‘Get up,’ said my headmaster.

‘I shall take the minutes,’ I said, ‘that’s a woman’s job, isn’t it?’ I showed them my teeth; it was supposed to be a smile. I pulled the phone from my pocket.

Ben had told me that this was the best of his devices for doing what I needed to do, though he also told me that it was lost. We turned over cushions and pulled out drawers in our search, Ben explaining that there was a democratic attitude to possessions at the Billet House – ‘Borderline communist,’ he said. Everything belonged to everyone. It occurred to me as we searched that he was pretending to have mislaid it because he didn’t want me to take it – those mainlanders and their attachments to their phones. When I spied it, slid onto the very top of their understocked bookshelf, it felt as if it had been put there deliberately – hidden. Ben was not as pleased as I’d imagined he would be, reunited once again with an expensive phone that had been missing for weeks. Still, he charged it up, he demonstrated how to use the function I required and he handed it over.

I placed the phone in front of me on the white tablecloth. The men of the Council leaned back in their seats, while Saul leaned in, Viola too, slack-jawed.

I did a sweep of their anxious faces.

‘Don’t worry, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘I shan’t be bringing forward a proposal for a phone mast.’

No one smiled.

‘I’m going to record this,’ I told them, pressing the buttons as Ben had showed me, hands shaking, betraying my desire to appear confident, in control. ‘It’ll make things much easier to type up later.’ I cleared my throat and stumbled on. ‘My first proposal as a newly appointed member of this Council is that, with the parents’ agreement, the Eldest Girls shall be put in my charge for a time, to set them back on a godly path.’

I looked at Viola as I spoke, gauging her reaction, an indication of how the Eldest Girls would receive the news.

‘Get up, Miss Cedars.’ Mr Crane’s voice came like a rumble of incoming thunder. ‘Do not threaten your distinguished post at the school by continuing with this display.’

I did not get up.

‘I admire you, Mr Crane,’ I said, ‘for juggling the headmastership of the school, your Council duties and your numerous chapel commitments alongside your teaching of the girls.’ This script that I had written for myself, had I ever truly believed I would have the audacity to voice it? And was it really me saying these words? It felt as though the message was coming through me. This was the channelling of a spirit. ‘But it is time that the Eldest Girls returned to the bosom of Lark’s womenfolk.’