Will The Hallmarked Man Have All-Sark Epigraphs? Part 1: A Maid of the Silver Sea

 "Robert Galbraith" continues to drop more hints about Strike 8:  The Hallmarked Man. Since I last wrote about them, Twitter header pictures have included the Iron Bridge of Ironbridge, Shropshire (which could be linked to the chain emoji clue given earlier) and the red lift of London's famous Savoy Hotel. Another tweet mentioned that the lyrics of the late singer Francoise Hardy were going to be featured.  Check out this link at Strikefans.com for a regularly updated list. 

But, my favorite Strike clues are the ones that lead me to new reading material to occupy my mind while waiting for the next book. Therefore, when the first epigraph from John Oxenham*'s A Maid of the Silver Sea was released, I immediately read not just that novel, but two others by Oxenham and set in Sark, an island we know will be visited in THM: Pearl of Pearl Island and Carette of Sark. All, happily, are available for free on Project Gutenberg. 

As JKR/RG has said there are five total sources for epigraphs, and at least 106 chapters in the book, so it seems inevitable that many quotations from A Maid of the Silver Seas will appear. Regardless of whether "five sources" means five authors or five books, it also seems wise to check out this author's other Sark-based stories. My plan here is to give an overview of all three novels, starting with Maid, with some speculation about what they could mean for THM. Spoilers for Maid ahead. In addition to being romances, all three books have elements of mystery and thriller, so, keep that in mind if you'd rather read them for yourself first, without knowing the outcome. 

Despite all three books being named for women, they all focus more on the male protagonist as he falls in love with and attempts to win the title lady's heart. Nonetheless, all three woman are admirable characters, with their own inner strengths, comparable to a Bronte or Austen heroine. And, all three reflect aspects of our favorite woman of Denmark Street, Robin Ellacott. 

Maid's Nance Hamon is probably the most bad-ass of the three. She grows up in wild and beautiful Sark, learning all the intricacies of the wildlife, the sea and its currents, her family farm and its animals and the island's network of caves. One can easily imagine young Robin having a similar love for the farmland and animals of the family property in Masham. Like Robin, she is the only girl with multiple brothers, and subsequently takes some grief. While Robin's brothers seem to limit themselves to a bit of teasing, particularly regarding her detective ambitions, Nance's older half-brother, called young Tom as his father's namesake, physically and emotionally torments her, so much so that the otherwise very virtuous young girl prays nightly for his death. She also has a younger brother, Bernel, whom she adores and who shares her love for the island's wild beauty. 

Nance adores her island home and hates the way it has been changed since the opening of the silver mines. Subsequently, when Cornishman Stephen Gard arrives as the new mine captain and boarder at the Hamon home, sixteen-year old Nance initially wants nothing to do with him. However, things change as the now-adult young Tom continues his nastiness, and family patriarch old Tom becomes increasingly obsessed with investing in the silver mines, from which he hopes to reap a fortune.  A fortune for which the three women in the family:  Nance, her mother and paternal grandmother, do not care about at all, preferring their life on the family farm. 

If Nance's bucolic upbringing reminds us of Robin's, Stephen Gard's is not dissimilar from Strike. Gard is Cornish and never knew his father, who was lost at sea when he was an infant.  Like Strike, he was raised by his mother, although she, unlike Leda, was described as a "good, God-fearing woman" who "strained every nerve to give her boy an education." But, like Leda, she died young, leaving Stephen to follow his father to the sea at age 14, not unlike Strike followed Uncle Ted into the Red Caps. Like Strike, he excelled, reaching the rank of first mate before moving ashore to work in the mine business. 

As a boarder with the Hamon family, Gard instantly appreciates Nance's beauty and virtue and quickly comes to dislike young Tom as much as the rest of the family does, largely because of his crude taunting of his sister. Although Gard is typically an upstanding young gentleman, he is described as, "if his manner was quite and retiring, there was that about him that suggested the possibility of explosion if occasion arose."  Tom quickly gives him occasion. 

