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Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Harbor Light
The sea kept its own counsel, even when the town would not. Every morning the tide slid back like a velvet curtain, revealing the dark stones and salt-buried ropes that tethered Evermere-on-Sea to its livelihood. The Harcourt house sat high above the harbor with a long veranda and a row of windows like watchful eyes. Sailcloth flapped, rigging sang, gulls wheeled and cried. Isabel Harcourt had grown up with this chorus, and the sound had always made her feel both rooted and restless, like someone pressing their palm against a windowpane.
On the morning she first saw him, a steamer pulled away and the harbor people stood and waved. Men in heavy coats shouted, women balanced baskets on their hips. Isabel stood at the cliffs’ edge in her straw hat and white gloves, pretending to care about the new lighthouse’s paint color. Her father’s foreman droned on about harbor fees and shipments while she nodded on cue. But her attention had been caught by a young man kneeling by a crate, brush in hand, painting the hull of a fishing boat on a scrap of canvas. His hair blew across his brow, and every so often he looked up, not at the boat but at the light sliding along the water’s asphalt-blue face.
She had never seen anyone look like that at the sea, as if it had told him a secret.
“Miss Harcourt?” the foreman said, waiting for some confirmation about the lighthouse.
“It should be the color it was last season,” she said, and he nodded, relieved that the world would proceed as before.
She lingered as her father’s carriage returned for her. The painter had clamped his canvas to an old chair, tugging at the corners with coarse fingers. He didn’t glance toward the cliff. He didn’t know that the most sheltered girl in Evermere had just found a door left ajar.
Isabel was twenty. She had been taught to curtsy and to question nothing. In the sitting room that evening, her father, Edmund Harcourt, spoke gravely of markets and alliances, of Lord Ashcombe’s “interest” in their family’s position, of the “natural course” of things concerning her future. Lord Ashcombe, who was nearing forty and moved through a room as if it belonged to him even if he had never been invited there. When he had visited the week before, he had taken her wrist in both hands as if measuring the diameter of a prize, and she had felt the urge to pull away.
“Your happiness matters,” her father said, though he said it like a man describing a ledger. “Lord Ashcombe will secure it. He is well placed. He is generous.”
Generous, Isabel thought, is another word for debt. The lamps burned low. The window glass reflected her pale face like a ghost, not free to pass through.
That night, unable to sleep, she crept onto the veranda and watched the lighthouse wink. Far below, a single candle shone in the row house near the harbor. Across that distance, a man leaned toward his canvas, and the light made a thin gold frame around him. Without knowing why, Isabel lifted her hand as if to touch him across the dark.
