Four Hearts, One Light: The Lamplight Romances, Four Sapphic Love Stories

Book One, Chapter 1: The New Hire

The ledger had survived ninety-some years, two floods and one very enthusiastic harbormaster's nephew with a stapler, and Margot Ellison was not about to let it die on a Monday.

It lay open on the suction table under the big north window of the conservation lab, its pages the color of weak tea, its spine split like a dropped loaf. Outside, the first Monday of January was doing what January did in Calloway Bay: a fine grey drizzle that never quite committed to being rain, the ferry slips below Pier 9 gone soft at the edges, the islands erased. The radiator ticked. The hygrometer on the wall read forty-eight percent, which was two percent higher than Margot liked and two percent lower than the building usually managed, so she was choosing to take it as a gift.

She lifted the corner of page sixty-one with a bone folder and a breath. SS Corinne, 14 crates tinned salmon, rec'd by M. Doyle. The ink had gone the brown of old blood. Somebody's whole working day lived in that line. Somebody's sore hands.

"You're doing the face," said Lucy Tran from the doorway.

"I don't have a face."

"You have a face. It's the 'I'm in love with a dead clerk' face." Lucy came in with two coffees and the bright, unrepentant energy of a twenty-six year old registrar who had not yet learned to fear donors. She set one cup on the far bench, well away from the table, because she had been trained properly. "Pike wants everyone in the boardroom at ten. He's wearing the plaid bow tie."

Margot lowered the page. "The plaid one."

"The plaid one."

The plaid bow tie meant an announcement. The polka dot one meant budget cuts. The solid navy meant somebody important had died, and once, memorably, that the gift shop had been robbed.

"Did he say what about?"

"He said, and I quote, 'exciting things.'" Lucy sipped her coffee. "He also said 'centennial' twice and 'synergy' once, so brace."

Margot pushed her glasses up, checked the clip in her hair, pulled off her nitrile gloves and tucked the cotton pair back into her cardigan pocket, where they lived. She straightened the bone folder so it lay parallel to the edge of the table. It did not need straightening. She did it anyway.

"Strictly speaking," she said, "I have fourteen pages to humidify before lunch."

"Strictly speaking," said Lucy, "the plaid bow tie."

The boardroom smelled of radiator dust and the orange cleaner the night crew used on the long table. Harold Pike stood at the head of it, sixty-two and anxious and kind in the way of men who had spent thirty years asking rich people for money and apologizing for the request. The bow tie was, indeed, plaid. Green and red, as though Christmas had not quite let go of him.

"Friends," he said, which was how he began everything, including layoffs. "As you know, this autumn marks one hundred years since the Calloway Maritime Museum opened its doors on this pier."

Margot knew. She had written the anniversary timeline for the brochure and had corrected, three times, the marketing department's belief that the building had been a cannery. It had been a net loft. Precision mattered. Nobody else in the room seemed to feel this as keenly as she did.

"To open our centennial year," Pike went on, "the board has approved a major exhibition for the Harbor Gallery. Working title, which the board quite likes, so let's call it the title." He clicked a remote. The screen behind him lit up with grey letters on a grey photograph of a grey dock. "Harbor Women: A Century of Work on the Water. Opening March twentieth."

There was a small murmur. Margot sat very still.

She had been asking for this exhibit for four years. She had a binder. ...