The first people to express that sick feeling were the men from over the water, who came for the inquiry. They gathered on the streets of the islands, calling Eva’s women names. When it came on the evening news, Eva’s women found it funny. They were even a little bit pleased with the attention. But in the wake of the angry men came more television cameras, and journalists, taking pictures and asking questions. Interviews with island men were published. Poor Jim’s going to have an aneurysm, Jen texted Inga after seeing James Mills, the geography teacher from Ayrness High, complaining to the BBC of ‘covert and extreme deviations from the national curriculum’. The all-male rallies got bigger. By week three of the inquiry, the national dailies were covering it. There were headlines such as FEMALE TAKEOVER OF ISLANDS’ LEADERSHIP; OR UNFAIR FEMALE BIAS IN BRITAIN’S FORGOTTEN ISLANDS; and even, FEMALE EDUCATORS CAVORT TOGETHER NAKED. Then the protests turned violent. Janice Handsworth, fifty-two, mother of three, came home with a bruised face and bloody nose. Barbara Anderson, seventy-seven years old, grandmother of six, was shoved against the wall of the abbey as hands grabbed her breasts and crotch. Things might have ended for the worse had the police not arrived in the form of DCI Ruth Brock.

The official line was that the violent men were incomers, ferrylubbers, over on the boat for some opportunistic women-bashing; but the women knew they were also being turned on by their own kith and kin. Some of the men who waved banners and shouted slogans were their neighbours, colleagues, brothers; expressing very well, on the whole, their indignation at having been hoodwinked into accepting, even lapping up, those well-ordered years of female rule. Euan F—, who had fainted in biology when Mx Thompson dissected a mouse (and was then made to stand on a chair as the girls circled around him, chanting, Gender stereotypes are social constructs), was holding up a banner with the words WOMEN ARE SEXIST TOO blocked out in fluorescent yellow. James Mills himself, who had won Ayrness High’s anonymous online poll for Creepiest Male, was caught on camera with fist thrust in air. The television reporter from BBC Scotland called it ‘an unprecedented scene of public male fury’.

And still the women didn’t know what had happened to Eva.

The archipelago where Eva staged her coup is shaped like the constellation Cassiopeia. Together, the islands make up a wave-crest reflection of that starry Ethiopian queen who was punished for boasting of her beauty by being spreadeagled in the sky: a nightly reminder of the barbaric status quo. Eva liked to look upon the islands as places where myths assume new meanings, where Cassiopeia’s feet are unshackled from their stocks, where she is free to run and dance in the heavens.