A True Lover’s Knot

The Long Night of Lamps is the Holm’s midwinter: a lantern on every sill, a true lover’s knot on the harbour lamp for every couple brave enough to hang one, and this year a three-day storm that shuts the causeway and leaves nobody able to leave. Then the folklorist Anthony Marrable is found dead in the museum archive among Thirza Curnow’s papers, and all over the island old keeping-knots, the ones people bought to keep a secret, start coming undone by themselves. Everyone has something Anthony had read about. Stella has more than most: in his notes is proof that the cord that drowned Tom Angove was never her knot, and a hint about whose it might have been that she cannot bear to say aloud. Least of all to Clem, on the night he finally kisses her.