Summary
On a bruised stretch of Scottish shoreline where North Sea winds gnaw stone into sand, Robin Cameron—lighthouse-bright spinster of the manor—turns ancestral rooms into a drifting caravanserai for war-broken men; her corridors smell of iodine, peat smoke, and poems recited through broken teeth. Outside, Sidney Carson—laird of the next cliff, fox-hunter by day, Morse-tapping saboteur by moon—keeps a telescope aimed both at shipping lanes and at Robin’s window, his estate a clandestine lighthouse for U-boats. Between them wanders Dr. Hyde, a surgeon whose scalpel is as steady as his heart is tremulous; he stitches femurs while nursing a private hemorrhage of longing for the same woman whose pulse he cannot claim. Into this triangulation limps John Hamilton, American salvage of a torpedoed freighter, skin tar-bronzed, eyes barnacled with survivor’s guilt; he limbos through the ward, teaching crippled Tommies how to foxtrot on crutches, and Robin—whose patriotism is a quiet vow rather than a brass band—feels her ribs fling open like chapel doors. When Allied brass descends to sniff out the spy whose nightly radio squawks have lured convoys into wolf-pack jaws, the sky unzips, bombs bloom like black dahlias, and suspicion ricochets: Carson points at Hamilton, Hyde secondes out of venomous envy, and suddenly the orphan Belgian waif Mimi—paper-thin but cathedral-loud—becomes both sleuth and angel, decoding Carson’s lantern-blinks into coordinates for iron sharks. Exculpated, Hamilton marches back toward the continent’s abattoir; Robin, fresh from burying her teenage brother Donald beneath a salt-stung Union Jack, stands on the dunes, veil whipping like torn semaphore, and waves farewell not to a soldier but to the idea that love can ever remain land-locked.
Synopsis
Robin Cameron transforms her home on the Scottish seacoast into a hospital for convalescing soldiers. Sidney Carson, who owns the adjoining estate, and Dr. Hyde both love Robin, but she gives her heart to John Hamilton, an American soldier whose ship was sunk off the coast. When several Allied officials are sent to investigate reports of German spy activities in the area, an air raid occurs, and one of the officers is almost killed. Carson accuses John, and Dr. Hyde, jealous of the American's success with Robin, supports Carson's claim. However, with aid from a little Belgian girl named Mimi, Robin discovers that Carson had sent nightly messages to a fleet of German submarines. Exonerated, John departs for the front, and Robin, although her younger brother Donald has just lost his life in battle, bravely bids him farewell.
