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Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Road to Gorsewick
The lane narrowed until it was hardly a lane at all, just two strips of shin-deep rut split by a spine of turf. Hester’s boots sank and drew up with a quiet, sucking complaint. On either side, the moor lay like a dark pelt under the sagging dusk. A slate wind had been rising all day, combing the tawny grasses in long shivers.
Gorsewick announced itself without welcome. A low scatter of cottages pressed together as if to hide from weather, their thatch scalloped by decades of rain. Smoke drifted thinly from a few chimneys. Cut peat was stacked in tidy black bricks along stone walls. Past the last willow, she saw a square tower on a hump of ground, an old beacon house with a little iron-railed gallery. A glass lantern sat in the window like an eye.
Hester’s pack weighed heavier for the tin of maps inside it. The letter tucked into her coat felt heavier still. It was only one line of script from a stranger: Saw a man as might be your brother, springtime last, on the Gorsewick road. Very thin, carrying a green-enameled canteen. Talked in his sleep about a light.
She pushed the door of the inn and found low ceilings, peat-fire, and the smell of cabbage. The inn’s name, a lopsided sign said, was The Notch. The landlady was a tall woman with a stooped back and wrists like the roots of a hawthorn. She looked at Hester’s coat, the mud, the maps, and did not smile.
“Taken the wrong road,” the landlady said.
“I meant to,” Hester replied. “I’m looking for someone.”
The landlady’s mouth thinned. “Aren’t we all.”
