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It didn’t take too long to round up the chooks.

They were happy to head back towards Tom’s place once the dog had gone.

They were distrustful of Hiccup, but she was more interested in chasing bugs than chickens.

Despite her breed, birds had never interested her much.

I blamed it on a fight she lost with a seagull when she was a pup.

She’d tried to retrieve the seagull, and it had objected strenuously.

Lost John, a hen tucked under his arm, led our little procession to Tall Tom’s house.

“I’ll put the kettle on,” Tall Tom said, and tottered inside his cottage while the rest of us counted the chooks into the sagging wire pen in his garden.

“Good for you,” I said, nodding at Eddie. He was holding a hen warily. “You got one.”

He held it out to me, flinching back as though he thought it might attack. “I didn’t catch it. That little kid shoved it at me while he went for another one. I had to take it. I didn’t know what else to do!”

“You did good,” I said, setting the chook down.

He blinked and showed me a pleased grin that warmed me more than it should have, given that I’d only known him a few days. But it felt right.

“Joe,” Agnes Dinsmore said, her curious gaze falling on Eddie. “You two coming for a cuppa?”

“No,” I said. “We’ve got to see Short Clarry.”

The women and Lost John waved us off.

Short Clarry Finch lived in a cottage in the street that ran alongside the curve of the harbour wall. He was the head of the Dauntless Island Tourist Board in addition to his mayoral duties. There were no other members yet, but Short Clarry was nothing if not optimistic.

“Red Joe!” he said, meeting us on his front path. “And you must be Mr. Hawthorne. How fascinating.”

Eddie held out his hand hesitantly. “Nice to meet you.”

Short Clarry shook it with enthusiasm. “Come in, come in. I’ve got the kettle on. Tea? Coffee?” He was already leading the way inside. “What would your great-great-great-grandfathers say if they could see you two right now, hmm?”

Probably nothing near to what they’d say if they’d seen us an hour ago on the lighthouse catwalk.

Eddie threw me a quick grin, like he knew exactly what I was thinking, and followed me into Short Clarry’s cottage.

Short Clarry’s living room was a riot of clashing floral décor, courtesy of his late wife, Enid.

Enid Finch had never seen a flower pattern—whether on curtains, cushions, carpet, or coffee mugs—that she didn’t like.

The bookshelf was full of porcelain knick-knacks, each sitting on its own lace doily.

Short Clarry was a fussy little man with a fussy little house, but he was endlessly enthusiastic about Dauntless Island and all its residents, and I’d always liked that about him.

Hiccup sat in the doorway and stared balefully at Short Clarry’s fat longhaired cat, her one true nemesis. The cat didn’t give a fuck and continued to gaze imperiously out the window.

Clarry brought coffee and sweet biscuits, and Eddie and I sat on the couch. Clarry sat opposite us in a worn easy chair.

“Oh, it’s a bad business,” Short Clarry said at last, gesturing to Eddie.

“Tourism will never take off if the mainlanders learn this is how we treat our visitors.” He flinched.

“Not that this is how we treat our visitors! This is quite out of the ordinary. Isn’t it, Red Joe? Quite out of the ordinary.”

Short Clarry, like many of the older islanders, had a distinct accent that many of the younger residents had lost at boarding schools and universities on the mainland. Two hundred years of isolation had preserved a lot of the West Country in the Dauntless accent.

“Very much so,” I said, more to smooth Short Clarry’s ruffled feathers than Eddie’s.

“And you’re looking into it, are you, Red Joe?” he asked, tilting his head. “ You are?”

I hummed and caught Eddie’s interested glance. “I am.”

Short Clarry inhaled. “Well, then. Well, that’s good news. Your father would be proud, Red Joe.”

I cleared my throat, ignoring the sudden ache in my chest, and changed the subject before Short Clarry turned this moment into something bigger than I wanted it to be.

“But listen, Clarry, I told John Coldwell this morning that this isn’t something for the community to handle. This is a police matter.”

“Oh, yes.” Short Clarry shook his head and tutted.

