A Storm to Keep

About this book

Nobody in Saltkettle meant to hurt her. They only fed her.

Eleven years ago, Bram Nancarrow told his brother the glass was steady. His brother believed him, and went out, and did not come home. Bram has read the barometer at seven, at noon and at nine every day since — as though enough numbers, kept carefully enough, could keep anybody safe.

Then something lands on his weathervane and will not get off.

She is a handful of grey weather with a temper and no manners. She steals his cap. And she can read a sky three days before it arrives — so the cove takes her in the only way it knows how. A saucer of milk on a wall. Three sprats on a bollard. A place laid for her at the harvest table, because leaving a person out of the cake is not a thing that is done in this parish.

What nobody understands — least of all the man who is falling in love with her — is what it costs.

Every hour she spends on the ground, she spends out of herself. An afternoon flying children’s kites. A night on a warm chimney instead of nine hundred miles of open Atlantic. Every one of them freely given. Every one a fair trade. Not one of them refusable. And by midsummer she cannot get above two thousand feet.

Bram would keep her safe. He is very good at keeping things safe. So he builds her the finest room he has ever built — a stove, a window facing west, and a good oak door.

And the woman who has fed him for eleven years takes one look at it and says: you’ve made her a lovely little cage, my lover.

Now there is a storm coming that no instrument in England can see. The lord of the storm-roads has come to collect what he is owed. And four hundred people will live or drown on whether one careful man can bring himself to believe something he has no way to check.

There will be tea, a betting book behind the bar, an octopus with a grudge, a pig in the chapel, and a village that feeds you whether you like it or not.

A Storm to Keep is a standalone cozy seaside fantasy romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. A gentle book that charges an honest price. Put the kettle on.