Midnight is a Lonely Place
Beautifully repacked edition of this stunning novel of contemporary and historical betrayal and revenge, from the author of LADY OF HAYAfter a broken love affair, biographer Kate Kennedy retires to a remote cottage on the wild Essex coast to work on her new book, until her landlord's daughter uncovers a Roman site nearby and long-buried passions are unleashed…In her lonely cottage, Kate is terrorized by mysterious forces. What do these ghosts want? Should the truth about the violent events of long ago be exposed or remain concealed? Kate must struggle for her life against earthbound spirits and ancient curses as hate, jealousy, revenge and passion do battle across the centuries…
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in 1994
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Copyright © Barbara Erskine 2016
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photographs © Jill Battaglia/Arcangel Images (beach); Craig Joiner/Arcangel Images (sand dunes); Shutterstock.com (woman)
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: 9780007280773
Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780007320929
Version: 2017-09-07
‘Where’er we tread ’tis haunted, holy ground’.
Byron
‘C’était pendant l’horreur d’une profonde nuit …’
Racine
Her hair was the colour of newly frosted beech leaves; glossy; rich; tumbling from its combs as he pulled her against him, his lips seeking hers. His skin was tanned by the sun and the wind, hers, naked against him, white as the purest marble.
The heavy, twisted silver of the torc he wore about his arm cut into her flesh. She did not notice. She noticed nothing but the feel of his body on hers, the strength of his muscular thighs, the power of his tongue as he thrust it into her mouth as though he would devour her utterly.
‘Claudia …’
He breathed her name as a caress, a plea, a cry of anguish, and then at last a shout of triumph as he lay still, shaking, in her arms.
She smiled. Gazing up at the sky through the canopy of rustling oak leaves she was utterly content. The world had contracted into the one small clearing in the deserted woodland. Child and husband were forgotten. For this man in her arms, she was prepared to risk losing both; to risk losing her home, her position, life itself.
He stirred, and, raising himself onto his elbows, he stared down at her, his face strangely blank, his silvery eyes unseeing.
‘Claudia …’ he whispered again. He rested his face between her breasts. It was the little death; the death a man sought; the death which followed coition. He smiled, reaching his fist into her hair, holding her prisoner, tracing the line of her cheek-bones, her eyelids, with his lips. What would this woman’s husband, a son of Rome, an officer of the legion, say if he ever found out? What would he do if he learned his wife had a lover, and that the lover was a Druid Prince?
‘I hate being famous!’ Kate Kennedy confessed as she sat on the floor of her sister Anne’s flat. They were sharing a takeaway with a large Burmese cat called Carl Gustav Jung.
When her biography of Jane Austen was published Kate had found herself a celebrity overnight. She was invited onto talk shows, she was interviewed by three national daily newspapers and two Sundays, she toured the libraries and bookshops of Britain and she met Jon Bevan, described by the Guardian as one of England’s most brilliant young literary novelists and poets. The reason for all this interest? What the Times Literary Supplement called her ‘sizzling exposé’ of Jane’s hidden sensuality; her repressed sexuality; the passion in those well-loved, measured paragraphs.
