Rating: 4/5
When, in the early twentieth century, narrator Penelope Taberner goes to stay with her great-aunt and -uncle in an old country manor, she finds herself transported back in time to a period four hundred years before. There, in the peaceful farmhouse which she is so familiar with, she ventures into the lives of the Elizabethan Babington family—a family that is risking everything to rescue Mary, Queen of Scotland. But Penelope knows what the future has told: the queen cannot be saved.
I enjoyed this book, particularly the way it was written. The style was quite old-fashioned but not flowery or boring. Penelope writes this one extract, which I thought sounded particularly beautiful, when she has just come back to the twentieth century after travelling backwards to the Elizabethan times:
“Like a dream which abolishes time and space, which can travel through years in a flash and to the ends of the world in a twinkling, I went into another century and lived there and returned before the pendulum of the grandfather clock had wagged once behind the bull’s-eye glass. I had experienced the delights and anxieties of another age, moving quietly in that life, walking in the garden, talking and loitering and returning in the blink of an eyelid. It was neither dream nor sleep, this journey I had taken, but a voyage backward through the ether. Perhaps I had died in that atom of time, and my ghost had fled down the years, recognised only by Jude, and then returned in a heart-beat.”
I also thought it interesting how Penelope did not always enter the lives of the Babington family with enjoyment, for always was there the anxiety in her that she might stay too long, and die (which she nearly did, at one point). She tells us this here:
“‘It’s a dream, Penelope,’ Francis mused. ‘One makes visits like that in dreams. The philosophers say that a dream journey takes but a flash of time, that we may travel to the ends of the earth in a heart-beat, and that if we overstay in that mysterious world of dreams, we die.’
‘That’s what I fear,’ I said very low, scarcely breathing. ‘If I stay too long in this world of dreams, I shall die.'”
Here is one last extract that I also thought interesting, which occurred when Penelope looked at herself in the mirror after one of her time-travelling visits:
“My cheeks were flaming red, my arms were sunburnt, but another sun had warmed them. The hot passions of those days flowed in my veins, I felt transfigured, old, wise, knowing a thousand things of which I had been barely conscious. Strangely moved by the knowledge that I was separated from that life by only the thinnest vapour, I went downstairs, my little watch ticking the minutes away, awakened from its sleep.”