Daughters of Fire. Barbara Erskine
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BARBARA ERSKINE
Daughters of Fire
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This edition 2007
Copyright © Barbara Erskine 2006
Barbara Erskine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for 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.
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Source ISBN 9780007174270
Ebook edition © SEPTEMBER 2008 ISBN 9780007279449 Version: 2017-09-12
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
For Diz, who started the hare.
The lamps now glitter down the street;
Faintly sound the falling feet;
And the blue even slowly falls
About the garden trees and walls.
Now in the falling of the gloom
The red fire paints the empty room:
And warmly on the roof it looks,
And flickers on the backs of books.
Armies march by tower and spire
Of cities blazing, in the fire;
Till as I gaze with staring eyes,
The armies fade, the lustre dies.
Then once again the glow returns;
Again the phantom city burns;
And down the red-hot valley, lo!
The phantom armies marching go!
Blinking embers, tell me true,
Where are those armies marching to,
And what the burning city is
That crumbles in your furnaces!
‘Armies in the Fire’
A Child’s Garden of Verses
Robert Louis Stevenson
‘The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones …’
Julius Caesar
William Shakespeare
Contents
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Postscript
Postscript Two