Mrs Jenkinson was utterly confounded by my declared intention of retreating to an island off the coast to lodge with cloistered nuns for a few weeks: I think she had visions of having to break the news to my mother that I had taken the veil. I had to play my hand carefully; the poor woman is, as I have mentioned, a terrible sailor, and the only way to and from the island is by fishing boat, rowed by rough men, and stinking of the day’s catch. I suggested she remain behind in our lodgings and rest, given that she remained debilitated by the rigours of the journey and the heat. It was wrong of me to tempt her, but I explained that the Mother Superior of the establishment would send sisters to meet me on the quay and accompany me on my short voyage. She did not have the strength to oppose me, and so I am here alone, unless you count the good sisters, who are so silent, but for their singing and prayers, that I might as well be sharing this island with corporeal ghosts.

This will be a shorter note than my last, because although I have leisure to write, there is little to report. The shape of each day is determined by the prayers recited at set hours in the small but rather fine cathedral – which luckily escaped demolition during the Terrors – and punctuated by meals and readings from the Rule of this Order. In between, the sisters work in the distillery, vineyards, lavender fields, and vegetable rows. I am excused such labour and left to entertain myself through the long, hot hours of the day.

It might seem that I have exchanged my life at Rosings for a foreign version but with habits and hymns – yet here I answer to no one but myself. Each day I walk for hours alone in heat made almost delicious by the wafts of cool air from the watery surrounds, circumnavigating this little island like the Portuguese navigators of old circled the globe. I have my objects – one of them a ruined castle where the wind whistles around the keeps and walkways, and whips at my clothing. The rocks below are black and sharp, and the waves froth about them, and I feel a rather pleasant tremor seeing them beneath my feet as I perch on the edge of a battlement.

The island is also supplied with a number of small chapels, cool, dark caves against the burning sun – welcome places to rest and drink from the bottle of water I carry, which I refill from the spring as I pass its mossy green bubble. More bellicose are the cannons pointed out to sea against the depredations of Boney, and the oven for casting the balls.