The Ghost Tree

  Thomas’s illness worsened daily and his brother was summoned from Dryburgh. The doctors diagnosed severe inflammation of the lungs. They listened to his labouring chest and bled him and gave him various potions. It did no good. It was no surprise to Thomas to find himself from time to time watching their efforts to prolong his life from somewhere outside that poor old body. He had known from the moment he lost the amulet that he was doomed, that his battles were over. His dogs would miss him, but he knew Frances would take them. For the rest, he was tired. His children, all of them, must fend for themselves now, but from wherever he was bound, he would watch over them.

  ‘Davy!’ Thomas drifted in and out of consciousness now, but as Davy sat at his bedside alone he reached out to his son, who took his hand. ‘I have a journal. There, in my portmanteau. I want you to burn it.’

  ‘But, Papa, that would be sacrilege!’ Davy tried to force himself to smile, to make a joke of it. ‘Do you remember Lord Byron said all your writings would one day be valuable!’

  ‘Do it now. Please.’ Thomas was visibly irritated. ‘What is in there is private and of no concern to anyone but me and my maker.’

  Reluctantly Davy stood up and went to lift the lid of the valise. He found the leather-covered notebook, filled with his father’s cramped handwriting in a writing case lying on the top of his folded shirts.

  ‘Do it now, while I watch.’ Thomas leaned forward on his pillows, gesturing towards the brightly burning fire.

  Reluctantly Davy took the notebook and walked towards the hearth. He hesitated for only a moment then he tossed the small volume into the flames.

  * * *

  Sally Laidlaw was in her kitchen when she smelt smoke. By the time the police and the firemen arrived the downstairs of Number 26 was well alight. They found the bodies in the kitchen; Timothy was holding his sister in his arms.

  Thomas

  How strange that I can talk dispassionately about my own demise. It was a relief when it happened, though I was sad to see Kate’s tears and my brother and my son, the two Davids in my life, sobbing on one another’s shoulders. It was decided to inter me there, in the old Kirk of St Nicholas near Kirkhill where my brother Harry already lay in a tomb with others of my family. The Davids suggested that I should be embalmed and my body taken south to lie in Westminster Abbey. What tosh. My living ego might have loved such an honour but I was content now with Kate’s firm decision that I should be taken in a simple procession, led by a soberly black-clad minister of the kirk, with no fripperies or even music, to lie in a quiet corner, where my old corpse could, if it were able to rise from its vault, view the glories of the distant Pentland Hills. I was to lie in Scotland and I was content.

  My son Davy disappointed me. When the fire died after he had disposed of my journal he found it lying there only half burned. He took it out of the ashes and carried it to his bedroom where he wrapped it in a cravat and buried it in his own trunk. Later he would give it to Frances, with a plaited clipping of my hair in a gold locket, as consolation in her distress.

  My youngest children did not fare well. They were traced at last to Stonecutters Court where Sarah had returned to live with her brother’s family. As their mother she regained custody of them from that same fool magistrate now that their father was gone, and she complained bitterly to all who would listen that I had left her without maintenance. Davy tried to persuade her to send Hampden to a good school, offering to pay all the expenses himself, but in her bitterness she would not allow it, demanding help and money from any who would give it and at the same time claiming she was without friends or help from my family. My heart broke for those little ones but for the family, for the time being at least, they were gone.

  She tried to earn a living as a dressmaker, then a bonnet-maker as she was when I first met her. Her gift of speaking with the dead had deserted her. Once she even tried to summon me to use me as her mouthpiece. It did not work.

  And what of Andrew Farquhar?

  He too was silenced, swept away in the storm, perhaps, though not, I now know, forever. Frances had the gift of the sight, but also that inestimable quality of serenity; through her, the slave woman’s doll kept our family safe. Did Farquhar hunt me through the echoing spaces of the universe? Perhaps, in his endless bitterness, he did. I did not encounter him, not until my life was dragged from the old and dusty papers Frances had left hidden and unread until they were laid bare on the desk of my great-great-great-great-great-grandchild, a woman called Ruth.

  Epilogue

  ‘Neither neighbouring property was damaged and structurally your house is sound. The damage is superficial except in the kitchen where the fire started.’ James Reid looked at Ruth over his glasses. ‘Once the paperwork is complete you can do what you like with it. I assume you will want to sell?’

  She nodded. ‘I want nothing to do with it.’

  ‘I can’t say I blame you.’ For a moment he almost lost his professional dispassion. ‘Though, I can’t help feeling,’ he hesitated, ‘that fire cleanses as well as destroys.’ He cleared his throat. ‘As far as the money is concerned you have the likely final figures there and the jewellery and cash found in April Bradford’s hotel room have been recognised as yours by the court – the money being the cash paid for two diamond rings and a selection of Victorian and other jewellery from your mother’s collection. Would you believe, the woman kept the receipts? No next of kin for the Bradfords have responded to challenge the ruling and as far as the courts can establish there are none.’ He stood up and held out his hand. ‘Goodbye for now, Ruth. I hope you can put all the trauma and unhappiness you have experienced in the last few months behind you for good. I understand you will be living in the Borders for the foreseeable future?’