But back to the farm. Old Tom wishes to sell the property, pay out his mother's and wife's dower shares and invest the rest in the mines, an act that will leave the women able to provide financial for the two decent children, Nance and Bernal, but which would effectively disinherit the wastrel that is young Tom. None of the women want to part with the farm, though. Grannie, who had amassed a sizable stash of money thanks to her miserly ways, decides to buy her son's share out so the women can own the property themselves, allowing them to pass it on to Nance and Bernal,  giving Tom a share only if he gets his act together. Tom is none too pleased with this plan, and angrily leaves home, something that all the residents, including Gard, consider a great improvement. 

Without the nasty eldest brother in the house, Gard dares to be a little friendlier to his sister and manages to begin the process of winning her over by punching Tom's lights out one Sunday when Gard, Nance and Bernal are walking home from church and Tom shouts crude insults at Nance. In return, Nance and Bernal give him some valuable tips about safely crossing the Coupee, the thin and treacherous land bridge that connects Little Sark to the main island, during a gale. Nance begins to have interest in Gard, despite his outsider status. 

Unfortunately, it takes six weeks for the property transaction to be finalized. With two days to go, tragedy strikes.  Now to put the epigraph into context:

This optimistic-sounding statement, from Old Tom searching diligently for the rich vein of silver he is convinced lies waiting in the mine, is actually a harbinger of doom. As Tom digs deeper and deeper into a channel that runs under the sea, he breaks into a new chamber, and strikes both pay dirt and disaster:

The silver-bearing veins ran thick as the setting of an ancient jewel, twisted and curling and winding in and out so that his eyes were dazzled with the wonder of it all...

And up above, the roar and growl of the sea sounded closer than ever before.

But he had found his treasure and he heeded nought beside. Here, of a surety, he said to himself, was the silver heart from which the scattered veins had been projected. He had found what he had sought with such labours and persistency. What else mattered?

And then, without a moment's warning—the end.

No signal crackings, no thin jets or streams from the green immensity beyond.

Just one universal collapse, one chaotic climacteric, begun and ended in the same instant, as the crust of the chamber, no longer supported by the in-pent air, dissolved under the irresistible pressure of the sea.

Where the sparkling chamber had been was a whirling vortex of bubbling green water, in which tumbled grotesquely the body of a man.

The water boiled furiously along the tunnel and foamed into the gallery. The wooden supports of the iron door gave way; the door sank slowly into its appointed place.

Old Tom Hamon was dead and buried.

Talk about bad timing.** Old Tom is history, and young Tom, as his eldest son, inherits the bulk of the property. The house and land must be divided, and his grandmother, stepmother and younger siblings have to move into a smaller set of rooms and subsist on a smaller portion of farmland. Boarder Gard has to find a new place to live, and Tom junior, along with Julie, his new and bad-tempered Frenchwoman wife, takes over as primary owners. The positive aspect of this is that Gard has even more opportunities to impress Nance. For instance, he keeps Tom from immediately evicting them, and insists he wait the six weeks for the property division to be legal. The animosity between Gard and Tom becomes apparent to the Sark community.  Gard becomes friendlier with both Nance and Bernal, and more impressed by both, but especially Nance, as they show him more of the natural beauty of the islands. This includes the best swimming spots, their knowledge of the dangerous currents that surround Sark, and a small rock island called L'Etat, to which Nance and Bernal have the unusual talent of being able to swim.

"You see," said Nance, in her decisive little way, "many of our Sark men won't learn to swim. They think it's mistrusting God. But that seems to me foolish. Every man who goes down to the sea ought to be able to swim—besides, it's terribly nice."

More about L'Etat later. On one of their excursions, Nance and Bernal demonstrate even more of their bravery and skill  by saving a foolish fisherman from drowning. Eager to impress her in return, Gard joins  her one night hurrying to the doctor's to get medicine for her Granny. Tom, out drinking with friends, is furious to see his enemy with his sister, and screams curses at her. Seeing that tome has reduced Nance to tears, Gard declares his love for her, sees her safely across the Coupee, then returns to teach Tom some manners. The men exchange insults and blows, then Gard realizes Tom is too drunk to make this a fair fight, and backs off.  He is even nice enough to follow the inebriate, to make sure the stumbling fool does not fall over the Coupee, and gets rocks thrown at him as thanks. 

