Excerpt from The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He is never visited by his wife Mary in this way, although she was a great blessing to him. She was thirty-three when she died, a placid woman who had seen much of this world and was amply prepared for the next: Mr Hancock does not doubt where she has gone, or the possibility that he might one day join her there, and for him this is enough. He only mourns their child, who passed so swiftly from birth to death, exchanging one oblivion for another like a sleeper rolling over.

'Now you see the sheets have taken mildew,' she is saying. 'If you had stored them as I advised you ... did you note it all in your pocketbook?'

The faintest of mumbles in response.

'Well, did you? This is not for my benefit, Susanna, but for your own.'

A silence, in which he pictures poor Sukie with her head hanging, her cheeks livid.

'I declare, you make more trouble than you save me! So where is your red thread? Where? Is't lost again? And who will pay for more, do you think?'

He sighs and scratches. Where is the fruitful family to fill the rooms of this house, which his grandfather built and his father made fine? The dead are here, without a doubt. He feels their touch everywhere in its pitched floorboards and staircase spine, and in the voices of the church bells, St Paul's at the front door, St Nicholas's at the back. The hands of the shipwrights are alive here in the long curves of its beams, which recall the bellies of great ships; its lintels carved with birds and flowers, angels and swords, testament for ever to the labour and visions of men long dead.

There are no children here to marvel in their turn at the skill of Deptford woodcarvers, unmatched in all the world; nor to grow up to the rhythm of ships leaving the docks gleaming and laden, returning battered and ragged. Jonah Hancock's children would know, as Jonah Hancock knows, what it is to load one's faith and fortune on board a ship and push it off into the unknown. They would know how a man who awaits a ship, as Mr Hancock now does, is distracted by day and wakeful by night, prone to fidgeting, with a bitter taste rising in the back of his throat. He is snappish with his family or else overly sentimental; he hunches over his desk scratching out the same calculations over and over again. He bites his nails

What knowledge is all this if it dies with Jonah Hancock? What good his joys and sorrows if there is nobody to share in them; what purpose to his face and voice if they are only to be assigned to dust; what value to his fortune if it withers on the vine with no sons to pluck it down?

Excerpted from The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar. Copyright © 2018 by Imogen Hermes Gowar. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.