The following morning struggled into existence, the bleary call of foghorns crossing and recrossing the harbor. When I rose, the fog was close in at my window, heavy and insistent in its thick silence. We were to make the trip to Leadbetter’s Island, one of the string of islands extending the granite spine that stretches out from Middle Haven harbor down the reach of Hurricane Sound to the east, sprouting above the black water into a pale sky. It was a favorite journey, but I knew the day would prove difficult now, for Mama’s fear of the fog would dampen the spirit of the voyage, and Papa’s cheery dismissal of that fear would only clamp shut her lips.

The sound of Jessie busy at the dressing table called me back into the room.

“The blue or the white this morning, Miss Maisie?”

Ah. What did one wear to visit a tower in the middle of an island in the middle of a bay? If I wore the white dress, I could slip in and out of the fog like a ghost and give Papa a start.

“The white, Jessie.”

“The white? On a day such as today, miss? And if there’s a rough crossing out to that tower, won’t the white be in a pitiable state after the trip? Far better the blue.”

“Oh, very well, Jessie, you dress me as you please. But why give me a choice to start with?”

I was answered by the smart snap of the brush through my hair, the heavy weight pulling me down to sit at my table.

“Jessie?”

The strokes punctuated her powdery breathing.

“What age were you when you married?”

Was there a change in the brushstrokes? Did they become fiercer, more insistent? Jessie’s breathing shuttered open and closed, not pausing an instant. I closed my eyes, waiting for an answer. Each time the brush drew down through my hair, it pulled my head back into Jessie’s body, rocking me softly against its aproned warmth. When Jessie answered, her words came as if from a great distance.

“Eighteen. And a widow at twenty.”

“Oh, Jessie,” I said. “I am sorry.”

She did not reply. I imagined a bright and hopeful Jessie, unaproned, standing next to a thin boy whose whiskers had just started sprouting on his soft cheeks. Then I saw Jessie and her husband walking down a lane, his arm awkward around her waist, his mouth bent close to her ear to say a little something. I saw a dark horror between them, a little grave on a hill, and then I saw the larger grave that was his own. My eyes flew open, frighted by the ease with which my mind could summon such things.

“Oh, Jessie.”

“That’s the hundred, miss. And the breakfast bell sounding. We’ve to hurry with the blue’s buttons.”