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10 brilliant books for lovers of historical fiction.
FROM the window of a lonely cottage in the Black Mountains award-winning author Barbara Erskine watches clouds as they scud across the crumpled landscape.
At her feet lies loyal Fergus, an eight-year-old black Standard Poodle. He sighs and yawns.
“I think he is making a point,” she smiles. “Writing isn’t very exciting for dogs.”
For Barbara – a descendant of the Scots-born Baron Thomas Erskine, who became Lord Chancellor of England – writing is her lifeblood.
She counts her newly released 15th novel – Ghost Tree, a fiction based on the life of her notable great-grandfather five times removed – her most important.
But the Edinburgh University Scots history graduate says there was no better place to write it than at the cottage in Wales which was once the cherished retreat of her father, Nigel Rose. The Second World War Spitfire pilot – a member of the 602 City of Glasgow Squadron – did not live to see the publication of the book he cared so much about. He died last September shortly before his 100th birthday.
Ghost Tree, the author admits, has been a lifetime in the making.
Barbara, who holds a Romantic Novelists Association’s Outstanding Achievement award, says: “My father’s aunt had done lots of research into the family. She knew people who knew Thomas’s children. She was very proud of him and she had inherited some portraits and letters.
“I inherited quite a few of those from my father. That made Thomas very real to me from a small child.
“The thing that excited the family was that he was Lord Chancellor of England. This was a Scots family, so that in itself was a bit of a puzzle.”
Thomas Erskine was born in Edinburgh in 1750, the third son of the Earl of Buchan. But Barbara reveals the family had a knack for “supporting the wrong side”.
During the Jacobite uprisings they ended up in poverty in an Edinburgh tenement, shattering 14-year-old Thomas’s hopes of attending university.
Instead he was enlisted in the navy before buying himself out and into an army commission. But he saved enough money to later enter the legal profession and studied at London’s Lincoln’s Inn and at Cambridge University.
Barbara says: “His eldest brother became the earl but his middle brother became a lawyer, having studied in Edinburgh and at St Andrew’s University. He ended up Lord Advocate of Scotland.
“In my story – and I think it’s true – Thomas was quite content to stay in London because his brothers had Scotland sewn up.
“What intrigued me most as a child was that Thomas believed in ghosts. He had seen ghosts and wasn’t afraid to admit it publicly.
“It didn’t matter as a little boy, but as an adult, and a senior barrister and eventually Lord Chancellor, he was still talking about ghosts.”
After his first wife and the mother of his eight children died, Thomas became obsessed with a spirit medium 30 years his junior and married her.
Barbara says: “It was a national scandal and he was much mocked and cartoon-ised by the press. He had a miserable second marriage.
“The more I looked it into it the more I thought this was just amazing, you couldn’t make this up.”
She admits: “I am interested in ghosts too and this was my lead into making an exciting novel and not just a biography.
“It is fiction based in fact because there is a modern part to it which is a ghost story. The heroine was going to be me doing the research, but it turned out that she is not like me at all.
“She has extraordinary adventures in the book. There are ghosts and it goes off on a slightly more dangerous tangent through a case – although not a real one – that Thomas got involved in as a lawyer.”
The research was not without challenges. “Thomas lived at a time when people wrote every single thing down, it’s all recorded history,” says Barbara. “It was quite difficult to get my head around the fact that I wasn’t writing a biography because there was so much information about him. In the end I decided that I had to leave room for the fiction.
“Ghost Tree took two years to write but I had been thinking about it for ages. I had huge files that I had been putting together all my life.
“My dad was very excited and wanted to be part of it. But as he said, he would probably be going to talk to Thomas himself fairly soon.
“He died before it was published but I think he would have been pleased with it.
“But as Thomas was into the supernatural I was slightly worried he would appear one day and say ‘hang on a minute…’”