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EDDIE

“G o to Dauntless Island,” I muttered to myself as the wind howled, the rain battered my tent, and I slowly died of hypothermia. The temperature was sitting at a level of cold that was frankly unacceptable this far away from Antarctica. “It’ll be fun .”

I wished there was someone else I could blame for this, except the person I was mocking right now was Past Eddie.

I liked that guy, mostly, but he’d been a short-sighted idiot when it came to Dauntless Island.

Firstly, it was cold . Colder than I’d been expecting.

When I’d tried on my jacket and beanie at the camping store a month ago, the zip had stuck and I’d almost died of heat exhaustion before I got them off.

Oh , Past Eddie had thought airily, this jacket might be too warm.

Fuck him.

Or fuck me.

Whichever.

That wasn’t the point. Neither was the fact that once again I’d jumped headfirst into something because I’d been carried away with enthusiasm and hadn’t actually planned it very well.

If my parents found out about this, they’d mentally file it away with the summer I decided to play Rugby League (concussion and a broken ankle), moving in with my boyfriend three weeks after we started dating (suddenly having nowhere to live after walking in on him balls deep in a theology major), and deciding that I was going to become a historian (I was going to be eating Two Minute Noodles and buying clothes from my local op shop until I died).

Still, my history of bad decision making wasn’t the point either. At least, not right now.

The point right now was that I was fucking freezing, and the wind had been slicing through this jacket like razorblades for most of the day. The night and rain made it even worse despite my stupidly expensive tent. Not even thoughts of a hot ginger lighthouse keeper could warm me up right now.

It had been a day .

Well, it had been two of them since I’d arrived on the island, but today had been worse than yesterday by a magnitude of about a billion, and it wasn’t just the weather.

When I’d arrived yesterday afternoon, I’d figured I’d find somewhere nice to camp and then wander around for a bit, getting the feel of the place.

I’d been poring over maps of Dauntless Island for years now—photographs too—but sometimes you have to be there.

You have to stand in the places you’ve read about, to take in how the light falls and the air smells, to make it all fall into place.

Theresa, my former history professor and current thesis advisor, liked to say that history was a lot like a jigsaw puzzle.

Well, visiting a location was like getting a glimpse of the box and seeing the whole picture instead of just the bits.

Usually that felt exciting, but when it came to Dauntless Island, the picture was kind of shit.

The island itself was beautiful . It was green and hilly, encircled in part by dramatic cliffs, and in part by pristine beaches.

The village was a postcard maker’s masturbatory fantasy: whitewashed cottages almost two centuries old following the curve of the harbour.

Little clusters of boats were tied along the harbour wall, bobbing with the rise and fall of the waves as seagulls bobbed alongside them.

And, above the village, on the tallest hill, an old white lighthouse standing sentinel over the island.

So, the island?

Picturesque.

The people?

Holy shit.

Okay, Joe Nesmith was hot as hell, so I hadn’t really evaluated him as an actual human being yet.

My brain was still stuck on the whole hot lighthouse keeper thing.

But at least he’d talked to me, and he had a nice dog.

Meanwhile, the woman at the shop had tried to murder me with her eyes, and John Coldwell at the museum?

I was pretty sure he legitimately hated me.

After talking to Joe earlier today, I went to the museum.

It was in the street that ran alongside the harbour, sandwiched between the old church and another building.

I’d checked the church out first. There wasn’t very much in it.

An altar bereft of anything ecclesiastical but, for some reason, holding what looked like a large baking tray.

Pews that had been shifted to the edges of the space, instead of lined up in rows.

No stained glass in the windows, just tiny plain panels, blurred with years of exposure to salt and held together by lines of lead.

I looked for a donation box on my way out—I wasn’t religious, but I was a fan of helping restore old buildings—and couldn’t find one.

I wondered if it was even consecrated still.

I poked around a little longer, squinting at a brass plaque on the wall that was so corroded I couldn’t even make out what it said, and then headed next door to the museum.

It wasn’t much of a museum, but I didn’t hold that against it.

