The doll is ragged now, scorched where she has burned it, scarred where she’s sliced then stitched it. Her weapon tonight is thorns, pulled from the brambles that clog Matt Taylor’s hedgerows, and stained with her own blood.

I crouch beside her, against the wall of the house, but she doesn’t falter. She presses a thorn, slowly so that I hear the material tear, into the leg of the doll. ‘For sailing out into a storm,’ she says. Tears run down her face into her mouth and the words are wet, slippery and bitter.

The next thorn goes into his cheek. ‘For letting the sea swallow you.’

Another and another and another into his chest, his back, wherever she can fit them. ‘For leaving us, for leaving me to become this, for abandoning the childer to a life of hunger and cold …’

I reach out, put my hand over hers, stop her. No good ever comes of this, the poppet only feeds her pain, and I cannot bear to see her with it again. She hesitates, fingers still hovering above the doll, then looks up into the distance, past my shoulder, and rubs her face. A smear is left on her cheek.

‘Remember?’ she says, still looking past me.

‘Father?’

‘Life as it was.’

I search for an answer that will not hurt her. ‘Sometimes.’

I’ve tried to hold my memories, keep them like the moth caught in the bubble of hard yellow sap that clings to the ash trunk, but they will not stay. There have been more years since he passed than we ever had together.

Once in a while a picture comes, a scent brings him back. The lift of his brows and creases in the corners of his eyes as he smiled down at me past the great stretch of his legs and body, the rush of air as he swung me high on to his shoulders. Those are real, I’m sure. The smell of wet boots and fresh fish. His hands, hard-skinned yet gentle, as they softly pinched the plump bed of my thumb. Mam’s laughter, soft and sweet, like the sounds of shells shaken in a small fist. That woman was taken too.

‘It all went with him,’ she says. ‘The food on the table, the cloth in the windows, the wood in the fire. You used to play in the fields with that farm lad, they even let you feed a lamb once. We went to dances. I used to call Alice Turner a friend, now she’ll spit as soon as look at me.’

Her tears have dried, leaving clear tracks through the grime on her face. She sighs, pulls the thorns out gently, laying them aside for next time.

‘Jonathon,’ she whispers, stroking the strands of hair that remain. ‘Come back to me, in any form, I’ll not fear you. Just come back.’