Outside, as they all stood by that deep hole in the ground, shoes caked in soil, Father Daniel’s voice battling the sharp coastal winds to explain that ‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery’, Viola thought only of their power, of what it could achieve; she zeroed in on this, so as not to recall the last time she had witnessed this sombre ritual, how on that occasion the bodies of her father and brother had been lowered into the ground.

She did not have the strength to attend the wake at the gamekeeper’s lodge; neither could she go straight back to the farmstead. The quiet there would likely unwrap the sorrow Viola kept so neatly packaged within herself; its exposure would only wound her mother further. Instead, the girl made for the emptiness of the harbour, to sit on the edge of the stone jetty that doglegged out to sea. She rested her back against the giant metal cross and let her legs hang over the edge, the wild sea licking hungrily at her heels. Then, she allowed herself to sob.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ A man burst out of a side door of the Customs House, interrupting her moment of solitude. ‘Get up, would you!’ he yelled, jogging towards her, pulling on a great, flapping oilskin coat. ‘Get up! You’ll catch your death!’

Viola quickly stood, realising the man would drag her to her feet if she didn’t obey. It was the Customs Officer, his expression twisted with horror.

‘What on earth were you playing at?’ he demanded.

Viola looked down to where she had sat, to where the sea snatched at the jetty like a tiger swiping its paw through the bars of a cage. These were the same waves that claimed a child every seven years. This was no place to hide and cry. She was playing at being stupid, was the answer to the Customs Officer’s question, but it would be too pathetic to own up to that. Instead, she reached for the lifebuoy of Mary Ahearn’s counsel.

‘Hello,’ she said to the Customs Officer, calming the chattering of her teeth and the hiccupping of her diaphragm, adopting the bright but quavering voice of a job interviewee, ‘I’m Viola Kendrick, it’s very nice to meet you.’

The Customs Officer was disarmed by this unexpected formality.

‘You’re a bloody idiot, is what you are,’ he replied, but his earlier passion had been assuaged. He strode off towards the whitewashed stone and warm light of his office, calling back to her as an invitation: ‘You’d better bring yourself inside, then, Viola Kendrick, get yourself dry.’