(Part 01)
Jennifer Bardsley lived in the small country village of Mornington-By-Mere in the Finchbottom Vale nestled between the Ancient Dancingdean Forest and the rolling Pepperstock Hills.
Which was a quaint picturesque village, a proper chocolate box picturesque idyll, with a Manor House, 12th Century Church, a Coaching Inn, Windmills, an Old Forge, a Schoolhouse, a River and a Mere.
She lived and worked up at Mornington Field, which had once been an operational RAF base, which had been converted into a mixture of commercial and residential units.
Jen lived in apartment 1O of Lancaster House, which was converted from the old Officers Mess and she was employed by Paige Turners as did the love of her life, David Norman.
The Normans ran the general store and post office in the village and also staffed the chemist shop for its limited opening times.
David was almost 22 years old, quiet, unassuming, thoughtful and intelligent and totally head of heels in love.
He loved Mornington and he didn’t want to spend his life anywhere else but would have gladly left the village just to be close to Jennifer.
He also quite liked the Grocery trade, and could quite easily have done it full time like his father and Uncles had, but he was also a well-read young man, and as he was an intelligent young man his parents didn’t want to stifle him, so he worked part time in the shop along with working full time up at Paige Turners.
So with him and Jennifer both working up at Paige Turners and both fancying the pants off each other it should have been a shoe in for them to get together, but that was not the case.
David was willing, but Jennifer had reservations and that was because she was 8 years older than he was.
He was a singularly unremarkable looking man to look at, Mr average, ordinary, not unattractive but not attractive either, with pale skin, sandy coloured hair and crystal blue eyes.
On the first day they met Jennifer fell in love with him when she looked into those eyes for the first time.
David was in simple terms one of life’s moths, plain and bland and always drawn to the light but never a source of light.
While Jennifer was the complete opposite, if he was a moth then she was very definitely a butterfly.
She was a strikingly good looking young woman, not supermodel beautiful, but very lovely, tall and voluptuous with luscious black hair and hypnotic blue eyes.
But despite the fact that they were the sun and the moon in each other’s skies and were besotted from the first moment they entered the others orbit Jennifer put the brakes on her feelings and rebuffed David’s advances because she didn’t think that the age difference could be overcome.
She envisaged jibes from colleagues and villagers alike about the cougar and her toy boy.
In reality the vast majority would have just been happy for them and as far as David was concerned she could have been 20 years older than him and he would still have wanted her.
(Part 02)
Jennifer’s job at Paige Turners was as a locator of hard to find books, rare books, first editions and the illusive.
She possessed an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the printed word and knew how to sort the wheat from the chaff and her talents were invaluable to Paige Turners and they were fortunate to have her and they very nearly lost her when the move was made from Finchbottom to Mornington.
She was one of the doubting Thomas’s along with Annette West and Carole Beverley who were unsure about such a move.
But once they saw the village and the standard of the accommodation on offer they all signed on the dotted line without any further hesitation.
Her skill at seeking out the illusive and the obscure meant that Paige Turners were the go to people if you wanted something different, special or that which had eluded you.
So it was in her role as book expert extraordinaire that she made the drive one Monday morning over to Clerembeax Palace which was to the west of Abbeyvale situated between Grace Hill and Bushy Down on the outskirts of the village of Clerembeax St Giles.
The Clerembeax’s arrived in Downshire following the Norman conquests and stayed for a thousand years before the name died out following the death of the reclusive Marcus Clerembeax at the age of 96.
He had lived alone, apart from a butler and a cook, for 50 years after the tragic deaths of his two sons in the hedonistic sixties as a result of an excess of drugs and alcohol.
His wife chose to deal with the loss by taking her own life the day after the funeral while Marcus decided his best course of action was to turn his back on the world and hide himself away.
Following his death in the autumn of 2015 with no direct heirs it took the Clerembeax solicitors, Beaumont, Villiers and Goodfellow, more than a year to find a legitimate Heir to inherit the estate, and that was 50 year old distant cousin Yvonne Labuschagne, and she took up residence in the January of 2017.
She was by profession a masseuse and had worked for many years along with her late husband at the Dancingdean Spa Hotel in Childean.
But with her inheritance she had the means and the venue to open her own Spa at the Clerembeax Palace but the house needed work.
The exterior was fine as the reclusive Marcus had been sensible enough to keep the fabric of the building well maintained.
She wasn’t sure about keeping the word “Palace” in the name because the building didn’t really look very palatial, mainly due to the fact that the original Clerembeax Palace burned down in the 19th century so the present manifestation was in fact a rather gaudy Victorian monstrosity in comparison, though it was not without its charms.
The interior had stood the test of time far less well and needed at the very least a lot of TLC.
The 19th century plumbing certainly wouldn’t stand the rigors of a 21st century spa and the electrics needed a complete rewire.
While the library was both a blessing and a curse, the latter because it took up so much space and the former because it was full of valuable old books which was where Jennifer Bardsley and Paige Turners came in.
