the proportions and the details a fair bit with their restorations and their rebuildings, but it still consisted of most of the
same old stones and it still sat squarely on the same patch of ground, and through all the changes it still preserved the same quality of cool, high silence inside that made your thoughts louder.
Above all it had its records written in stone and Ferney liked to ground himself from time to time through the contemplation of the engraved evidence of who he had been. He had come now to exercise
his memory and blow the dust from what had nearly been a final sidetrack off the main course of his life.

He was on a mission of mercy. Ferney would never have admitted it, but he was shocked by the state Gally was in. Knowing her as she usually was, he could see how deeply she was currently
undermined by being out of touch with her past. Whatever different aspects were dictated in different lives by time, circumstance and body chemistry, those were just overlays to the strong serenity
that always marked her out. The Gally he knew so well was a smiling haven of calm, a wise and loving beacon. In this life he still had a sense of that, but in front, obscuring the real woman, was a
damaged façade of fright and phobia. There was, he thought, only one option and that was to carry carefully on, locating the pain and filling in the gaps for her, but he needed to know her
pain more closely.

Once before and only once he had felt the same pain and had come close to losing Gally for ever. The life that started with the glory of his singing had led to a lethal exile. In the recent
aching years, believing this time he was truly alone, he had found it too painful to consider what had followed then. Now, still slightly aghast at the proposal he would soon have to make, he knew
it had the power to stiffen his resolve. It was not easy. In this joint heartland of theirs, the constant ridge of Penselwood, there was always an echo to call up the memories, but this one was
rooted in a foreign landscape, a disconcerting world where there had been nothing the slightest bit familiar to serve as a crutch to a young, struggling mind – a world in which that mind had
been bent to madness by the discord of unfamiliarity.

He had to get there the long way round, via the death that came before the birth, because the suppression of all that was Ferney in the young man who died had, he was sure, made the youth who
came after him all the more vulnerable to alien insanity.

‘James Cumberlidge. Born the first day of October 1777,’ said the small marble tablet set low in the wall. ‘First Lieutenant in the Royal Navy of his Britannic Majesty, King
George the Third. Gave his life most gloriously in the service of his country at Quiberon, France, in the fight against the enemies of our sovereign, the twentieth day of July in the year of our
lord 1795.’

He sat sideways in the nearest pew and stared down at the inscription. It must have cost William Cumberlidge a great deal, he thought. William Cumberlidge, just one from the long line of his
fathers, the men whose genes had dictated the varied bodies his constant mind would enter. He could pull individuals out of the muddled ranks – the brutes and the friends, the kind men and
the autocrats – but William Cumberlidge was as distant as the arctic, a pompous bully who had passed on the family’s recognizable barrel-chested build but had never for a moment come to
understand his son’s mind. He read the words again, thinking it so typical of that man to exaggerate the rank, deriving more satisfaction from the boast of his son’s death than he ever
had from his life. That father had lost patience with his only son at a very early stage.

‘You’re James,’ he would say when he came back to the big house on the edge of Bourton from his merchant’s office in Mere. ‘Stop this Ferney nonsense. I named you
James after the apostle and James you will stay,’ then he would turn away and stride into the house as the boy who knew as yet only that he was Ferney watched the grooms unharness the fine
chestnut horses from the landau.

So James suppressed the dawning Ferney in him, to turn away from confrontation and trouble, and became for most of the time an outwardly cheerful little boy despite his father’s harsh
formality. His mother made up for the shortage of love and though he was kept away from villagers who were deemed unsuitable playmates for a merchant’s son and denied the company of the local
aristocracy through their similar view of him, he was superficially content with his limited world within the garden walls. On the day before his fifth birthday, at the very end of a warm
September, he was taken in the landau with his mother and father to visit his grandmother at the old house in Penselwood where he had been born and that was where the dam of memory broke.

