The Bargain

In a shadow-splintered manor on the Kentish coast, a nameless drifter is hauled from the surf by servants who mistake his salt-caked silhouette for their long-lost heir, Gerald Waring, presumed drowned. The impostor—gaunt, cipher-eyed, fluent only in survival—slips into the heir’s tailored life like a blade into antique sheath. He glides through drawing-rooms perfumed with lilac and guilt, signing cheques, patting dogs he does not recognise, courting the dead man’s betrothed under chandeliers that tremble with ancestral disapproval. But the drowned man, it transpires, is less dead than advertised: one tempest dusk he stalks home, clothes torn to pennants, grin carved from graveyard marble. The returned Gerald keeps the drifter’s secret—only to weaponise it, demanding servitude in exchange for silence. Thus the bargain: one year of counterfeit aristocracy in return for becoming the true heir’s ghost, his puppet, his debt-collector. Over twelve lunar cycles the estate’s corridors grow claustrophobic with mirrors that refuse the impostor’s reflection; ledgers bleed red; tenants whisper of a gentleman who walks at night with a lantern but casts no shadow. When the usurper falls rapturously for the flickering kindness of Eveline, the housekeeper’s daughter, the pact curdles: blackmail becomes crucible, love becomes ransom. On the eve of the heir’s wedding to an American heiress—an alliance meant to plug the family’s haemorrhaging coffers—both men stand in the chapel nave, each clutching half of a torn confession. One will leave with name, bride, and fortune; the other with nothing but the story of how he once wore someone else’s soul.