It doesn’t have a title yet. Or a contract. But here’s a taste from the middle of the story (I don’t want to give too much away!) A dual-time story set in East Sussex in 1821 and Brisbane in 2024.
The gravestones loomed like grey shadows in the moonlight as she set out down the terraced slope. Some of the stones were ancient, etched with lichen, faded memorials remembering only nameless ghosts. Others belonged to people she had once known: women who had perished in childbirth; babies taken by the cholera; old men dead of apoplexy. And one, the earth only newly grown over, belonged to a lad not much older than her — dead after stepping on a rusty nail while shovelling manure in his master’s stable. They had brought him to her mother when the surgeon could not be found, but by then he was wracked with convulsions and the poultice of dried puffball she applied was too late to save him. Philadelphia had stood at her mother’s elbow ready to fetch whatever was needed, but no one could fetch a miracle.
It was to poor John Cooper’s grave she headed. It rested halfway down the slope; a cherry sapling sheltering it to one side while his infant sister’s grave lay to the other. Reaching it, she halted several yards distant and paused to remember the living boy and summon her courage. He’d had brown eyes with a crescent shaped scar hooking the corner of one eye. Right or left, she could not recall. But she remembered the way his thick brown hair flopped over his forehead and how he would flick it away with the back of his hand. He had given her an apple once, too perfect for any horses, so he said. She hoped that he rested in peace and would understand her intent.
JULIE BROOKS 
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