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His hand on my back ushered me toward the shadow that was his grandmother’s house. It was dark, as I had left it. It was not until this moment that I recollected I had left the lantern, still lit, on Eli’s desk. It was apparent that we were not going into the dark house but into the bright emptiness of Eli’s room. I waited for him to remark on the movement of the lantern, but he did not.

It was cold in there, desolate. Wind whistled around the walls. The sound of revelry on the beach came in spurts like the cawing of rooks. I did not glance at where the red book had been. I was not supposed to know there had ever been one.

I looked at Eli, standing in front of me, splendid as a wild creature, and despised myself for my immediate thought:
How dreadful I must appear with my hair in a tangle, my eyes watering, my clothing dirty and disheveled.
I tried to push back my curls and straighten my cloak so that he would not see me at my worst. As if my appearance were of any consequence on a night such as this. If he witnessed my feeble attempts to improve myself, he did not speak of it.

“There are things I need to say,” he said. “I will be leaving tonight, never to return. And you cannot come with me.”

I stared at him filled with sudden hope. “Since I am leaving too, can we not go together?”

“Josie!” He took my hand and guided me to the chair by the desk. “No.”

“Why?”

“Our ways will be different. I was sent back to Brindle Point for a reason. Now I must return to where I came from. While I was here, I was forbidden to become close with anyone. And then you came.”

“I came? You mean, you care for me?” Hope flared in me again. “Who are these people who give you such orders? I want to meet with them. I will talk to them. I will not allow . . .”

He smiled, that smile that trembled my heart. “My Josie,” he said. “You are so fierce, and so strong, and so lovely. You cannot meet and talk with them.”

“I can. Where are they?”

“Not here.”

Tears filled my eyes. “Could you find them for me? I would even beg. I—”

He shook his head. “It is not possible.”

I did not feel strong or fierce or even angry anymore. I felt defeated. He was going to leave me.

“Can you kiss me goodbye, then? I would like to have your kiss, just this once. Though I am sure it is forbidden.”

“It is,” he said, and pulled me toward him.

I forgot everything.

The kiss was the world, and there was nothing else.

Still in the circle of his arms, pressed tightly against him, I was content. I had not known a kiss could be like that. Surely he would not let me go now? I found myself smiling.

He held me a little away from him.

His face showed no trace of a smile. “It is too late for us, Josie, far too late,” he said.

“You are still leaving? You can’t.”

“I must.”

I stared at him.

“You led me to believe that I would help put an end to these murders. That was why I came back with you. Was that a falsehood?”

“It is the truth. I want you to come with me now to where you will be safe. Where you will be able to see and to understand. And perhaps forgive me.”

“I will never forgive you,” I said. “Never.”

In a moment of sanity, I thought,
I know nothing of him. I have never heard him laugh. I have never seen him cry. But I know his kiss. I know he means more to me than anything else in the world. What am I to do?

He tried to take my hand, but I pulled it away.

I hate him. I love him,
I thought.
I will not go with him. I do not want to understand.

But for the second time that night, I went with him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I
STOOD ALONE BEHIND
the closed gate of Dobbin’s empty field where Eli had left me.

The wind pounded me, at times almost knocking me over. There were no sounds now, from the beach or from the cluster of dark houses on Brindle Point. I could have been alone at the edge of the world.

Time passed. I had no way to assess how long I stood there, slapped by the wind, expecting, I did not know what. I relived Eli’s kiss. I repeated in my mind the little he’d told me of the night. Leaning against the fence, I drifted in and out of sleep, fatigue winning over trepidation. He had told me I was to play an important part, but here I was, alone, confused.

“Wait,” he had said.

I jolted myself awake.

No.

I was not going to remain there not knowing anything.

The gate gave a creaking squeal as I pushed it open.

As fast as I was able, I ran along the cliff path, my body complaining with every step. It wanted dry clothing, rest, heat.

More than that, it wanted Eli.

But he had vanished.

