Flappers & Fiction

On a Newport beach in the summer of 1809, a boy half-asleep on the sand looks up to find a weeping stranger leaning on his cane at the water’s edge. The man calls himself Henri Baptiste, émigré of ’93, and what he then tells the boy is a confession he has carried across an ocean: how he walked a condemned prisoner through the gates of the Conciergerie, in borrowed rags, past the cart carrying Marie Antoinette to the guillotine.

In the drafty misery of “The Crow’s Nest,” Jenny wakes to the roar of the dam and the crushing weight of her own history. She wasn’t always the town pariah; she remembers the scent of Sunday mornings and the clean, bright world of the agent’s daughter, Agnes. Believing that a single kind word from her idol could wash away her sins, Jenny braves the winter storm to find her. But within the warm vestry, the town’s “good” women are too busy saving distant souls to notice the dying girl at their gate.