By mid-day the next day, Nance comes looking for Gard with the news that Tom never came home, and is not at the home of his equally wastrel friend, Peter Mauger. Gard explains that he brawled with Tom briefly but walked away, leaving him alive and well. Julie and Peter call out the residents for a full scale search on the rocks beneath the Coupee, and Tom's body is found, his head "staved in with the blows of some round blunt thing like a mallet," and with a torn piece of Gard's coat near the probable site of his fall. The romance has now become a whodunnit. 

Little though the men of Sark liked young Tom Harmon, and despite the authorities believed in Gard's innocence, it is inevitable that the Corish outsider and mine-captain would be blamed for the murder. After Bernel overhears the men's plan to take the law into their own hands, he and Nance whisk Gard away to L'Etat by boat, leaving him with some provisions and a gun, and instructions on where to find shelter in the caves and fresh water. The plan is for him t hide out there until the real killer is caught, and for Nance and Bernal to keep him supplied with food, since the only thing to eat on the rock are very unpalatable puffin eggs. 

Unfortunately, Bernal is only able to supply him once before a torrential eight-day gale strikes that makes travel impossible. Gard is only able to slip out of his cave during two brief lulls to search for puffin eggs and to make one fortuitous discovery. 

That discovery is a series of caves that appear to have been enlarged by human hands, which contain packets of desiccated tobacco and a bound up and badly decayed corpse of a man. Gard concludes this must be an old smuggler's cave where contraband was stored, and the body that of a revenue officer who had been captured, imprisoned, abandoned and eventually starved. 

"It was horrible to think of, and desperate as his own state was, he thanked God heartily that he was not as that other."

Once the gale finally breaks, Gard is surprised when his rescuers do not arrive on the first clear evening, although he does spy a fishing boat during one of his puffin egg hunts, and fears he might have been spotted. On day two, Nancy arrives, having swum to L'Etat with provisions tied to her head. She immediately asks if Bernal is there, and, when Gard says no, she breaks into sobs and tells him that the rowboats they would have used were wrecked in the gale, that Bernal attempted the swim the previous day, and, if he had not arrived, must have drowned. There is not too much time to grieve however, because Gard's fears that he was spotted are confirmed. A boat of angry Sark men arrive to capture him. Gard managed to take shelter and drive them off with a warning shot, leading to one of the funniest lines in the novel (and another possible epigraph?): 

Coming in, they knew, meant certain death for one among them, and, keen as they were to lay hands on him, no man had any wish to be that one.

But they vow to return. Nance offers to stay with Gard, but he persuades her to return to Sark, and try to convince the authorities to call off the mob.

"Dear!" he said, putting his arm round her, and drawing her close. "You must not stop. They must not know you have been here. I do not know what the end will be. We are in God's hands, and we have done no wrong. But if ... if the worst comes, you will remember all your life, dear, that to one man you were as an angel from heaven. Nance! Nance! Oh, my dear, how can I tell you all you are to me!"—and as he pressed her to him, the bare white arms stole out of the cloak and clasped him tightly round the neck.

Gard decides to take refuge in the smuggler's cave, since modern Sarkers are apparently unaware of it. He manages to set a trap with the old tobacco and dead body that convince the next band of hunters that L'Etat is haunted and that Gard must not be there. Nance makes a return swim to bring more food, but Julie catches her as she returns, and realizes Gard must still be on the Rock. Happily, Peter Mauger is found dead, in the same place as Tom and with similar injuries and, since Nance and Julie agree that Gard was on L'Etat at the time, his name is cleared. Nance is able to return by boat to bring Gard back to Sark.  But now there are two murders to solve. 

While Gard recovers from his ordeal, he, the Doctor, the Vicar and the Senechal puzzle over who could have killed Tom and Peter, but several nights watch in the area show nothing more suspicious than a loose horse galloping over the Coupee. Finally Gard offers to be a decoy, and heads out to walk the Coupee, wearing a padded helmet and with the Senechal on guard with his pistol. After multiple nights of searching and decoying, Gard is finally attacked by the "devil"---  a vicious white stallion, who is shot and falls off the Coupee. Gard is struck on the head by the horse's hooves and wounded, but survives thanks to his helmet. The mystery of the mysterious head wounds of Tom and Peter is solved. 