They had taken the long way round through Chaffeymoor because the track from the east past the jute factory was for horses only and the encroaching brambles might scratch the varnished
bottle-green flanks of the new carriage. The horses had to trot up the hill towards the village, though the ruts and bumps made the ride uncomfortable. Mr Cumberlidge thought distance was a trick
designed to cheat him of time and time was on an hourly rate that ticked in his head. James, allowed to stand on the floor of the carriage so long as he kept a good firm hold on the top of the
door, looked out and saw a slender woman of perhaps twenty-five standing in a cottage garden, a woman in a brown smock, stacking firewood for the coming winter. A sharp dart of adult anguish flew
into a corner of his heart and, leaning far out over the side so that his mother, fearful he would fall under the back wheels, made a grab for him, he called out, ‘Gally, Gally’ as they
went by.

His mother chuckled. ‘Who’s Gally?’ she said. ‘You don’t know that woman. Who did you think she was?’

‘Don’t you try and talk to people like that,’ said his father more fiercely. ‘They’ll take it all wrong and think the less of you.’

He sat on his mother’s knee, silent, muddled and heartbroken that the woman, who must have seen him, had shown no response to his call and for the rest of that day he was disconsolate. His
mother put it down to the greengages he had eaten at breakfast: she could hardly be expected to recognize the sickness of lost love in a five-year-old, just as he could hardly be expected to know
that infection, in the brief years since he had last shared her life, had robbed his Gally of her hearing.

His grandmother died the next year, bringing an end to the expeditions that would always have him craning, intent on that cottage and on every woman they passed in the village. His voice, his
peerless singing voice, developed during that time, but it was another six years before he was held to be old enough to leave the house by himself on occasional country rambles and though he
haunted the lane into Penselwood with obsessive determination at every opportunity, she was gone – carried off, he came to think, by one of the illnesses which scythed through the unprotected
poor and which would have his mother closing windows and stoking fires as if to beat them back by the sweltering heat.

Cut off from his background, in touch only with an acute but formless sorrow and scared to allow himself his proper identity, he diminished into a shadow world. Looking back, Ferney found even
those memories so insubstantial that he seemed only half present in this unhappy boy. There had been other times when the part of him that carried the long memory of his identity had been forced to
play second fiddle to an overwhelming physical presence. Over-active glands could occasionally produce a monstrous body for the uneasy soul to inhabit, where floods of manly aggression could swamp
the rational messages of the quiet mind. In those lives he was only ever partly the true Ferney and the memories were always confusing, warped by the strength of the parasitic body, but such lives,
thankfully, were few and far between. This hadn’t, he thought, been one of those occasions. From the wisps of feelings he could trawl back, this had been a boy so disabled by that tragic
moment of recognition that he had recoiled from the other messengers from the past, pushing them away at the expense of the balance and strength of his character, so that only the singing was
allowed to matter.

His father thought him mostly worthless, a dim-witted milksop whose one acceptable gift was his voice. It was James’s sole solace, that perfect heaven’s flute of a voice which
survived puberty to re-emerge deeper but equally spell-binding. Singing was his true pleasure and even his father tolerated it so long as the songs he sang for him were manly and patriotic. He was
twelve when the Bastille fell and word of the great terror that followed came winging to England brought by those of the ruling classes who escaped across the Channel. He was much in demand to sing
the patriotic songs that could chase away the fear of the ogre across the water. His father, safe in his own advanced years, was all for a family offering to be sent into the reek of blood and he
lost patience with his son’s soft life. Believing he needed a tough regime and male company to put him to rights, and that patriotic duty called, old William enrolled young James into the
navy. If James survived he would be a man. If James died then the family would have their very own hero. The old man kept those thoughts to himself as he defended his decision against a
surprisingly bold attack from his wife.

