‘Crane knows it’s him,’ Mary put in. ‘We took the heart to him as proof – Rhoda, Ingrid and me – proof that our girls were being harassed. We know they’re acting a bit all over the place right now but is it any wonder? You’ve heard Crane’s solution to it all, though – lock ’em up!’ She finished her wine with an aggressive swig. ‘Why should we lock up our girls and not that little bastard?’

She set down the glass gently and straightened her jumper – a small, decorous action to demonstrate that her anger was not for us.

‘And who was it, do you think,’ I asked, adding that touch of innocence to my voice, ‘who told Luke the girls were fair game?’

My mother turned slowly to scowl at me. ‘Leah Cedars, you do ask the strangest questions!’

She was right; it was a strange question. I wanted them to see that it was and wonder why I’d asked it. Hadn’t Luke’s behaviour changed all of a sudden and only recently, about the same time a handsome new stranger stepped on our soil? The two of them moving into the Billet House, the elder perhaps encouraging the younger to give free rein to that dark something lying there, ready within him, cultivated during his childhood growing up on an island like this.

‘Oh, they say all sorts of crude stuff at the Anchor, the men,’ was Mary’s too-easy response. ‘It gets back to me,’ she said, ‘I don’t miss nothing.’

The three of us around that kitchen island were our own worst enemies – scared to tell each other what we really knew and honestly felt, how in our quietest moments we suspected the most terrible things, impossible things. How would we ever gain strength in numbers if we continued to depend on the comfort of our doubts?

My mother tried to top up Mary’s glass but Mary placed her hand across it. She wanted to get home for Jade-Marie. We should just leave things as they were, was Mary’s parting decision, bide our time, see who the Council appointed as gamekeeper. As if that was going to be any surprise. I didn’t want to let her go. The girls had rejected my call to action and now Mary was too. I would not be herded back into that pen with the perpetrators, the collaborators and the ones who stood by.

‘We could go to the Big House,’ I said, taking a keen grip of Mary’s arm as she made for the door, ‘get the Earl to appoint you.’

Mary shook her head, laughed the idea away.

‘Wake the Earl?’ she said. ‘Oh, no, I’m not sure we’ve quite got to that yet.’

The day after her visit we found the first fox.