The inquiry was held in Ayrness, at the All Islands’ College, in the Harcourt Memorial Library, a monument to Eva’s husband’s family’s largesse. It was there that the judge sat, beneath the large windows overlooking Ayrness Bay. Every day, Eva’s women waited at the back of the courtroom created by the council, listening as islanders stood up to defend or attack her work. They watched the changing expressions of the sea beyond: the water, hurrying in its businesslike way across the bay; the luscious streams of darkened silk that moved across the sixteen leaded panes behind the judge’s august head, where the archipelago’s forebears are depicted in a kaleidoscope of coloured glass, beginning with Saint Victus, including a Viking warlord, and ending with Zoe’s great-great-great-grandfather, Henry Harcourt, the kelp, soap and glass baron himself. They grew accustomed to counting off the ferries, noting the promptness of the Astrid–Ayrness service, skippered by Joanna Havant (taught by Eva), and the tardiness of the 4.10, which, in the care of old Sid Cobb, carried schoolchildren back to Tarn. They listened nervously as the inquiry examined various claims and counter-claims: how and why council rules were changed to stipulate fifty-one per cent female representation; who was responsible for the blatant feminist slant to the island paper; whether any of the hundred other female-friendly projects amounted to illegal discrimination or corruption.

Silence, said the judge, more than once. But that solemn place of learning was changed forever by angry voices and innumerable images of the seated judge, the solicitors, the witness in question – giving evidence beneath the soon-to-be decommissioned portrait of Eva Levi’s late husband, the islands’ former political representative, Harry Harcourt-Vane.

1: Why did Eva do it?

&

2: Who knew what and when?

These are the questions the inquiry circled back to, again and again.

STELLA: She detested her husband’s politics? And what his party was doing to Britain, especially to the north? She wanted a place where things could happen differently? Like, outside the patriarchal frame?

JEN: Although personal frustrations contributed, I hope you will see that her motivations were wider. Although she didn’t set out a blueprint at the beginning of what she intended, the implication is clear in her various pronouncements, and if you’ll let me finish I just want to stress that—

CAMILLE: She felt she had failed as a mother. Her sons, you understand, grew up to become their father.

MARIAM: Very nice lady, very good, very kind.

LUCIJA: Bosnia was more important than you think. She was formed by her work there, by her love affair. It was in my own Yugoslavia that Eva realised – as she had not done growing up in England – how much the politics of a country affects its people.

NINA: I wasn’t ever comfortable with who she was and what she stood for, OK.

RUTH: I had no idea, the whole time. We never discussed it. We never discussed anything, except Zoe.