Sands of Time. Barbara Erskine

      

      

       COPYRIGHT

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in 2000

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

      Copyright © Barbara Erskine 2016

      Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

      Cover images © Shutterstock.com

      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: 9780006512097

      Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780007320981

      Version: 2017-09-08

       EPIGRAPH

      If poets’ verses are but stories, so are food and raiment stories. So is all the world a story. So is man of dust a story.

       St Columba

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Preface

The Legacy of Isis

What Price Magic?

Between Times

Sea Dreams

       The Footpath

       Sacred Ground

       Damsel in Distress

       The Last Train to Yesterday

       Party Trick

       Lost in the Temple

       Random Snippets

       On the Way to London

       Second Sight

       The Cottage Kitchen

       The Room Upstairs

       Moonlight

       The Girl on the Swing

       An Afternoon at the Museum

       Day Trip

       Barney

       You’ve Got to Have a Dream

       First-class Travel

       Moving On

       ‘You’ve Got a Book to Write, Remember?’

       Sands of Time

       The Storyteller

       Keep Reading Barbara Erskine’s Novels

       Keep Reading Sleeper’s Castle

       About the Author

       Also by Barbara Erskine

       About the Publisher

       PREFACE

      This third collection of short stories has allowed me to fulfil, at least in part, my ambition to write a sequel to Whispers in the Sand. One of the hardest stages in the writing of a novel is finishing it. For weeks, perhaps months, I will have been looking forward to writing those two magic words, The End – words that mean a conclusion to obsession, to long hours, to RSI at the keyboard and to saying no to invitations I would so much love to accept. When the moment finally comes, however, saying goodbye to the characters, reconciling the urge to give them a happy ending with the temptation to leave the reader on a knife edge – after all, real life doesn’t provide neat endings – and parting with the characters, people who have become closer in many ways than family or friends, and whom