Winter Brings a Stranger to Dunn Cottage

1. Chapter 1

Fourteen and a half years after my father vanished, I spot his coat beneath the Old Exe Bridge.

It hangs from the shoulders of a man warming his hands over a barrel fire.

It isn’t Papa, of course. It never is. And yet…

The faded pink patches at the elbows are unmistakable—I stitched them myself when I was six.

Crooked little scraps of my own dress that have held up better than most new coats.

Exeter roars around us, carts rattling over stone and merchants shouting their wares, but the world suddenly narrows to that shallow bowl of earth carved beneath the bridge… and the coat I would know anywhere. I strain to see.

Turn around.

Let me see your face.

He hovers over a frail woman, shoving aside piles of leaves and lowering her onto the ground and leaning her back against the arches.

She glances up and that expression of unquestioning trust—the way they all look at him—echoes with familiarity.

A lad approaches, and the man in Papa’s coat offers a quiet command.

Yes. Oh, dear Papa.

Shivering, heart pounding, I stumble down the snowy slope toward the encampment beneath the bridge. But a child tugs on the man’s sleeve and he turns—a stranger’s face. The fairy tale disintegrates.

The man in the coat looks up and spots me… and stills. I’m staring. He hunches his shoulders in that coat, in Papa’s coat, then vanishes into the shadows beneath the old medieval arches.

“Wait!” I hurtle the rest of the way down into the dry riverbed, bracing against the decline, scanning for that tall form with jet-black hair. I search every face, straining to see that coat again.

But he’s vanished.

Yet when I turn in the ankle-deep snow to climb back up—there he is. He’s moving quickly, toward a scuffle on the opposite side of the basin. Reaching the feuding vagrants, he threads himself between them, one hand to each chest and pushing them apart, taking stray blows like an oak.

Even from a distance, I feel his solidness, the way you simply know before biting down on a ring that you have found gold. Moving closer, I keep to the shadows beneath the arch and watch, not letting that coat out of my sight.

A stray blow strikes the man’s face. He lands in the snow, then springs back up. More blows.

I fly up the incline toward them, boots slipping on packed snow. “You there—stop!”

His head shoots up, that ragged man, and he stops me instantly with the most deeply penetrating gaze. There’s nothing weak about him.

Who is this man?

Before I can gather my wits, a whistle splits the winter air.

Police officers stream down the hill, and the stranger freezes, shoves both feuding men into the snow, and bolts.

Chaos erupts as ragged bodies scramble to escape—colliding, running, crying out.

Officers grab men by their collars, throwing down whoever comes within reach.

Including him.

“Round them up!” shouts an officer.

I scramble back down to the bridge and slide behind the arch, watching. Pleading.

But then that black frock coat twists and springs up, spraying snow as the owner bolts. His face is ghostly white as he dodges the officers’ grasp and sprints toward the bridge as if he’s fleeing a firing squad.

My breath catches. Time is suspended for a moment as the stranger comes hurtling toward me, coattails flying. He’s trying to outrun them—but he’ll be caught. I can see them gaining on him.

There are dark shadows on the earth, Dickens wrote, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.

I am a moth, and it has been far too long since I’ve seen light.

I grab a fistful of that frock coat as it flies by.

He lands on all fours at my boots, and I shove him toward the crumbling steps built into the side of the bridge.

“Don’t run. Hide.” The stairs climb into an old tower, the ruined remains of a church that once sat atop the bridge.

He scrambles off and I turn to face the pursuing officers, praying the man has gone up those steps.

That sliver of hope I came to find this night goes with him.