“It’s terrible. Just terrible. Of course the police need to be involved, but it’s terrible that it’s even necessary.

” He leaned forward, the springs of the easy chair creaking underneath him.

“Now, who do you think did such a thing? Was it John Coldwell? Because you know how short his temper is! You remember when Agnes Barnes threw an egg at Josiah Nesmith’s statue?

” He clicked his tongue. “No, that must’ve been before your time, but you know the story. ”

That was the island in a nutshell, really. Whether a thing happened five years ago, or fifty, it was never forgotten.

“Well,” Short Clarry continued, “John Coldwell was livid , even though Agnes was just a little girl larking about. He yelled at her up and down the length of the street for an hour, until her brother Big Johnny and your dad came up from the jetty and told him they’d knock his teeth out if he didn’t lay off.

” He sipped his coffee. “Agnes still won’t sit near him in village meetings, even though it must be over thirty years ago now it all happened. ”

I nodded.

Short Clarry smiled. “Oh, but she carried a torch for Tall Joe after that day!”

I’d heard that story a million times before too. How little Agnes Barnes had mooned over my dad for ages, with the intensity only an eight-year-old girl could muster. She’d been a flower girl at my parents’ wedding, scowling jealously at my mum in all the photographs.

“You didn’t see anyone going up to the point last night?” I asked.

Short Clarry’s brow creased. “In that storm? No, I shut my windows and was in bed early.”

And there was the difficulty. People had shut out the weather and pulled their curtains closed. Even if they had been looking out, who would have glimpsed anyone in that storm? The island was as dark as pitch when storms came, apart from the lightning.

“You’ve heard about the diary then?” I asked him.

Short Clarry snorted, his hairy eyebrows tugging together. “Who hasn’t? It’s a fake, of course. Everyone knows Henry Jessup died on the island.”

Eddie snapped a biscuit in half and pasted on a brittle smile.

“Probably,” I agreed. “But even if it was real, it’s just a book. Nobody should hurt somebody over a book.”

“Hmm,” said Short Clarry thoughtfully. “Tell that to John Coldwell.”

I thought back to how John Coldwell had suggested Eddie was lucky the islanders hadn’t hanged him like they had his ancestor George Hawthorne.

Short Clarry had a point.

* * *

I t was cold enough that night that I lit a fire.

Eddie accompanied me on my rounds of the lighthouse, and then we returned to the cottage and sat on the living room couch.

The fire burned, wood cracking, and light danced and made shadows in the cavernous fireplace.

Hiccup, who had no sense of self-preservation, lay as close to the screen as she could, slowly roasting herself.

We watched TV for a while in companionable silence, and then Eddie stood up and began to check out the bookshelf. “Do you mind?”

“Help yourself.”

Eddie came back to the couch with one of the young adult novels Amy must have left.

“Not the book about Dauntless?” I asked with a smile.

Eddie grinned. “I’ve read it.”

Of course he had.

Eddie didn’t open the novel. Just ran his fingers down the spine. “What you said today. Do you really think the diary is a fake?”

“I’m not the historian,” I said. “But I didn’t want to get Short Clarry offside by saying it wasn’t.”

“Fair enough.” Eddie chewed his lip for a moment. “But are you curious?”

I considered that.

I was, in a way. But Mavis was right: nothing good could come out of disturbing the dead.

So what if the diary was real? What if Harry Jessup had left Dauntless and made it all the way to Sumatra?

What if he had survived long enough to write down what had happened on the island, and it turned out that George Hawthorne wasn’t a tyrant, and Josiah Nesmith wasn’t a hero for overthrowing him?

What if the island’s history was even darker than I had ever been told?

Would it change the way I looked at my neighbours?

Maybe it would.

We were fiercely proud of our origins. Such pride wouldn’t readily turn into indifference or mere academic curiosity if everything we thought we knew about our origins turned out to be a lie.

It ran too deep for that. It would turn to shame, probably, or anger, and I didn’t quite know how to approach that.