On the third day (a timeframe that I am sure is pure coincidence, given the large number of Christian references in Maid), Gard awakes to find Nance by his bedside. They kiss, and the Doctor arrives with news of the final element of the happy ending: Bernal survived after all, was picked up by a fishing boat and has recovered and returned to Sark.  

But Nance had fallen on her knees and buried her face in the bed-clothes, lest any but God should see it in the rapture of its breaking.

"Dieu merci! Dieu merci! Dieu merci!" she was crying, though none of them heard it.

And "Thank God!" said Stephen Gard with fervour—for Bernel, and for himself, but most of all for Nance.

So, besides the similarities between the Maid protagonists and Robin and Strike, what other echoes do we see and what could be coming up in The Hallmarked Man?

• Bad horsie!:  For starters, here is another literary work with a devilish white horse as an omen of death. Some have speculated that The Hallmarked Man will pick up immediately after The Running Grave, with Strike waiting at the Flying Horse, with its white horse signage,  for Robin to dump Murphy and return to him. Though the white horse of Sark is a killer, it is also the resolution and the impetus for our hero's final reunion.
• Bad brothers! We've certainly seen evil ones like John Bristow and Freddie Chiswell. Even Robin's brothers acknowledge they weren't exactly nice to her as kids. Will there be serious conflict with one of Robin's, or even Strike's brothers coming up?  Will Martin abandon his new baby?  Will Switch Levay Bloom Whittaker return?
• Kick-ass woman: Just has Robin regularly risks her life to save others; Nance endangers herself multiple times, first by arranging Gard's escape ahead of the mob that would have killed him, then by repeated swims to L'Etat to keep her beloved from starving. We could be setting up a situation where Robin will save Strike's life in THM. Though Robin has assisted Strike innumerable times, such as when she returned to the office to stopStrike from pounding John Bristow in CC, we haven't actually seen her "rescue" him in the same wa y he crashed through the door of Raff's boat or beaned Taio Wace with the wire cutters.  Yes, she jumped the machete-wielding Gus Upcott from behind, but that was only after Strike followed her into the house. What if Robin was the one to arrive just in time save Strike from the killer?
• Shades of the emoji code?: The emojis JKR/RG released as a preview for THM: a chain, a DNA strand, and skull, have lead to speculation that the mystery will involve an unidentified body. If there is a body and it's either old and decayed or tied up, we'll have a nice echo to Maid. 
• Smuggler's caves:  Strike missed his excursion to the smugglers' caves with Polworth as a four-year-old, but maybe he'll get a chance in THM. I can't say as I want Dave Polworth along as a third wheel on (hopefully!) Strike and Robin's romantic Sark getaway, though.
• Swimming oe water rescue?: There was a lot of speculation that there would be some sort of attempted drowning or water rescue at the Norfolk pier. The attempted drowning happed elsewhere, and Strike didn't get a chance to rescue anyone. But Maid stresses how important it is to understand the riptides and what to do in an emergency. Strike likely picked up those skills as a life guard's nephew and sailing buddy, and we know he still swims. But could he manage ocean currents with one leg?
• False accusations:  Could we see more efforts to prove someone's innocence, a la Leonora Quine? Bonus points if the false accusation is a result of mob mentality, or the accused's "outsider" status. 
• Stormy weather: Historical floods in Cornwall were certainly part of Troubled Blood. There were five named storms in England in late 2016 through February 2017, although most were focused in Scotland and Ireland, not the Channel Islands. 

If you are waiting for The Hallmarked Man, A Maid of the Silver Sea is well worth a read.

Coming up next:  Carette of Sark. 

* also known as William Arthur Dunkerly and Julian Ross. 

**This event is likely based on a real-life collapse that drowned 10 people in 1845, and eventually brought an end to the Sark mining operation.