The Strangers

One wild, stormy night Kate Nants's father comes home with something different from his usual catch of fish. He brings two strangers, and the news that the Roundhead fleet is about to invade their little Scilly island of Tresco.
Kate is used to a hard, uncertain life, but the next few days are to prove more full of excitement than any she has known before. Lady Melchett and her son, Lum, are Royalists with a price on their heads, who must escape to France, but they need money to pay their passage, and the man who could have told them where the money left in store for them is hidden is dead.
This absorbing historical novel is written with a sharpness and delicate precision which makes its exciting events totally credible. At its centre is the brief friendship which springs up between Kate and Lum. From quite different backgrounds, they are yet held together by their common bewilderment at the great happenings they are caught up in. But they keep quiet, listen, and gradually piece together fragments of what they hear, till they are able to make discoveries which their parents have missed. And this friendship, which ends with one going, the other staying, means that for Kate, at least, life will never be the same again.