The Wreckers’ Lantern

On Wreckers’ Night the Holm lights lanterns along the cliffs for the Constance, driven onto the rocks two hundred years ago by a wind the island has blamed on a knot-wife ever since. This year a treasure diver who swore he’d found her bell is found in the smugglers’ tunnels under Wrack Cove, a lantern in his hand and a four-knotted cord in his pocket that ought to be at the bottom of the sea. Stella has a museum full of doubtful relics to sort through, a lifeboat coxswain she has started looking for on the quay, and a mother who walked out fifteen years ago and has just walked back in with a suitcase and no explanations. And in her grandmother’s ledger she finds the entry she has dreaded all her life: the wind-cord sold for Tom Angove’s boat the week he drowned, tied by her own hands.