INGA: The inquiry has acted like a lightning rod. A call to arms. Solidarity. Any woman who feels this way too should come to the islands and join us. We welcome you. For now, male supporters will have to cheer from the mainland.

The Sea Nymphs paid for them to come. The emails went out, spinning across the globe, passed from hand to hand, like Mariam and Eva’s V-stones. Eva, as she had predicted, drew women in from all over the world.

During the run-up, Zoe barely had time to worry; but in small, snatched moments of repose, she was nervous. Would those other women, the ones they wanted, show their faces? Not the initiated; the others. They were the ones who would make the difference.

In Her House, the women lit the fires, so that Eva’s home grew warm again, and familiar, and expansive. As women poured in from all over the country, and beyond, in a great glorious river, they lit fires, and invited them to arrange the little they had brought with them here and there in those large empty rooms. Inga, Jen and Zoe picked leaves and grasses and the occasional winter flower from the garden and deposited them, in jam jars, on every windowsill. They relit the Aga; flicked lighters and made the blue gas dance on the hob; loaded both stoves with Eva’s huge saucepans and cooked up a feast. Inga took charge in the kitchen. Nobody could ever remember eating a meal she had cooked but it turned out that Eva had taught her minestrone, and Stella and Tara, after looking longingly through Eva’s chest freezer in the shed, pulled out ice-cream tubs filled with summer fruit – last year’s blackcurrants, gooseberries and raspberries – and baked a giant cake. There was also wine in the cellar, the distillery sent two cases of whisky, and Lucette Smith herself dropped off boxes of chocolate, daily. Nina drove over with trays of cake, and loaves of bread. Puffed; and when she got her breath back, chatty.

The women kept arriving. Thanks to The Sea Nymphs, the Islands of Women Study Centre had booked out all hotel and B&B accommodation throughout the islands for any visiting woman who needed it; but some, the younger ones, especially, wanted to stay in the house. The doors were opened wide, and in they came, with their sleeping bags, and scents, their chatter and their candles. (Absolutely no candles! Jen kept saying.) The house filled with the steam of baths, the smell of coffee, erupting on the stove, the odour of face creams and perfumes, of female sweat, the iron tang of menstrual blood. Voices grew louder, music more raucous; and Zoe, who found that she believed in the unplanned effect, let it all happen.

JUDGE: I have heard what you have to say, and now the time has come for me to offer my preliminary conclusions.