Jane Johnson – author

An excerpt from The Salt Road

High above a mountain valley a girl was sitting beneath a tree, gazing out over the landscape. She had a striking face, strong and distinctive, with a long, straight nose, bold black eyes and an uncompromising chin. No one ever called her pretty or likened her to delicate things–to moonlight or gossamer or the tiny, elegant songbirds that soared in the twilight air. The men who had attempted (unsuccessfully) to woo her spoke in their clumsy verses of wild camels and the great winds of the desert: elemental things over which they could hope to have little control. They strove, and failed, to find rhymes for her name (Mariata); and she repaid their attention with verses as abrasive as a sandstorm and they soon went away.

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An excerpt from Crossed Bones

To the Right Honorable Lords of his Majestie’s most honorable Privy Council.
Haste, haste, posthaste.
Plymouth, the eighteenth of april, eight in the eve
–Thomas Ceely, Mayor.

–May it please yr honors to be advertised that this daie I have heard of certaine Turks, Moores, & Dutchmen of Sallee in Barbary, which lie on our coasts spoiling divers such as they are able to master, as by the examination of one William Knight may appeare, whose report I am induced the rather to believe, because two fisherboats mentioned in hys examination were very lately found flotyng on the seas, having neither man nor tackle in them…

–I am also credibly informed that there are some thirtie sail of shippes at Sallee now preparing to come for the coasts of England in the begynnyng of the summer, & if there bee not speedy course taken to prevent it, they would do much mischeef.

–Hereof I thought it my dutie to inform yr honors.

And so I rest,
Yr honors in all dutie bounden,
Thos. Ceely, Mayor
Plymouth, 18th daie of april 1625

One

‘There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they have never happened before, like larks that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.’

I had scribbled this down in a notebook after reading it in a novel the night before I was due to meet Michael and was looking forward to slipping it into our conversation at dinner, despite knowing his likely reaction (negative; dismissive – he was always sceptical about anything that could even vaguely be termed ‘romantic’). He was a lecturer in European literature, to which he presented an uncompromising post-structuralist stance as if books were just meat for the butcher’s block, mere muscle and tendon, bone and cartilage which required flensing and separating and scrutiny. For his part, Michael found my thinking on the subject of fiction both emotional and unrigorous; which meant that at the start of our relationship we had the most furious arguments which would hurt me so personally as to bring me to the edge of tears, but now, five years in, we were able to bait one another cheerfully. Anyway, it made a change from discussing, or avoiding, the subject of Anna, or the future.

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