If what Eddie said about the island’s history was true, then I wasn’t sure I wanted to look it in the face.

“Maybe I’ll just wait to read all about it in your thesis,” I said at last.

Eddie smiled and pushed his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose. His expression grew serious again. “Why did Short Clarry seem surprised when you said you were looking into things?”

I’d hoped he hadn’t picked up on that. I let out a slow breath. “There’s an...an expectation that comes with being me. With my name, I mean, and being a direct descendant of Josiah Nesmith.”

Eddie’s eyes were large behind his glasses. He nodded. “Like when we joked that you’re the king of the island?”

“I’m not the king of the island,” I said.

“But I am something , and it’s not a joke.

It’s hard to explain, but the other islanders listen to me because of who I am.

The problem is, I’m not much of a talker at the best of times, so sometimes when they’re expecting my opinion on something, I’ve just got nothing to say. ”

“You do okay with me,” he said. “Talking.”

“Yeah, I do okay with you.”

He smiled, cheeks flushing, and tapped his fingers against the cover of the book.

“So, tell me,” I said. “How does it feel to be a direct descendant of the tyrant of Dauntless Island?”

Eddie laughed and stretched his legs out.

His feet, like mine, rested on the coffee table.

He wriggled his toes in his striped socks.

“Pretty cool, actually. Like, my parents weren’t really into history, but my granddad left me a bunch of books and old family stuff, and I got into it that way.

I’ve got George Hawthorne’s christening cup at home.

It’s this ugly silver thing. I keep pencils in it. ”

I smiled and knocked our shoulders together.

Eddie set the book aside. “Anyway, I thought it was cool to be related to someone kind of famous, right? Or notorious, anyway. But when I looked into it, he didn’t actually seem to be that much of an arsehole.

” He snorted. “Well, I mean, he was a nineteenth century white British naval captain, so there’s a certain amount of unavoidable arseholery inherent in that, but he didn’t seem worse than any of his contemporaries, you know? ”

“Sure.”

“So I figured something went really wrong on the Dauntless .” Eddie wrinkled his nose. “And I’m pretty sure that was down to Josiah Nesmith.”

“You think he didn’t have a reason to mutiny?”

“Henry Jessup didn’t think he did,” Eddie said.

His expression grew serious. “I’m not here to shit on his memory, you know?

It’s just there’s another side of the story, and I think it’s the truth, and I want to make sure it gets out there too.

The truth doesn’t destroy a legend.” He shrugged. “Look at Ned Kelly.”

“It won’t matter to most people,” I said quietly. “But it matters here.”

I raised my hand and touched my fingertips to Eddie’s temple, close to the healing cut.

Eddie held my gaze as the air around us shifted and grew quieter, heavier. “So, what would our great-great-great-whatever-grandfathers think, Joe Nesmith?” His lips quirked. “Do you think George Hawthorne, rope around his neck courtesy of Josiah Nesmith, figured we’d be kissing on a couch one day?”

“We’re not kissing on a couch though,” I pointed out, and suddenly I had a lapful of Eddie, and we were kissing on a couch.

I carded my fingers through Eddie’s hair, mindful of his wound, and Eddie curled one hand around my shoulder, cupping my cheek with the other.

His knees dug into the couch on either side of my thighs.

I slipped a hand down his back, fingers sliding against skin where his shirt had ridden up.

God .

The rush of pure want made me almost giddy. I tightened my grip in Eddie’s hair and groaned as we kissed. Closed my eyes, savouring every moment, until at last our urgent, heated kisses trailed off into gentle pecks, feather light. I opened my eyes.

Eddie laughed, breath warm and gaze sparkling, and lifted himself off my lap to slump beside me.

“There.” He sounded breathless and satisfied. He reached for my hand, twining our fingers together. “What would our great-great-great-whatever-grandfathers think of that ?”

I pretended to consider it. “Well,” I said at last, “they were both in the navy, so I’m guessing they wouldn’t be completely shocked.”

Eddie laughed so loud that Hiccup woke up, her tail thumping on the floor.