Luke Signal shook his head, not in response, but in disregard. He retrieved his gun from the grass by Viola’s feet, and the girls twitched at the way it clacked in his grip. Had he brought it for cover, to explain his business out in the wood at night, or as insurance that he would get his payment as agreed? More vitally, would he use it now?

‘Fuck this,’ said the boy, the man, eyeing them each in turn before gobbing in the grass. ‘I’ll be coming for those keys to the lodge soon, yeah, Miss Cedars,’ he said, a final, malevolent rejoinder. Then he disappeared into the gloom.

They regrouped at the base of the centre stone, where candles were lit in jam jars and they huddled for warmth. Leah Cedars leapt immediately to the subject of blame. Under no circumstances were the girls to believe that they were at fault for what had happened there tonight.

Viola felt patronised by this lecture. Not their fault? She had engineered the whole thing! She might not be to blame, but she deserved the credit. Saul Cooper was now in her confidence and she would have had leverage with Luke Signal too if Leah Cedars hadn’t come blundering in.

‘The older generation are to blame,’ Leah went on. ‘The attitude of those men bleeds down into the young of the island. We grow up to think of ourselves as inevitable victims, while the boys are told they are conquerors, entitled to take whatever they want.’

Viola sighed, waiting for Leah to get to the point, or for the girls to eject the woman from their circle, whichever came first, but the others seemed to have forgotten how much they despised Leah Cedars. They were nodding along.

The teacher trained her gaze on Viola, her head on one side, to all appearances kindly, compassionate. ‘You know, you really shouldn’t have put yourself in that situation. You should never let yourself be abused in return for, well, anything.’

Viola couldn’t hold in her anger any longer. ‘Let myself be abused?’ she spat back. ‘Let myself be abused!’

‘Okay, okay,’ said the teacher. ‘That sounded wrong. That’s not what I’m saying. You know that’s not what I’m saying.’

What was she saying? Viola looked to the Eldest Girls. Why were they not jumping in to defend Viola, to argue with the woman? Why did they continue to nod so obsequiously?

‘We have to start saying no,’ Leah said. ‘We have to fight back.’

She spoke as if they were weak, as if they had been coming to the Sisters’ Stones all this time just to hide, as if they weren’t already on the frontline, battered and muddied, striving for victory.

‘You have no idea,’ Viola snapped. ‘No idea at all what’s going on.’