Time's Testimony
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Book Three of The Wyngrave Women
In Time’s Prisoner, Jane Summers, author of historical whodunnits, solved the brutal murder of Wyngrave Hall’s resident ghost, Horatio Fortune, liberating him from four hundred years’ confinement. When Jane finds evidence of another historical murder at Wyngrave, she sets out to prove the innocence – or guilt – of her benefactor, Queenie Brooke-Bennet, a 1950s actress who became the ill-fated Countess of Guiseborough, darling of the tabloids, then a much-married author of scandalous fiction, before dying a reclusive widow, haunted – quite literally – by the past.
There’s no shortage of baffling clues. Jane discovers hidden letters, shocking audiotapes recorded by Queenie as she lay dying, and a mutilated portrait in the attic. With the expert advice of art conservator, Jesper Olsen and support from Queenie’s old friend and rival in love, Sylvia Marlow, Jane sets out to solve what appears to be another stone-cold crime...
Shaking violently, Queenie gazed down at her husband who lay surrounded by broken glass and stank of whisky. Lord knew, it wasn’t the first time he’d been dead drunk, but it was the first time he’d been dead. She mounted the uneven wooden stairs, worn in the middle of the tread by hundreds of years of ascending and descending feet. At the top, she gripped the banister and tried to remember where their bedroom was.
Her bedroom now.
Her home.
Wyngrave Hall was hers now and there would be no more talk of selling up.
Families and Friends
The Wyngrave Women series is about family and friendship and how important friends are for support, how friends can become “family”. The four women who live at Wyngrave become very close, particularly during Covid lockdown, but I also examine the relationship of an earlier inhabitant of the Hall, Queenie Brooke-Bennet, with the resident ghost, Horatio Fortune. Eventually theirs becomes a deep friendship, albeit a very unusual one.
What I've done in the Wyngrave books, particularly the third, TIME’S TESTIMONY, is look at different kinds of friendship and support: Queenie looking after "poor Dido" when she loses her baby; Queenie and the fiercely protective dog, MacGregor; Queenie and Sylvia as impoverished young actresses, sharing a squalid flat.
Much of the theatre content of Time's Testimony is autobiographical. In my youth I was an actress for some years and performed in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1978 at Arundel Castle in Sussex, playing a fairy and understudying Helena, the role Queenie plays in the novel. After a very wet four-month run at the Open Air Theatre in London’s Regent’s Park ended, the company was invited to take the production to Arundel Castle to perform in the grounds.
It was magical. As darkness fell and the stage lights came up, bats came swarming out of the towers on the battlements, which was alarming for the fairies who were performing up there, of which I was one! Unforgettable though.
(Interesting trivia: I wasn’t the only member of that company who went on to become a successful novelist. The actor playing Lysander became bestselling historical novelist, C C Humphreys.)
In Time’s Testimony and in the trilogy as a whole, I've looked at what it means to be a friend and how very important friends are, especially if, like Queenie or the appalling Mortimers, you don't have a loving family, or any family, like Jane Summers.
I wanted to write about the loneliness of a much-bereaved, elderly woman, living and dying with many unhappy – in some cases traumatic – memories. To balance that I incorporated some comic scenes to compensate for the high drama. I hope overall, Time’s Testimony is a feel-good, uplifting book, focusing on Queenie's last friendship, which was perhaps her only real friendship, certainly the only one that wasn’t complicated by sex or marriage.
My Literary Influences
Horatio, I am dead.
Thou livest. Report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.
HAMLET
A canny reader of TIME’S TESTIMONY might guess some of my literary influences. A CHRISTMAS CAROL is actually mentioned in the novel and Horatio Fortune might occasionally bring to mind Wodehouse’s imperturbable valet, Jeeves.
Another influence on me writing this book and also TIME’S PRISONER was Tom Stoppard's play, ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. (The play’s title is a quotation from HAMLET and the action of Stoppard's play is set within the action of HAMLET. It's a play within a play.)
I saw ROS & GUIL at London’s Old Vic in the 1960s when the play was new. I went many times and saw several different casts. Eventually I knew chunks of the play by heart. (There is an old film of the play starring Gary Oldman and Tim Roth.)
I also saw a lot of HAMLETS in that era too – notably Sir Ian McKellen and Alan Bates, who played the part in the same year, 1971.
Those two plays, HAMLET and ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD form part of my writing DNA, They go through me like Brighton rock.