Now and then, a fleeting warmth rose in me as I remembered how he had kissed me. When I thought of his mouth, I shivered. The touch of his hands! He had said I could not be with him. He had said I could not find these others who were keeping us apart. Didn’t he know that I would fight for him? That if there was a way, I would find it?

As I hurried past Raven’s Roost, I saw that the grassy field where my aunt Minnie and Lamb had lain was empty. Someone had moved them, or they had wakened and moved themselves. I glanced anxiously around but saw no sign of them. There was something in the house that I wanted to retrieve. Something of Eli’s.

I steeled myself and went once again into the den of thieves I had sworn never more to enter.

The lantern had burned to a flicker. There was the chair my aunt Minnie had sat in, the glass, empty of brandy, still on the table.

I went quietly upstairs.

The door to my aunt and uncle’s bedroom was tight shut. Had it been that way when I left? What if my aunt had managed to come inside and was ready to reach for me? Or worse, if Lamb was in the room?

I cautiously turned the door handle.

No wild barking from Lamb. Only silence. I opened it farther. No one there.

One quick glance was all I took time for. The room was fit for a king, filled with satin pillows, china knickknacks, a mirror held in place by golden cherubs. Who had been drowned to get them? My stomach gave a sick lurch.

No time now for stricken thoughts.

I hurried into my room, took Eli’s coat that I’d laid across my trunk, the coat that his grandmother had sewn for him, the coat he had wrapped around my shoulders, threw off my sodden cloak and shawl, and put it on. I would not leave it in this house of the devil.

My gaze fell on the blue slippers that I’d bought, dreaming of us dancing together. Tears sprang to my eyes. The slippers had been taken from a dead woman. Did I still want them? Yes. I could not abandon my dream.

I slid them into my dress pocket, which was already overfilled, and hastened outside.

But where was Eli?

The moon wandered through masses of cloud.

The night felt biblical.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .
It would not have shocked me if a lightning bolt had opened the sky and struck all the living souls in Brindle Point.

I could not hear the revelers. I imagined them, sprawled around the remains of the bonfire, asleep or still drinking from the jug.

But what if Eli had gone there for reasons of his own?

I stepped to the cliff edge and looked over.

The merrymakers were as I had imagined.

Eli was not there. But my aunt Minnie was. She was conversing with my uncle. In her arms was Lamb.

I bit my lips.

She had wakened, while the dog was still asleep. And she had lifted the weight of him and carried him with her down the path, the way she had carried my heavy trunk that first awful night.

She and my uncle stared up. She pointed.

I stepped back, searching for deeper shadows.

But unexpectedly, a great commotion had started farther along the beach, beyond the cove where I’d seen the fishing boats.

Now those who had been sleeping on the sand had staggered to their feet, gawking, waking one another.

I was gawking too.

The length of the cliff path as far as I could see was filled with dark shapes, moving, marching, all coming this way. A mob, a multitude.

The trail was filled with them, the night loud with their tramping feet. The ones at the back carried lit torches that flared above their heads.

I stood, uncertain, my back pressed against the outside wall of Raven’s Roost. Waiting.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

T
HEY MARCHED TOGETHER
two or three abreast. Men, women, children. They did not talk among themselves. I stood, stiff and scared, as the first two passed close to me, never glancing in my direction. Had they come to stop the murders on Brindle Point? How was I to be a part of it?

Farther back, I saw torch carriers. Suddenly there was a flare and then a blaze, and a house was afire. Then another and another. The wind was lifting the flames, hurling them house to house.

Brindle Point was burning.

Smoke rushed toward me. My eyes stung, and I blinked to try to ease them.

Passing me now was a lady in a blue shantung dress. I’d seen that dress before. In Jackdaws. Mrs. Kitteridge had purchased it for Daphne. I looked at the lady’s feet. She wore blue satin slippers with beading on top,
my
blue satin slippers.

It couldn’t be.

I fumbled in my pocket and pulled out the slippers that I’d placed there just minutes before. “Do not assume dreadful things,” I told myself. “Do not. These slippers are similar. They cannot be mine.”

