Lucy Klein, 42, is not only obsessed with Highgate, she works there too, organising tours for those with an interest in some of the finest Victorian funerary architecture in existence. Single, and on the shy side, she is nonetheless content with her life, or so she thinks. When she meets the enigmatic Zak Harborne, she realises what she's been missing and quickly falls in love. Suddenly, it is the business of living that interests her.
1972, and Emma Matthews, a 19-year-old history student, also feels as though she's on the outside. After visiting a derelict Highgate with a group of friends, she starts to feel a connection, a sense of meaning to her life, in amongst the tombstones, the crosses and the angels. Returning to Highgate over and over, she discovers both a paradise and a garden decidedly more savage.
Grace Derby is just 11 when she encounters the gentleman, tall and with a tall hat, a long black coat and a cape about his shoulders. It is the 1850s and street urchins such as her are not accustomed to kindness from those belonging to the upper echelons. Proffering money for food, for her and her family, he asks nothing in return. Curious about the man with the kind blue eyes, she follows him one day... all the way to Highgate.
For some, it seems, all roads lead to Highgate...
Published in October 2019, Highgate so far has sold nearly 8,000 ebooks, and had 687028 pages read in KU. It also sells well in paperback and audio.
Extract from Prologue
There it is again, a rustling amongst the leaves, so faint that if you breathed you would have to forego such an act in order to hear it. Silence, and then she comes a little closer.
I wait as I have waited for so long, but the footsteps – such as they are – retreat.
Why is that? I wonder. What, in the end, deters her?
Is she afraid? If so, she has every right to be, for there exists amongst us dark things, impure things that we run from. We hide whenever they break away from the shadows to stalk these grounds, which were once so grand. Does she hide too? What if she doesn’t?
I want to shout at her, to scream: The darkness waits; it pounces. Once it has you in its grasp it is so hard to break free. Run! Now! Be on your guard! Never let that guard down.
I have no voice, however. And I never have had. The words I utter are for my ears only. There has been no one to smile or nod their head in kind understanding of my wretchedness.
No…wait… There was someone, long ago. But it was all so brief, and she is but a shadow too.
Would this woman who ventures near bend her head to listen? Is that her purpose? Not just to me but to others as desperate?
Don’t turn away! Don’t go! You’re one of us!
Too late. It is only her sorrow that remains, settling like dust motes in the air.
