A Cord Not Quickly Broken

Holmouth, 1796. A widow with a debt she cannot pay. A surgeon no woman in town will let near a childbed. And a marriage set down in seven numbered clauses.

Loveday Hockin mends nets, helps the old midwife at lyings-in, and listens every night to her small sons cough in a damp cottage on Fish Street. Her drowned husband left her something worse than grief: a forty-pound note held by Silas Quance, the softly spoken chandler who owns half the town.

Gideon Hale has come home from the navy with steady hands and bad nights. Holmouth wont send for an unmarried stranger, and without the confinements his practice will fail by winter. So he writes Loveday a proposal: a dry house and care for her boy, her help at his side, separate rooms, nothing further expected.

She says yes. She doesnt tell him why.

Through a summer of fever and an autumn of herring, the arrangement begins to hold in ways neither of them wrote down. But Quance hasnt finished collecting, and the man Loveday married carries a secret of his own from the Glorious First of June.

A warm, closed-door Georgian romance of the north Devon coast, about debts, knots, and the strength of three strands laid together.