Young men, sailor men, twenty or thirty of them in dark trousers, strode along. Who were they? The men wore jerseys with the word
BONIFACE
writ large across the fronts. And there were more with
LIVERPOOL LASS
in white letters on their chests. Others, seamen all. Two or three of them wore what Eli wore, the sleeveless singlet, the cutoff trousers. I clamped my hand over my mouth, afraid that I might scream. These sailors were the Unknowns in Eli’s list. I was becoming more and more certain of it.

I should run, hide from this unimaginable horror. But I could not. There were gentlemen in ordinary clothing and a few women, two small boys, a man with a child on his shoulders, a woman with a baby wrapped in a shawl. The woman pointed down to the beach at a man standing alone at the edge of the surf. In a strong voice she yelled, “You! You! You would not save my baby, though I begged. Instead you took a roll of wire into your boat! I curse you, you fiend!”

The man she pointed to was the mayor of Brindle. He shrieked, then threw himself face-down on the sand.

There was a marcher, bent over, carrying a violin. There must in the world be many violins, but I knew instantly that this was the one that was displayed in my aunt’s living room. And that man with the white face and bushy black beard? I had seen him robbed of all his clothing, lying dead on the beach.

And I saw Eli.

In his hand, tight against his chest, was the book with the red leather cover.

Not Eli! Please, God. Not Eli!

He walked between a man and a woman. She wore a simple white dress, and at her neck a gold chain with a gleaming purple stone. She was the woman in the painting that hung in Mrs. Stuart’s house—Eli’s mother. His grandmother had said,
That was the dress Miranda wore the night she drowned.

Every inconceivable thing became a certainty to me.

These were his parents. His parents who had been on board the
Liverpool Lass.
All these marchers were dead, dead at the hands of the people of Brindle and Brindle Point.

Eli’s parents were dead.

Eli was dead.

The look of him there with those living corpses destroyed me.

I stifled a scream.

How could he be dead? He’d held me, carried me, kissed me.

I wanted to run to him, but my feet would not move.

He had seen me, and I saw him whisper something to the woman, his mother, then come to where I stood.

I stared at him, speechless.

He ran his hand across the smooth darkness of his hair. The red-leather-covered book was held tight against his chest.

A sob, like a hiccup, racked me. “Tell me,” I whispered. “Help me understand. If I can . . . I don’t know—”

“Shhh! Shhh!” He stroked my cheek. “I need you to be strong. I was on the
Liverpool Lass
with my parents when it was wrecked on the Sisters. I was working on the sails, helping in the storm. Your uncle and the others believed I had survived. They were wrong. I drowned too.”

I shook my head, shook it over and over. “You can’t have. If you drowned, you wouldn’t be—”

“They thought I was still alive. But they sensed a strangeness. They feared me. They could not kill me.”

I was crying, and he held me, whispering into my hair. “Oh, Josie! From the start, I knew there was a line we could not cross. That I should stay away from you. But I could not. I ask your forgiveness.”

I looked into his face. “Don’t say that. I care nothing for the line. I will break through it. Only take me with you.”

“I cannot.” He bent, and for a moment, I felt his lips on my brow. “You will go back to Edinburgh—”

“I will not go back. I will follow you into the darkness.”

He took his arm from around me and with his thumb wiped away the tears on my face. “No. Do not try to find where I am,” he said. “I cannot be found. You will forget me.”

“Never! You are speaking to me as if I am a simpleton. I can decide.”

“No, my love. On this you cannot.” The words were so definitive, his face so anguished.

I tried to hold him.

Beyond where we stood, the fire roared. I saw it licking at the trees around his grandmother’s house.

“Your grandmother?” I gasped.

“She is safe. She has been taken to live with her sister in Kilbarchan. Arrangements were made. And I brought your aunt and Lamb from inside Raven’s Roost. We want no more deaths on Brindle Point.”

The marchers had turned now, walking silently on the road that led to Brindle, their torches flaring ominously into the darkness above.