Lonely Island: Volume II in the Perdita Series

Marged Brice’s next series of journal entries (1900-1901) have her travelling to Montreal and Europe, as well as a remote lighthouse on Lonely Island.

At Lonely Island a former light-keeper has been arrested for corpse-robbing (chronicled by Marged in Perdita) and has been replaced by a couple with a newborn baby. Troubled by his daughter’s anxiety and depression over what he assumes is her failed engagement with the painter George Stewart, Marged’s father agrees to let her stay and take care of the new light-keeper’s ailing wife. Marged finds herself nursing a young woman who has fiercely rejected her infant in order to punish her brutish husband and foil his sexual advances. As tensions mount, Marged is stranded on the island during a terrific storm, along with several unsavory shipwreck survivors.

The unexpected arrival of both George Stewart and Dr. Andrew Reid  exposes the dark medical past of one of the shipwreck survivors, raising the spectre of murder and insanity.