  She noted the quizzical lift of his eyebrow and laughed. ‘I will indeed. You have my address, James. As you well know, I am lodging with a fellow author.’

  Hers was not the only property that was going on the market. Fin had decided to sell the Old Mill House and planned to go back to the Isle of Skye in the spring. ‘But it’s not forever. Some more filming and some downtime then I’ll be back,’ he told her with a hug. ‘I have an eye on a flat near Max. I don’t have the strength or time to live in a big house any more. A flat is all I need and this one has a magnificent kitchen.’

  Lachy came down to the Tower House to help Malcolm demolish what was left of the chapel after the winter winds had cleansed it, helped, in an advisory capacity, by Cas and Pol who ran round in wild excitement and Ruth who watched from a safe distance.

  After Lachy had gone, Ruth and Malcolm walked back up the track to stand on the site. For a while they just stood there, arm in arm, then Mal nodded. ‘There is nothing here. No ghosts. The spirit of the woods will move back soon.’

  ‘Will you build a new chapel?’

  ‘No. There are hundreds of acres of woods here. That’s all I need. And my special tree.’ He slapped the old oak tree on the trunk affectionately.

  ‘Your family tree.’

  ‘When we go over to Dryburgh I’ll show you an ancient yew in the abbey grounds that would have been a thousand years old when Thomas and his brother were there. That could be yours.’

  She shook her head. ‘It turned out my family tree was full of ghosts,’ she said. ‘A ghost tree.’

  He laughed. ‘Everyone’s is,’ he said. ‘It’s just that not everyone sees them.’

  Later, she went up to the room that had been her bedroom and was now her study.

  Pol and Cas were up there with her as usual, lying patiently on the rug, but now, suddenly, they both stood up. One after the other they slipped out of the door and down the spiral stairs.

  Ruth had been about to turn on the lamp but now she waited. It was almost no surprise when she saw Thomas’s familiar figure in the shadows by the window.

  His story, with its heroes and its villains, had been told, the ghosts laid to rest, at least for now. He had come to say goodbye.

  Author??
?s Note

  This story is fiction, woven around and through the very real life of my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather and his family. Like Ruth and her mother, both fictional characters, I became fascinated by Thomas from an early age because of the stories I heard about him and the fact that his name was treated with such reverence by the family that many of them, myself included, found themselves given his name. He intrigued me, not least because I wondered why we, as such distant relations, should possess so much memorabilia about him. Alas, no letters or journals (or silver!) in the quantity that Ruth inherits – they too are fictional, but nevertheless enough to make him seem very real and very close.

  As soon as I realised I was a writer, beguiled and enchanted by all the branches of our family history, I dreamed of one day writing a novel based on Thomas’s life and The Ghost Tree is the result at last of an attempt to make sense of all the material assembled by my great-aunt and after her by my father, research that revealed a man far more complex, more interesting and more human than I ever expected.

  Thomas was the youngest child in an ambitious, highly motivated, brilliant family. That much is clear. The basic facts of his life mostly come from a book called Volume VI of the Lives of the Lord Chancellors by Lord Campbell, that was published in 1847, only twenty-four years after Thomas’s death. He wrote in close collaboration with his son, Thomas, who obviously gave him access to much detail, but also a certain amount of disingenuous obfuscation.

  Subsequent biographies have mostly followed Campbell’s version. I have worked with two, Erskine by J.A. Lovat-Fraser (1932) and Thomas Erskine and Trial by Jury, by John Hostettler (1996). But we now have the benefit of much original material which is online and it is relatively easy to follow up each strand of his career, his education, his time in the navy, of which I knew nothing except for the lightning strike. (The first of three, according to family legend. I remember my mother showing me the reference in an old edition of the Guinness Book of Records. His record is long broken.) His army career, his legal and political careers, his marriages and his children are all on record to explore. Though, as always on the internet, the facts are not always consistent.

  His time as Lord Chancellor turned out to be fairly brief, but his passion for civil rights and his reputation as the most brilliant barrister of his age, his involvement with the anti-slavery bill of 1806 and his devotion to animal welfare lasted a lifetime. His animal rights bill came in 1809, fifteen years before the founding of the RSPCA. I also had that most invaluable source, family stories and, for me, in a way far more interesting than all these was his publicly admitted ability to see ghosts.

