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.
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.
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.
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”
