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beyond.
    ‘Is anybody
there?’ I called weakly. Eerily silent, all seemed quiet in the dark hallway. The resounding, pounding
beat of my heart made me
jumpy and I couldn’t get past the feeling that somehow I was not alone. Scolding myself for
getting carried away, I put my
sensible head on and considered the fact that in an old house like this there were bound to be all
sorts of noises caused by old
timber shrinking and expanding, and gales howling through the gaps in the antique joinery. Returning to my
chair, I gave myself a stern
talking to before I sat down and switched on the lamp.
    Candlelight was
a little too atmospheric, I decided, and the light that pooled across the tabletop and over Great Aunt
Elizabeth’s rosewood box was
comforting. But the reassurance lasted no longer than the time it took my eyes to alight on a small,
leather-bound volume, lying
next to the rosewood box as if it had always been there. I was sure I’d never before set my eyes on
this small pocketbook that
proved on opening to be an ancient journal, but to consider what that meant was an idea I didn’t want
to contemplate. It surely was
the case that I’d merely overlooked it.
    Opening the
diary with trembling fingers, I saw three names inscribed in three very different hands on the
inside cover and then I didn’t
feel quite so frightened any more.
    Firstly, in a
flowing style in brown ink, neat and perfectly formed, were the words: This book belongs to
Sophia Elliot of Monkford Hall, Somerset, January 1st 1802 . She was the namesake my Great Aunt had mentioned, and I felt for sure it
had been her body I’d
inhabited earlier though just thinking about it had me doubting that my strange experience had really
happened. I remembered my
mother talking about this ancestor, telling me that I’d been named for her. I’d often wondered what she
was like, but I knew nothing
more. Mum always said there had been portraits of Sophia in the family, but sadly they’d all been
lost or sold many years ago before
she was of an age to save them.
    Secondly, in
pencil, with many flourishes on the capital letters, my grandmother had written: This book
belongs to Dorothy Elliot, Mandeville House, Stoke Road, Crewkerne,
April 7th, 1950 . Keeping the name of Elliot in the female line, my grandmother had declared, was a family tradition that had been in
place for hundreds of years passing
from daughter to daughter. Thankfully, each generation had married happily to understanding men
who never baulked once
when their own names were rejected in favour of their own. Elliot women could trace their ancestry
back to Tudor times according
to Dorothy Elliot, but whether those first ladies had felt as passionately about their heritage, we
would never know.
    Thirdly, written
by my mother in an expressive, artistic style in blue fountain pen ink: This book belongs to
Caroline Elliot, Flat 3, 36, Lennox Place, London, December 11th, 1976 , but was clearly written when she was young, the letters larger and
expressed with a creative
flourish. Perhaps written when she was at art school, I wondered. Seeing mum’s handwriting brought back
memories of her shopping
lists, the recipes she’d copied out on scraps of paper that still fall out of cookery books to this day
and, of course, all those precious
birthday cards I’d collected. I stroked the ink, held the page to my face, knowing that her hand had been
there and had touched the
page. I wanted to add my own name, to feel a kind of kinship with the known and unknown Elliot women who
had cherished this diary before me. I
dug out my pen from the large bag at my feet and wrote my name with pride.
    I skimmed
through the entries, turning the pages and admiring Sophia’s perfectly formed handwriting. January and
February seemed to have
been fairly dull months for her, I noted. The weather that year had been cold and it had not been
possible to go out very much in
the Somerset countryside. The family coach had once become stuck