Of course, it is natural for islanders, with their clean air, to love the stars. In the islands, stars hustle, demand attention, are noisy in their beauty. Sometimes they cascade down like women’s hair.

Eva liked to hint how, if the moon and sun draw the tides through the seas, an equally epic – if distinct – force draws the blood down through women’s wombs. That, in the islands, everything is connected: sky, water, blood, land. She boasted openly of the islands’ beauty, the historic fierceness of their storms, the salt toughness of their kith. She saw these things as female, intrinsically. She seemed never to have been concerned that those who boast, often end up, Cassiopeia-like, upended. Nor that almost everyone finds womb-blood disgusting.

Until the inquiry, the archipelago was barely known south of Berwick, north of the A1. Off the east coast, beyond the mainland, beyond your ken. To travel there across the water is actually to have an illusory mental fog descend. To arrive by sea is literally to be cast into a spume of bluey-grey: out of which, after the passing of one hour, some jagged shapes of land emerge. This is the main island, with the harbour towns of Lerston and Ayrness, the capital. The smoother, smaller sugar lump to the right is Astrid, the speck to its right is Papay, and well beyond that is the crab cake which is Tarn. The serrations to the left are Dounsay, Skellar, and the skerries. Straight ahead, at the dead centre of the main island, is a Neolithic stone circle. To the east, on a spit of land with the harbour of Ayrness on one side, and woods and sea on the other, is Harcourt House. And just across from the Harcourt woods and beach, is Cwen.