(Part 03)
For the new owner of the Clerembeax Palace, Yvonne Labuschagne, the library was both a blessing and a curse, the latter because it took up so much space and the former because it was full of valuable old books which was where Jennifer Bardsley and Paige Turners came in.
Because the revenue from the book sale would go a long way to paying for the refit, or at least that was what Yvonne hoped.
When people were looking for a particular book, or a particular edition and they weren’t readily available they went on the “wish list” and it was that list that she was hoping would be much reduced after her week in Clerembeax.
After first meeting Yvonne and having a brief chat over coffee Jennifer entered the musty library of the once great house with its leather upholstered chairs and oak panelled walls and she instantly felt at home, it was after all her perfect place.
She spent the first hour just casually perusing the packed shelves and just in that short time she had found four titles on the wish list.
She spent the first four days doing a rough appraisal of the library and gave Yvonne a ball park figure of what she might expect at auction from the rarest volumes and she nearly fainted.
But to catalogue the whole library would take a little while longer and she would need reinforcements to complete the task.
The understanding when Paige Turners undertook the appraisal was that they would have first refusal on the contents at the market value but they recommended O’Sullivan and Springthorpe to sell the really valuable items at auction and Paige Turners would take a small commission.
On Friday she decided that before driving home she would spend a couple of hours relaxing in the library so she took a seat in a Chesterfield chair beside the fire and in consummate comfort she began to read.
But her chosen reading was not one of the myriad of leather bound tomes that filled the oak shelves from floor to ceiling, nor a rare first edition, of which there were so many, despite her having her choice of all the literary classics, with their gold embossed titles stamped into the leather, it wasn’t one of those.
In fact Jennifer’s selection wasn’t a book at all it was a collection of letters neatly tied in faded red ribbons and as she began to read them they took her breath away, for each beautifully hand written page was part of a remarkable love story.
The lifelong love story about a most extraordinary couple, whose depth of love was evidenced in every eloquent syllable.
As she read on, their love affair was revealed to her as the most exceptional love story she had ever read or known of.
For this lovingly devoted couple who billed and cooed in copperplate script on every scented page and shared their hearts love and their deepest feelings in unguarded detail, had never met.
“How could that be” she said aloud
She thought their love was evident, in fact it was palpable on every page of their intimate personnel correspondence.
“Poppycock” she exclaimed “that’s not what this is”
Correspondence did not in any form convey the true meaning of their substance.
The tangibility was in their Love letters that was the only way to say it.
Although they had begun to write in the innocence of childhood as mere pen pals, for a project set by School, a chore that had to be done didn’t remain burdensome for long as they had fallen in love.
(Part 04)
The flowery words of an affaire d’amour, echoed in the calligraphy on every page, in each revealing billet doux, more affectionate, romantic and intimate than its passionate predecessor.
She read on as they billed and cooed on every page in each lovingly constructed sentence, heavily laced with innuendo and dripping with sensual longing, subtle yet explicit at the same time and flavoured with delicious nuances, flirtatious and lustful, romantic and affectionate.
Tears rolled down her cheeks as she read of a love of such perfect purity, not it had to be said for its pureness of thought but for the absence of any hope of physicality.
For their love was star-crossed, because she was an invalid, bed ridden, stricken with polio as a child, while he was a subject of an enemy state and because their two nations were at war she couldn’t go to him even if her health had permitted.
He in turn was unable to go to her for fear of capture and imprisonment so they could never meet, would never meet.
And as Jennifer read on it was obvious to the reader that they were content in that fact, for their love transcended the physical.
So they made love via their sweet missives, a love that never faded or faltered, in an affair lasting more than forty years, which only ended with his death.
Jennifer stopped to wipe her eyes and then read the final pages which revealed the one and only public acknowledgement of the lifelong love affair.
That acknowledge was in his will when he expressed as his dying wish that her letters, which were so precious to him and cherished during his lifetime, should be returned to his love, so that they at least should lie together.
On receipt of the letter and the news that her cherished lover had left the world she was so broken hearted that she died a week after receiving them and with her death the lovers could be united at last.
Jennifer sat in the library and sobbed her heart out for an hour and when she had finished crying she
Said loudly
“You’re a bloody fool”
She sat upright and wiped her eyes and added
“She couldn’t have the man she loved, and she loved him till she died”
“But you can, and you’ve done nothing about it”
She left the library and marched to her room talking to herself the whole way
“She never met the love of her life and you see the man you love every day”
She quickly threw her things in her bag
“You just fret about what people will think of you, well sod them, sod them all”
“Every day you see him and you’ve done nothing about it”
She repeated then she set her chin defiantly and added
“Well that changes today”
She left Clerembeax Palace without even pausing to say goodbye and drove back to Mornington at breakneck speed and went straight to Paige Turners where without even pausing for breath she marked inside without acknowledging anyone until she spotted David, and she made a beeline for him and ignoring the fact that he was in conversation with a colleague and without speaking she went straight up to him and kissed him passionately in full view of the whole staff.
“Well it’s about time” Paige said and everyone agreed “We should send her away more often”
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