HANNAH POWERS'S FATHER taught her about the masters of painting and engraving, how Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci had transformed vision into a new geometry. He lectured Hannah on scale and proportion. The place where a ship was lost over the horizon was known as the vanishing point.
Their servant, Joan, was a woman of fifty-three years with ropy blue veins bulging out of her red hands. She taught Hannah and her sister, May, about another kind of vanishing, about the lost people who had once populated the West Country, indeed the entire island of Britain. Their stone arrows, green mounds, and dolmens still marked the land that had swallowed them. The first people.
Once, according to Joan, the faery folk had possessed physical bodies as plain and ordinary as anyone else's. But over the centuries, they had become fey. Their bodies grew vaporous and insubstantial, visible only at twilight and in dreams. Fleeing church bells and the glint of iron, they shrank into their hollow hills.
"A mere optical illusion, Hannah," her father told her, referring to the vanishing point on the horizon. "In truth, the ship does not disappear. The vessel is still there, even if we on the shore cannot see it."
So it transpired that both people and ships could become ghosts without ever dying or sinking beneath the waves.