This was the root cause of Miss Cedars’ disappearance, of her slow evaporation. My elders had always told me that wanderlust was nothing but an unhealthy quirk of the genes – like original sin, it could be beaten back and conquered – but Paul was strong enough for the fight. He left, and my faith went with him. The colour of all my memories faded. Those days lost trekking across estate land for the best horse-chestnut trees, pockets full of shining conkers. See a black bird and you can’t speak again until you see a white one. Forfeit is to throw three conkers at the high, mullioned windows of the Big House and risk waking up the Earl. Pink sunsets on the cobbles for the June cook-out. The lick-slap of the sea against the harbour wall. The smell of mackerel on the fire. Weeks spent in collusion on our effigy of St Jade, her construction never withstanding the door-to-door singing. One year her nose falls off; another, her arm. The next, more appropriately, her foot. Laughing until we couldn’t breathe.

Miss Cedars was renowned on Lark for preaching the word of the island to anyone who even mooted the idea of leaving. She kept on preaching right up until they walked the gangplank.

‘It’s all right for you,’ my friends would reply gnomically, and I thought I understood them. I was different – I had my teaching post, I enjoyed privileges as the daughter of the gamekeeper, I was more at one with the land than them, but still I fought back.

‘You won’t find a place on earth as beautiful or as special as here.’ My passion was hard to articulate; something always stoppered my throat. ‘Lark is not the problem,’ I told them, ‘because we are Lark. We are its future. We are its blood.’ I believed that.

Yet, when Paul said he was going, my mouth ran dry. He knew how wonderful the place was; he had lived it all alongside me.

‘Maybe you should come too,’ he said, and what on earth was I supposed to reply to that?

Margaritte turned over the card that signified my immediate future. The Knight of Cups. In the low, campfire voice she affected when doing her readings (not at all the voice she used when offering more wine), she told me, ‘And here comes your love.’

I turned away, else I might cry.

Margaritte’s shelves beside me were filled with books that she believed contained the true voice of the island, untainted by the prophets and evangelists who had washed up on our shores over the years. Titles such as Past Lives: The Basics, Cosmic Ordering: A Higher Level, The Truth Within the Runes – so much contraband in plain sight. She had created a circle of invisibility around her books and objects, she said. No one could see them unless she allowed it.

‘You really believe that?’ I’d scoffed.