As she set off along the shore road toward home, she rather wished she might find someone waiting to rub her own feet when she arrived there. She also wished—not for the first time—that instead of every family in town gifting her live chickens or smoked hams after a birthing, they might pool resources and buy her a sturdy pony.
She might wish it, but it wouldn’t do to ask. It was only an hour’s walk along the shore road anyhow. Jean straightened her back and lifted her chin as she passed over the bridge and went by the last of the brightly painted houses of the town, and tried not to imagine anyone’s eyes following her, or their whispers. For much of the last four years she’d had nothing but slander from one half of the town and cool indifference from the other. She’d worked long and hard to gain the respect she had now, and she’d not have anyone looking down on her again after all that effort, saying she was asking special favours, or that she wasn’t capable of managing just fine on her own.
The wind started blowing into her teeth as dark clouds began to pile up in the sky, biting at her cheeks and whistling down her ears. Coming around the cove, Jean spotted a sleek, dark head in the choppy water and stopped, shielding her eyes from the wind with her hand.
She’d never lost her love of seals after the first time she remembered seeing one up close, the day the Teazer had blown up out in the bay. They had a hint of mystery about them, the curious way they watched you as you watched them before disappearing back under the waves. This one vanished beneath the whitecaps almost as soon as it had appeared.
It was edging on toward evening and Jean struck out on her way again, faster than before. She didn’t fancy finishing her walk home in the dark, with the woods looming on one side of her and the open sea on the other.
The road curled back on itself in a stand of windswept pines as she came over the last rise, then dropped down toward a stretch of pebble beach, a wide view of water and sky. Far out in the bay, Jean could make out the lonely tower of the harbour light atop the red cliff on the Scotsman’s island. Soon, old Mr. Buchanan would light the oil in the lamp there and set his great curved mirror to spinning, a steady, flashing star to guide lost souls home.
Just before the weathered bridge over the marsh stream, Jean turned up the dirt path to her little wooden house.
Her father, William, had built the cottage tucked up against the edge of the forest as if to hide it from the salt, wind, and sun that had long since bleached its shingles a soft silvery grey. The house had no call to hide from sunset tonight, for it had been swallowed by the gathering clouds, but the wind was picking up as Jean came to her door, tugging at her shawl, her skirts, and stray wisps of her hair. She wanted nothing so much as to go inside and get the fire and the lamp lit before the last of the light went and the threatened rain began to fall. This time of year, if the wind turned the wrong way, it might even sleet before morning.
Jean sighed, heaviness in every bit of her body, and set her basket down on the slate step, turning away toward the goat pen.
She had chores yet to do.

* * * *

“We ought to be careful.”
Jean sat in the stern of her father’s little wooden dory, exactly where she always used to when she and her father went out in the boat, and she absently hoped he wouldn’t be too angry that they had taken it without asking his permission. They’d already lost both the oars; it was good they had stayed in the marsh pond and not gone farther.
Jo Keddy looked up from the prow and grinned, rosy pink with laughter and exertion under the shade of her bonnet. Her hair hung in long gold waves down her back, spilling over her shoulders as she tried to paddle with her hands over the side.
The pond was smooth as glass, a shining mirror. Jean wondered if they ought to worry about getting back to the shore. There was something important she was meant to be doing, but she couldn’t remember what it was. She put her hands in the water, too. The two of them, together, would be able to steer the little boat straight.
Jo looked over at Jean and pushed down on the side of the boat to make it rock, laughing. Jean laughed, too, and did the same on her side. Anything to make Jo smile at her like that.
The boat rocked. They went in a circle.
They were making great waves in the still pond, the boat pitching with a force that made Jean’s stomach drop. She stopped laughing.
“Jo,” she said. “Be careful.”
Jo looked at Jean from under the wide brim of her bonnet, her eyes as blue as the forget-me-nots by the stream. “Shh.” She pushed her side of the boat down once more, making it dip low.
Jean’s side tipped up even higher than before and fell back again, unchecked.
Before Jean could do anything, Jo toppled into the water with a shriek and disappeared without even a ripple.
“Jo!” Jean cried. “Jo—!”
* * * *
The echo of her own cry followed Jean back up out of dreaming, and for a moment she lay there panting, her heart hammering. She was sure it had been real, someone calling out from the yard, in fear or pain.
It was ridiculous. No one would be out, not at such an hour, nor in such torrential weather. Maybe in the direst emergency, like the night Jean’s father had gone out looking for her mother, with Jean only a month old and left alone in a basket by the hearth. Anneke, who had been the midwife then, had told Jean about it when she was old enough to hear, and bold enough to ask someone besides her father about what happened to her mother. But this night, Jean was safe in her own bed, no one had gone missing, and neither of the women she was tending now were anywhere near their time. If they were, she’d be staying in the village with Anneke, and one of the town lads would’ve come out to mind the animals for her.
She sat up and tried to still her racing heart.
Jean was glad she could sleep beside the warm embers. If it hadn’t just been her, the house would have been too small— a single room with a loft, a solid table and a few cupboards, a pair of comfortable old armchairs by the fire, brought new from town when her parents had first married, and the bed tucked into one corner. It was where her father used to sleep—Jean had slept up in the loft as a child, adrift in the big bedstead that had been meant for her parents. After Jean’s mother passed, William hadn’t wanted to sleep in the big bed without her, and he switched to the bed downstairs that had been meant for his daughter. The upstairs bedstead had stayed empty until Jean was big enough to leave her own little cot.
