‘I don’t know,’ was Mary’s response as she swilled wine around her glass. ‘Jade-Marie and her friends are getting a lot of grief at school. Wouldn’t this make things even worse with Crane?’

We nodded sympathetically, we sipped. No one spoke for a while. My thoughts were loud – What kind of grief, Mary? What kind? Do you know? I mean, do you really know? They became too loud: I had to speak.

‘What kind of grief?’ I made it sound casual, innocent, and therefore easier, I imagined, for Mary to reply – but I had put her on the spot.

She looked up guiltily. ‘Well, the stuff with, you know, the heart and with… Peter. The idea that the girls are going up to the stones to do… magic.’

‘Nonsense!’ shot back my mother.

It was a comradely outburst, not an honest one. I had heard her gossip with the other women, before my father’s death, about how those girls were up to no good. She patted the top of Mary’s hand on the counter and I allowed myself to wonder for the first time how much my mother really knew. My instinct was that she was unaware of it all, blissfully so, but I was also astute enough to realise that this was the kindest conclusion to come to, for her and for me.

‘You know it was Luke,’ Mary went on. She eyed us cautiously, still unsure if she could speak freely.

My father had been her ally certainly, giving her work after Neil Ahearn drowned, but the fact remained that he had sat on the Council, alongside Crane and, until his recent retreat, Luke Signal’s father, Robert. My mother and I were, in Mary’s eyes, still under the Council’s wing.

‘He killed a goat,’ Mary said. Perhaps our earlier renegade proposal gave her the reassurance to continue. ‘Luke killed it and then took its heart to the stones. It was some sort of punishment, you see. He thought the girls, my Jade-Marie –’ her voice teetered; she took a breath to pull it back ‘– he thought they were fair game, out there beyond the woods on their own, if you get my drift, and didn’t like being turned down.’ She gulped her wine like it was beer, or maybe medicine. ‘I keep an eye. I’ve had to. At work, the boy’s got lazy. He’s a hotshot with that rifle, let me tell you, but is he managing to kill any foxes? Is he heck!’

We were quiet again.

‘So, there’s no way he should get the job,’ said my mother, stating the obvious conclusion to Mary’s account, ‘let alone the lodge.’ Then she added: ‘To think of all the dinners I’ve given him’, as if this were the real betrayal.