Places like this were always at the bottom of the list when it came to funding, so the drab and uninteresting little foyer didn’t put me off.

It was charming in its way. These places just kept plodding along because the people who ran them weren’t motivated by money; they were just passionate about history. And that was kind of amazing.

I passed a rack of postcards featuring mostly goats, and smiled at the man who was perched on the stool behind the counter, eating a cheese sandwich. Crumbs rained down onto a delicate little china plate.

“Hi,” I said brightly.

The man stood up. He was tall, with a bit of a paunch—but who was I to judge?

If I could spend my days in a museum eating cheese sandwiches, my waistline would reflect it too, and I would have zero regrets.

The man wiped his hand on his knitted jumper, and then brushed his thinning blond hair back. “Good morning.”

“Hi,” I said again, because I was articulate like that. “How much is entry?”

“Five dollars,” he said, and looked vaguely surprised when I didn’t argue with him.

I dug in my wallet for a ten dollar note.

From the look of the sad lobby and paltry gift shop, there wasn’t going to be five dollars’ worth of anything in this place.

But, just like I always dropped money in the roof restoration boxes of churches, I never quibbled about paying to get inside a museum.

“Don’t worry about the change,” I said, and the man’s face lit up as he tucked the money under his sandwich plate.

“Thank you,” he said, sticking his hand out. “Coldwell. John Coldwell.”

I shook it. “It’s great to meet you. I’m Eddie Hawthorne.”

He pulled his hand away, and something like wariness crept into his expression.

“I’m a historian,” I said. “Or at least I’m a history student. I’m doing my Honours thesis on the mutiny.”

“The... I’m sorry, did you say your surname is Hawthorne ? Any relation to?—?”

“Great-great-great-something-grandson,” I said. “It’s actually really amazing to be here, where it all went down.”

John Coldwell’s expression was decidedly frosty now. “You’re the tyrant George Hawthorne’s great-great-great grandson?”

“That’s right. Although I think ‘tyrant’ is a bit of exaggeration.” I laughed.

He didn’t. “And you’re here to learn more about the mutiny?”

“Not exactly. I think I’m pretty well versed on it. Actually, my thesis is going to turn everything people think they know about the mutiny on its head.”

He drew back like a startled cat. “What do you mean?”

“Well, what if it turned out that nothing happened the way it was described?” I asked, with the same thrill of delight I always got when I discussed the mutiny with other people.

The other people, unless they were Theresa, weren’t often as delighted, or even vaguely interested.

My mum nodded and smiled politely, and my dad, who was supportive in other ways, usually said something along the lines of me being on about that bloody ship again.

“What if George Hawthrone wasn’t a tyrant?

What if the mutineers were the bad guys?

Not by, like, just the standards of the day, because of course the authorities at the time said they were, but what if they were actually objectively horrible, and George Hawthrone was killed because he tried to stop them? ”

“Excuse me?”

“I have Henry Jessup’s diary.” I beamed proudly and waited for this fellow history-lover to be amazed and astounded by my incredible revelation.

Getting thrown out of the Dauntless Island Museum by a man who called me a “crazy fantasist and dirty historical revisionist” hadn’t been on my bingo card.

Yet here I was, hours later, listening to the rain drumming on the roof of my tent and wondering what the hell I was going to do to kill time for a week until I could get back to the mainland.

Work on my thesis, I supposed. I’d brought my laptop because I’d envisioned at least a little cafe or something where I could set up in a corner with a mug of coffee and work for a few hours.

Except I hadn’t seen any signs of a cafe down in the village, and I was pretty sure John Coldwell wouldn’t be very pleasant if he saw me lurking down there anyway.

I wriggled my arms out of my sleeping bag, then dragged my backpack close enough to unzip.

I pulled my laptop out and opened it. The light from the screen was warm and welcoming and familiar.

I opened a browser window, hoping to check out Tripadvisor or something, but there was no Wi-Fi.

I thought about setting up my own hotspot and checked my phone—no bars there either.

So much for getting the inside scoop on things to do on Dauntless now I’d burned my bridges at the museum.

I closed my laptop and sighed.