When her father passed, just over a year before, Jean had moved downstairs, too. It was warmer by the fire in the winter, and curling into her father’s old bed made her feel safer somehow, less alone. Perhaps it was the smallness of it. It was comfort, in a way. A small bed, a small house, a small world—but one that was entirely her own, where Jean was safe and free to live her own life, just as she pleased.
There’d been arguments, after her father had died. Anneke had wanted her to move to town, said it wasn’t safe for her to be on her own so far out, and Laurie hadn’t been completely sold on the notion of Jean keeping the place alone, either.
Once upon a time, she wouldn’t have minded living in town. Once upon a time, she’d liked it there, and she missed how safe and welcoming the town had seemed to her back then. But Jean couldn’t imagine ever being truly comfortable there now, no matter how much she did to cement her good reputation again. So she’d dug in her heels. She was fully capable of keeping the place on her own; she didn’t need anyone to help her, and she wasn’t scared.
Jean perched on the edge of the bed and studied her toes, debating whether she should take off her socks. It had gotten every bit as chilly as she’d feared, the wind howling down from out of the Northeast.
When Jo Keddy had still lived in town and they’d still been friends, Jean had stayed over with her family sometimes. They’d shared Jo’s bed and Jean would leave her socks off on purpose, to press her icy toes to Jo’s in the dark and hear her squeal and giggle, and then Jo would catch Jean’s feet between her own to warm them up. The memory opened up a hollow between Jean’s shoulders, where her spine ought to be, as empty and cold as the hours after midnight.
Josephine Keddy was married to Victor Gaudry these four years past and had moved clear across the colony, closer to his people in French Acadia. Jo didn’t even speak French. Still, she’d not gone against her family, not fought the marriage, not fought for Jean.
Not that Jean had fought any of it, either, though God knew what she could have done to stop it. That was the biggest shame of it all—that she’d not even tried when Jo had needed her. Jean’s throat tightened painfully, and she shoved her feet down under the covers and the memory away, curling on her side in a tight little ball. There was no one outside the house, no one calling for help, and she should stop letting her mind run away with her or next she’d be imagining ghosts drawn by her own loose tongue, just as Ida Mae had warned her; the drowned captain of the Teazer come ashore from off his flaming ship.
Flame.
She’d left the lantern burning on the table. She cursed. Oil was expensive, and even turned low she couldn’t afford to leave it to sit and burn the whole night away. Jean sighed and slid her feet back out from the covers, dropping them onto the plank floor.
A cry from outside caught her halfway between sitting and standing. It was unmistakable, sharp, and real, not a dream at all.
There was someone out there, and something was wrong to have brought them here now, in the night, in a storm. Jean grabbed up the lantern, raising the flame she was now thankful for, and went to open the door, a blast of wind and icy rain stealing her breath away and whipping her hair across her face. She squinted into the dark, straining her eyes to make out anything in the darkness beyond the circle of lamplight as she stepped out
into the yard.
Blackness. Slowly she turned, her eyes adjusting, the chill wind flattening her shift against her body. A darker black behind the house, the trees. The woodshed’s bulk at the corner of the wall, the chicken coop, the goat shed . . . there. A pale spot, blue-white and rippling at the edge of the marsh, its presence spectral, unearthly.
Jean’s scalp prickled, and she froze; the breath turned solid in her lungs. An icy trickle of water ran down the back of her neck. She was going to be murdered by ghostly privateers. She was mad to have come out of the house at all at this hour, by herself. Laurie was right; the last time he’d visited Anneke he said that Jean ought to have a rifle, out here all alone. Although, if it was a ghost—
The white thing in the darkness contracted in on itself, and carried on the back of the wind came a moan. A moan that was altogether human, full of pain and despair. Jean’s heart started beating again, and she pressed forward into the teeth of the wind and rain, suddenly sure—at least in part—of what she would find.
It was a woman, shaking and sodden, clad in nothing but a wet nightgown. No shoes on her bare feet, which were sunk ankle-deep into the thick mud at the edge of the marsh pond. Another step and she’d have been in the water. The woman was hunched over so that Jean could make out nothing more of her, save that she had long dark hair. She was in danger of catching her death out in a storm like this.
“What on earth—?” said Jean, breathless. She caught at the woman’s arm to pull her toward the house.
The woman straightened with a yelp, jerking her arm back and nearly toppling over.
“No, come, get inside—” Jean reached out to steady her, and the stranger’s eyes widened and sparked, a short breath puffing out of her mouth, still ajar. The woman grabbed at Jean’s wrist, tugging her toward the marsh pond, dark eyes pleading in her pale face. She was much taller than Jean, and heavier, too, strong and solid. Jean’s heels dug into the soft earth as she resisted, trying to keep her footing in the wet grass. Tugging Jean’s wrist again, the woman pointed off into the night, first to the pond and then away over the road toward the sea, as she began to speak in hushed tones, rapid and urgent.
Jean couldn’t understand a thing. The woman’s words were strange, liquid, rolling things that growled in her throat before being whipped away by the wind that flapped her thin nightdress around her like a bit of loose sail. They cut off abruptly as she doubled over again, moaning and hugging her round, taut belly. Her legs nearly buckled beneath her, but Jean had her now, one arm tight around the woman’s waist to keep her on her feet.
Jean drew her away from the marsh, across the yard, and into the house, not allowing for any refusal. She held firm even as the stranger cried bitter tears, pleading brokenly for God only knew what in her strange language. Jean still didn’t know what the woman was trying to tell her, but this . . . this she knew. She had to act quickly. Understanding could wait; the baby would not.