On the Edge of Darkness
Stunning repackage of the story of a woman trapped in the wrong time. Abandoned by her twentieth century lover, she plots a terrible revenge on him and his family.Adam Craig is fourteen when he meets Brid near an isolated Celtic stone in the wild Scottish Highlands – he is fascinated by her exotic, gypsy-like dress and strange attitudes. They become friends, and, in time, passionate lovers. She leads him, unsuspecting, into the sixth century, where she has mastered the ancient mysteries and dangerous magic of the Druids.In her obsession with Adam, Brid is seen as a traitor by her people, only escaping death by following Adam to Edinburgh, when he leaves home to study medicine.As the years pass he makes new friends and finds new love. But Brid is consumed by jealousy and haunts him like an evil shadow, until, fifty years on, Adam’s granddaughter helps him discover the secret that will free them from the terror of Brid’s curse.
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in 1998
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Copyright © Barbara Erskine 2016
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photographs © Athina Strataki/Etsa/Corbis (woman leading a horse); Tom Gardner/Alamy (Dusk on Black Mount, Rannoch Moor, Scotland); WebbTravel/Alamy (view across the heather, Scotland)
Barbara Erskine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007288656
Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780007320950
Version: 2017-09-08
In a symbol lies concealment or revelation.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Henry IV Part I
Time, the boy noticed idly, whirled in gigantic lazy spirals like a great vortex in the sky. Lying on his back on the short sweet Welsh grass he stared upwards into the intense blue, his eyes half closed, and let the song of the skylark carry him upwards. Beyond the clouds there was an intensity of experience which drew him on beyond the now, to where past and future were the same.
One day, when he was older, he was going to travel there, beyond time and space, and study the secrets which he knew instinctively in his bones were his hidden inheritance. Then he would fight evil with good and bring light into the dark.
‘Meryn!’
His mother’s voice, calling from the cottage down in the sheltered valley beyond the mountain where he lay, brought him to his feet. He smiled to himself. Later, after he had had his supper, when the long summer dark was descending over the hill, and the only sound was the occasional companionable bleat of a sheep in the distance or the quavering hoot of an owl drifting down the valley on silent wings, he would slip out of the cottage and run up here again to dream his dreams and prepare for the great battle which one day he knew he would fight out there, alone, on the edge of darkness …
‘Why don’t you take a knife and kill me, Thomas? It would be quicker and more honest!’
Susan Craig was shouting now, her voice harsh with despair. ‘Dear God, you drive me to do this! You and your sanctimonious cruelty.’ She was standing near the window, tears pouring down her face.
Adam, thin, skinny, and tall for his age, which was fourteen, was standing outside his father’s study window, his arms wrapped tightly around his body, his mouth working with misery as he tried to stop himself shouting out loud in his mother’s defence. The quarrel, growing steadily louder and louder, had been going on for what seemed like hours, and for what seemed like hours he had been standing there, listening. What had she done – what could she have done? – to make his father so angry? He didn’t understand.
‘Now you take the name of the Lord in vain as well! Is there no end to your wickedness, you stupid, senseless woman?’ Thomas’s voice too was almost incoherent.
‘I’m not wicked, Thomas. I’m human! Is that so evil? Why can’t you listen to me? You don’t care! You never have, damn you!’ His mother’s voice was shrill, out of control, his father’s a deep rumbling torrent of words designed to override and to annihilate.
The boy’s eyes were blind with tears as he put his hands over his ears, trying to block out the sounds, but it was no use; they filled the echoing rooms of the huge old stone-built manse and spilled out of the windows and doors until they seemed to fill the garden and the surrounding village of Pittenross, the woods and even the sky.
