The house was built in a style which she immediately guessed, architect’s daughter that she was, to be early or mid-Georgian. As Harry unpacked the car, he nodded dismissively and explained what a mishmash it was: medieval, some late-Tudor improvements, if you could call them that, a complete Adamesque remodelling of the façade; internally, some belated Victorian gestures towards comfort and proper sanitation. I’m afraid we’ll really be camping, he said. But first, I will show you the view.

They stepped together across the front lawn. It was almost midsummer and the islands barely get dark at that time of year; summer solstice nights are dreamy and strange. The field at the front of the house led down in a slope to the churchyard. On the edge of the lawn was a crab-apple tree, and a bench. The house, with its back against a hill, was flanked by fields below, and behind, by a wood. In the distance, all was grey. But as Eva looked, a ray of sunlight fell suddenly from the clouds, piercing the sea: a thunderbolt from heaven. The sea. Not the calm Illyrian blue through which boats drifted at the periphery of one’s concentration but a grey, all-encompassing expanse, the very mass of which suggested peril.

INGA: An entitled house.

STELLA: Isolated and aloof, in a clearing on a wooded hill—

TARA: —the sea spilt at its feet like a moat.

STELLA: Nothing modest about it.

JEN: Having been owned by nine generations of Harcourt-Vanes, it was a building that weighed upon her emotionally.

HENRY: Of course, the family goes much further back than that.

ALICE: Eva Levi’s tribe goes all the way back to Adam.

The house is large, and was well stocked, in those days, with treasures from these islands and beyond. It had been empty for some years when Eva first saw it – Harry’s grandfather having spent his dotage in France. The housekeeper, Mrs Rendall, did her best to air the bedrooms and keep the upholstery from damp, but the place had the musty stillness of abandonment, the tins in the pantry bore pre-war prices in shillings and pence, and water from the taps ran brown with peat, as well as setting up a singing and moaning throughout the house which made Eva gasp as she lay that first night in the huge cast-iron bathtub, watching her legs looming towards her through the bathwater like pallid sea monsters rising from a loch. Of course, the plumbing was almost impossible to improve. Over time, Eva made many other changes, slowly bending the will of the place to her own. But even now the house sings its own indecipherable, echoing song, like a chorus of seals, out in the bay.