“Come.” He put in his oars once more. “I must take you somewhere.” And without waiting for me to set right, he took a long stroke and set us forward again. I fell in with him and rowed, my heart glad to work, my back and shoulders pulling and yielding in time as my mind turned over the pieces of conversation Bart had overheard. Had Halcy born a child before she drowned? She had held one in her arms on Leadbetter’s Island. I rowed and rowed. I saw we had rounded the end of the point and were heading down the other side, the ocean side. The current grew much stiffer and I found I had to fight my oars to continue.

“Where are we going?” I asked after what seemed an endless time.

“Not much farther,” Bart answered between breaths.

Several more minutes of hard stroking against the current brought us to the head of a long cove. I turned round and saw the rocky remnants of an old pier still piled above the shallower waters. Bart nosed us forward and several strokes landed us alongside one of the broad granite foundation blocks.

“What is this?” I wondered aloud.

“We are on the far side of the old quarry,” he said. “This must have been a loading dock for the workers.”

He leaned down and offered his hand. But I looked up at him, suddenly uneasy. I thought I knew the spot he meant to show me.

“Come,” he said softly.

I shook my head.

“You have been here?”

I nodded. “With Miss Grange.”

“She was a very little girl,” he said sadly.

At that, I pushed myself from off the seat and gave him my hand.

Quite close to the old quarry dock, a path led away into the woods, the old stone wall alongside. And there, not far beyond, lay the little headstone marking Miss Grange’s secret grave.

Almost defiantly now, I reached out my hand and brushed the hanging green tendrils of moss from off the marker’s face. It bore the legend:

PERDITA GRANGE
Pray for Her

“I think she is the sad explanation for Henry and Halcy’s death,” said Bart, looking down upon the stone. “They lost her and buried her. And then, distraught—”

What he did not finish struck me cold. “No!” I whispered.

He was silent.

“How could you say that?” I turned from the grave to face him.

He looked back at me gently. “We all of us thought as much. Why else had they tied themselves to the mast?”

I started to shiver. “All of us? Which all of us?”

“Your father. Mr. Coates. Myself.”

“But no one ever spoke of that! No one ever suggested such a thing. Surely Papa would have brought that up with me.”

Bart remained quiet, watching me.

“I suppose he meant to protect me!” I said hotly.

“You were also on the dock, Maisie. You saw us untie them.”