Wind of time

by John Dandola

"In the year 1123, Bishop Eirik went in search of Vinland." So reads the very terse entry which appears in six different Icelandic annals. Yet no further explanation or resolution is offered leaving the inevitible conclusion that the bishop was never heard from again. Nearly nine centuries later, teacher and amateur historian Jeffrey Devereaux has a chance meeting with Kirsten Eriksson, the girl of Icelandic heritage who had been his first adolescent crush. When her reading of mystical runestones at a Renaissance Faire finally brings their love to fruition, subsequent visits to Kirsten's home on Cuttyhunk Island, a mysterious stone tower in Newport, Rhode Island, and Hammond Castle Museum on the coast of Massachusetts plunge them into history and carry them from 20th to 12th century New England, where they face the ghosts of Bishop Eirik's lost Norse settlement and their own very personal connections to the past.