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Prologue
THE COAST OF MAINE, 1882
He was an old, old man, and he thought he'd seen it all. For seventy-one years he had fished these icy waters of the Atlantic, as had his father and his father before him. He'd braved the angry sea as it crashed and howled along his beloved coast, gone out in his small, flat-bottomed dory into the sleeping blue giant when the fog was so thick he couldn't see his own hands. But he'd never been afraid out here until today.
The woman scared him.
He glanced at her from beneath the snagged brim of his cap, trying to hide his interest. He needn't have bothered. She seemed to have forgotten his existence.
He tried to think of something to say to her, to this strange, fey beauty who sat like a silent Madonna in his rocking, scarred little boat, a dozen old lobster traps in need of paint clustered around her.
She sat slumped over, beaten somehow, her pale hands clasped against the rough brown wool of her cloak, her sad gaze fixed on the sharp line of the horizon.
Blue water slapped the dory, sprayed over the high sides, and puddled on the floor at her feet, but she didn't bother to move her scuffed boots out of the wet-
ness.
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He waited for her to say or do something. But she just sat there, staring, staring. Long, wavy strands of reddish brown hair whipped along her pale cheeks, caught on the fullness of her lower lip. The odd, nearly transparent white bonnet that hid her chignon fluttered with the breath of the wind.
"That's Purgatory," he said at last, pointing at the craggy, lonely crown of granite that pushed up from the sea, its cliffs ringed in the white foam of a pounding surf.
She nodded silently.
He maneuvered his small craft toward the island, his eyes narrowed against the bright sun. The island wavered and danced before his gaze, seeming one moment to disappear amidst the swelling tide of the sea, then to thrust up again like a proud fist. It was the last rampart of land, this place; beyond it, the Atlantic stretched into the distant horizon. As they neared the lonely island, the pounding hammer of the surf became louder. The swells crashed against the stone cliffs, sending spray higher, higher.
"I'll go around to the bay side, miss. 'Tis a quieter place to land."
"No," she said sharply, in a voice unexpectedly throaty and full. A barmaid's voice from an angel's face. "I'll get out on this side. It doesn't matter now."
"But, 'tis rough, miss?"
She turned to him then, and there was nothing sad or lonely or lost in her eyes now, there was simply determination. Cold and hard and uncompromising. "Shall I get out and swim, sir?"
For a moment, he couldn't respond.
She sighed and began gathering her skirts.
"No! Th-There's a slight cove to the starboard. I can manage a landing there, but 'twill be bumpy."
She laughed, a hollow, empty sound that frightened him. "It will not bother me, I assure you."
He drew his gaze away from her eyes and scanned
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the rocky shoreline. He knew from experience that he could manage a landing alongside one of the rain pools that gave the westernmost tip of the island a deceptive look of calm, but it wouldn't be easy. And it wouldn't be safe.
