Maura deftly flicked her apron to the side as she moved swiftly between the bar and the Guinness barrel in order to retrieve a pewter mug, suspended from the wooden beam above her head. It belonged to her first customer of the afternoon, one of a small number of fishermen who frequented the inn on a daily basis and who always arrived with great ceremony. She was ready for him. He ignored the doormat she religiously beat each morning and stomped across the dark wooden floorboards she had polished on her hands and knees just an hour before, leaving puddles of muddy water behind him. He shuffled off his dripping oilskin and flung it onto the settle by the fire, never breaking his stride until he reached the bar.

Maura raised her eyes to the low ceiling, stained brown from peat smoke and clay pipes and bit her tongue. She had found the transition from docker’s wife and queen of the four streets in Liverpool, to that of the landlady at the Talk of the Town Inn on the windy west coast of Ireland, a difficult one.

‘Why would anyone call it the Talk of the Town?’ she had demanded of her husband, on the wet, cold, windswept day they had arrived. She could barely hear his reply as the ocean roared behind them, only a moment’s walk from where they stood. Their children, bedraggled, too miserable even to complain, huddled into their sides. ‘There’s almost nothing and no one here and we haven’t passed a shop in miles. In the name of God, what flamin’ town is it supposed to be the talk of? Where is the town, Tommy?’

She had stood with her hands on her hips and taken in the sparsity of stone cottages with weak spirals of grey smoke struggling to rise in the rain and blending without trace into the equally grey sky. The church, with its teetering gravestones facing the ocean, sloped down towards them and, huddling against the crumbling perimeter wall for protection, stood a sad and sorry-looking donkey that struggled to raise his head, or show any interest whatsoever in their arrival. Maura’s dark eyes, offended by the sight of the dilapidated inn, locked onto Tommy’s face and she realised, with a sickening dip of her heart, that her husband had been entirely duped.

‘Tommy, speak to me, are we in the wrong place? Tell me we are, please,’ she begged.

‘I don’t think so, queen,’ he replied, his voice hesitant, a letter that they both knew he couldn’t fully read, gripped in his hands. He was inches shorter than his wife and twice as wide and she fought the conflicting desires to knock his cap off his head, or comfort him.