Ferney found himself in a dream, still standing by the memorial tablet on tired legs, and turned to lower himself on to the end of a pew, pushing a heavy crocheted kneeler out
of the way. There would have been little time for introspection in that regimented naval world and here again, reflection on this Cumberlidge mongrel character made him wonder how it must have
been. It hadn’t taken many lifetimes for Ferney to learn a few unchanging rules for survival and happiness. The first golden rule was don’t work for others, or at least not for long.
There was no freedom if you did. It always led to a choice, either to hide your light under a bushel and have to obey the commands of fools, or to let your ability show through and that was usually
a bad idea. Don’t show your wisdom was, therefore, the second rule. Let others catch sight of the wide-ranging skills that came with such long experience of every human foible and they would
elevate you, put you in charge to get the most out of you, milk you dry, contest your decisions, bring you down and finally grind you in the dust. That was the way of power and the usual reward for
ability, in his experience.

Cumberlidge must have been content to submerge himself in naval discipline, though Ferney could just touch on the absent moods that would still capture him and get him into trouble. Only his
voice made him popular with his fellows on board and though he hated the coarse tunes they wanted him to sing, those tunes were the price of his being left alone the rest of the time.

Sitting there undisturbed as the church clock ticked the day past him, Ferney could catch snatches of it – a wildly unsuitable life for this young man. Under ‘Black Dick’ Howe,
he served in the flagship
Queen Charlotte
in the lackadaisical blockade of the French channel ports, rolling around at anchor in Torbay for much of the time. He fought in the battle that
was finally joined with the demoralized navy of Villaret de Joyeuse. Ferney knew far more from the history books he’d read since then than he ever discovered by delving into the memories of
this shadow creature. Cumberlidge’s perceptions had been dim at the best of times. The books said that the French officer corps had been decimated by the guillotine. Villaret de Joyeuse
himself was a stripling lieutenant, promoted to admiral because he was one of the few to survive the purges. His response to his unskilled, poorly led crews in their ill-prepared ships was to have
the decks painted red, blood-red, so that the inevitable carnage they would face in battle would show up less clearly. By this he hoped to avoid rapid demoralization.

In 1794 young James showed himself in his true useless colours. Large parts of France were in danger of starvation in the unruly aftermath of the Revolution and the French fleet was trying to
bring a convoy of American grain through Howe’s blockade. Ferney could just recall disguising the fear in partly hysterical excitement on 28 May, when billowing sails first hardened through
the early morning haze to show that they were closing on the French ships. They traded a few shots only, then darkness and bad weather stopped them. In a fully-remembered life, Ferney would have
been scared in a wholly different way, he thought, terrified at the prospect of death there, burial at sea far from any retaining, restoring stone – death with no prospect except slow
dissolution in the dark bottom mud of the cold Atlantic. As it was, that hardly seemed to matter to this youth who had no great interest in whether he lived or where he died.

The first of June was a calm, clear day and Black Dick chose his moment for battle. The
Queen Charlotte
was one of the few ships that succeeded in following his order to cut through the
French line, but even though the tactics went awry the battle was won. James Cumberlidge, typically, could claim no associated glory from his part, spending the last half of the battle below decks
with a broken arm when, suddenly dreaming even at the height of danger, he was hit a glancing blow by the shattered debris of French cannon fire.

It was just the sort of contribution his commanding officer expected of him and it was received by him in just the same vacant way that drove his superior officers to despair. It was therefore
the main reason why, a year later, he was detailed off for a hazardous return to the coast of France, being regarded as entirely expendable, and here Ferney’s memory was much more certain
because the extremity of danger had forced even James Cumberlidge to a degree of awareness.

As plans go, that had been a truly ridiculous idea. Ferney had searched through the books to confirm it really had been the way he remembered it. The accounts were only sketchy but they all
agreed that the ‘Screech Owls’ were real. Breton smugglers were fed up with the results of the French Revolution because they had no one to chase them any more. The upheavals had
destroyed the French customs service. With no danger of being caught, any amateur could be a smuggler in such anarchic times and the bottom dropped out of the business. The smugglers formed
themselves into a paramilitary rabble, named themselves the ‘Screech Owls’ and decided they wanted the old order restored. They were to join a small army of exiled royalists who had
persuaded the English that if they could be landed on the Breton coast the people would flock to them. No military strategist would have given a fig for their chances of success but, despite that,
the Royal Navy was given the job of landing the motley force.