The mention of blood snaps Viola back to the urgency of the moment; she needs to go. Maybe this woman is no real friend, no compatriot in the fight. She is likely the same as everyone on Lark – her eyes have been averted for too long, never willing to be sure.

Viola turns for the kitchen, the way out.

‘You have to be compassionate to those who looked away.’ The woman follows her, imploring her to listen. ‘The truth is slippery; it’s difficult to get hold of. And if you do, what then? You can’t escape it here. You have to shape it, make it palatable. Or else, how do you go on living? Some people can’t, just ask that poor girl who –’

‘Bethany Reid!’ Viola whips back around, the girl’s name bursting from her lips – a hard sweet released from the throat by a slap on the back. ‘She killed herself because of what was happening to her and you all looked away!’

The old woman’s voice is riven with remorse. ‘She left nothing, no evidence, nothing we could use.’

Viola shakes her head. It is not good enough.

‘But now we have three voices,’ says the woman.

‘Four,’ says Viola fiercely.

‘And Bethany is here too.’ The old woman stretches out her fingers and plays the invisible strings of the air. ‘I believe that. I think she came back as a fox. The men lost at sea, they are now deer and –’

Viola backs away, frightened by this talk. ‘No,’ she says.

The woman lets her arms float down and steps closer, peers at her.

‘Did you lose someone?’ she asks, trying to place a hand on Viola’s shoulder.

She flinches from this touch. ‘People don’t come back from the dead.’

‘You understand the pain then.’ The woman speaks gently, sympathetically. ‘You know it too well.’

‘People don’t come back,’ Viola repeats. She had let herself think that they do, was haunted in the aftermath by that scene from their namesakes’ play – Sebastian arriving in Illyria, returned from the dead, not in his watery tomb at all but able to hug his long-lost sister. The fiction tormented her. ‘They just die,’ Viola blurts, ‘they just end. They don’t even go to heaven because why would we want them up there, looking down on us, seeing what we’re doing now and how we’re getting it all totally and completely…’ She chokes, unable to go on.

The woman gets her hand to Viola’s shoulder this time and her touch is like a kind of magic. Viola’s vision swims. She looks down, roots herself, sees her legs in pyjamas, her two feet in their boots, the kitchen tiles beneath. She sees that she exists, she is here, and that is enough. She looks up.

The woman smiles, tells her: ‘I will do better this time, I promise. I have you beside me.’