  His marriages were a source of much interest. Here was a man who ran away to Gretna Green not once but twice (although even that is not certain; his marriage to Frances, according to some records, happened in Guernsey) and whose second marriage was a well-recorded public and private scandal. That Sarah Buck was a spirit medium was part of the family legend, and I have found nothing to substantiate it. Some of her bizarre behaviour has been attributed more prosaically to post-puerperal fever rather than possession. The fact that she attacked Thomas was witnessed and recounted in a letter by his son David. My theory that Sarah channelled Thomas’s beloved Fanny is fiction (or guesswork!). As is the character Andrew Farquhar. When I started writing the book I realised I needed a fictional link to carry such a powerful story and to explain so many of the puzzling facts that have survived as profound enigmas. Farquhar is one of those people who, if he didn’t exist, had to be invented to explain the unexplained.

  Sarah survived Thomas by thirty-three years. As far as history seems to relate he had three surviving children from his second marriage; I haven’t attempted to follow up their history as it lies beyond the scope of the novel. It appears in some records that Erskine went to live in Sussex, so I hope Frances and Samuel made contact with them in the end, and at some point after their mother died he and Agnes seem to have left England for a life in New Zealand.

  Following up the family stories and visiting scenes I have written about in the book have brought the connections and motivations, friendships and animosities into a wonderful focus for me.

  Thomas seems to have had at least twenty-six grandchildren from his first marriage, and possibly twelve more from his second, which goes some way to explaining the number of descendants he has all over the world. I have met some of them and it has been a delight to find I have so many distant cousins!

  And me, where do I fit in? My grandmother was the granddaughter of Mary Ann Catherine, who was Frances and Sam Holland’s third daughter. My grandmother and her siblings inherited the Sussex connection, the passion for Scotland, the obsession with ancient ancestry (going back long before the eighteenth century) and from somewhere, and perhaps most interesting of all, the second sight and the ability to see ghosts.

  And so to Dion Fortune. While researching my novel Time’s Legacy I came across her story and it was when I found out that she believed herself to be communicating with the very same Lord Erskine that this novel was born – a weird and most unexpected connection!

  My sincere thanks for help with this story go as always to so many people who have thrown themselves with so much enthusiasm into helping me. First to Carole Blake, who was my agent when we first discussed this novel and who, as always, wholeheartedly supported the project, but sadly died before it was completed. And to Isobel Dixon who has taken over as Carole’s successor. Next there are all the cousins, immediate, distant and even more distant! Passing strangers, curators, guides, the lovely lady skipper who allowed us to embark on the ferry to Inchmahome as Storm Ophelia roared towards us across the hills. It was the last ferry of the season. Following my habit of visiting the scenes of my fiction at the end of the summer when the world has sent the year’s tourists away I revelled in the wildness of the weather, especially as my son Jon, research assistant, chauffeur and dispenser of soothing wisdom and co-conspirator in all our adventures, was with me.

  The team at HarperCollins have been wonderful, coaxing me on to finish the book after the sadness of my father’s last illness and death. He would have loved to read this. I hope that maybe he is even now sharing a dram or two with Thomas and scanning some ethereal version of the manuscript. Especial thanks to my editors, Kim, Susan, Anne and Eloisa, for their dedicated patience. Also to Richard Woodman for correcting the naval references and to Peter Buneman for abandoning his professorial desk to hunt the alleyways and closes of Edinburgh for clues and Rachel and Hugh who did the same; to Annie McBrearty for walking with me in Ruth’s footsteps (or did she walk in ours?) To Robert Lindsey (one of those other descendants) for sending me his essay on Thomas, and to so many others. The liberties I have taken with history were for the purposes of the plot. The errors are mine, or are the result of the mists of time.

  Let time stand still.

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  About the Author

  Barbara Erskine is the Sunday Times bestselling author of over a dozen novels. Her first book, Lady of Hay, has sold more than three million copies worldwide and has never been out of print since it was first published thirty years ago. Her books have been translated into over twenty-five languages and are international bestsellers. Barbara lives near Hay-on-Wye in the Welsh borders.

  To find out more about Barbara and her books visit her website, find her on
Facebook or follow her on Twitter.

  www.barbara-erskine.co.uk

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  @Barbaraerskine

  Also by Barbara Erskine

  LADY OF HAY

  KINGDOM OF SHADOWS

  ENCOUNTERS (SHORT STORIES)

  CHILD OF THE PHOENIX

  MIDNIGHT IS A LONELY PLACE

  HOUSE OF ECHOES

  DISTANT VOICES (SHORT STORIES)

  ON THE EDGE OF DARKNESS

  WHISPERS IN THE SAND

  HIDING FROM THE LIGHT

  SANDS OF TIME (SHORT STORIES)

  DAUGHTERS OF FIRE

  THE WARRIOR’S PRINCESS

  TIME’S LEGACY

  RIVER OF DESTINY

  THE DARKEST HOUR

  SLEEPER’S CASTLE

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