And she shook her head mournfully in Jonathan Adams’ direction. That night the Sergeant wrote down the story of the Naomhog exactly as he’d heard it. He tried to imagine a stone god in a tweed suit that could calm the sea. He stood on the pier and looked out at the Inishkeas with the same wonder he had once looked at the Isle of Purity. A man on the pier hailed him.

“I hear you’re interested in the islands?”

“I am.”

“Well Bernie Burke is the man to take you out there. Aren’t you, Bernie?”

“I will, surely.”

“Someday,” said Jonathan.

“They know we’re Protestant,” complained Adams to his wife.

“Why wouldn’t they. We don’t go to Mass.”

“I hope you’re not suggesting that we should.”

They were plied with questions in Lavell’s shop. While Maisie filled a shopping bag, the old policeman stood uneasily inside the glass door, nodding fretfully at each further invasion of his privacy.

“Aren’t you the great man,” said Mrs Lavell, “for your age.”

“He’s quick on his feet, right enough,” said Maisie.

“You must have had an active life,” queried the shopkeeper, “before you retired?”

“Oh, he was always on the go,” said Maisie.

“And what will he find to do out here, God bless us?”

“He’s writing.”

“Ah.”

“I’m writing,” he explained to Mrs Lavell, “a short religious history of the Mullet.”

“And would a book like that sell?” she asked, astounded.

“Won’t it pass the time for him?”

“I’m sure it will, the poor cratur.”

Word got round that Adams was a deeply religious man who was penning an ecclesiastical account of Protestantism in Erris. On the road, people stopped to tell him names of long departed landlords, of churches gone into ruin. The Mullet folk told him stories of proselytizers of whom many, in years gone by, had come to the west.

“Are you sure you’re not one yourself, Reverend?”

“You can rest easy there.”

“Well, even if you were you’re too late. The Irish Church Mission was here before you to teach the orphaned girls. They were housed for their pains just over there. Then a Father Nangle went to Achill to teach and feed the Famine victims. He did well, but his crowd are gone too. Oh, the Protestants came and went and here we are, Catholics still, for our sins.”

And they laughed: “Now if you could build us a new bridge! Or give us jobs – who knows.”