‘The Eldest Girls!’ Viola says, spluttering it, making the woman jerk in her chin. Viola has coherent sentences prepared for the Earl but nothing for his indignant gatekeeper. ‘The Eldest Girls,’ Viola repeats, ‘it’s the Eldest Girls and I’ll… I’ll…’

I’ll huff and I’ll puff, says a voice in her head, because the time for gentle negotiation has gone.

‘I’ll burn this place to the fucking ground if I have to,’ Viola cries, her voice singing off the bare stone walls. ‘I will smoke the old bastard out if you will not let me past!’

March 2018

MARCH 2018

Viola was truly sorry.

She went to tell him so, fearful that she would find the Customs House deserted, a later search of Cable’s Wood revealing Saul’s body, swinging from a tree. He had saved her from the death-lick of the sea on the day of the gamekeeper’s funeral and this was how she repaid him: with humiliation. Viola had witnessed it all. Though it hadn’t really been her fault; it was that woman, yet again, stymieing Viola’s plans.

She lifted the hinged front desk and let herself into the back office. The place was ominously deserted, the first part of Viola’s premonition coming true. A small, oscillating fan turned its eye this way then that on the edge of the counter that ran beneath the sea-filled window. It wasn’t warm outside but the sun that shone into the office became trapped, magnified. Saul’s sketchbook lay open on the counter by one of the radio consoles, its pages riffling upwards at the attention of the fan, dropping down again as it rotated away.

Viola peered at the drawing-in-progress, a striped pencil resting in the fold of the book – proof at least that Saul was recently alive. It was a sketch of a gathering of herring gulls, a trio of them squabbling on the harbour railings, one directing its mean gaze to the viewer, one wide-beaked, mid-squawk, and another lifting into the air, splaying its improbably huge webbed feet. The drawing was good; Saul was good.

She flipped to the start of the book to see more and found sketches of Lark’s buildings – Customs House, Counting House, Provisions Store, Anchor – with Lowry-like figures populating the cobbles, then another of the harbourside from a different angle, taking in the masts of the boats, the chimneys of the smokehouse and the sun setting behind the hills. After that came portraits, Saul practising his mastery of hands by drawing the boatmen at work on the nets. Then followed a head-and-shoulders sketch of Leah Cedars, looking down pensively, black hair falling across a shaded cheek. In the corner of the page he’d drawn her full-length, striding, carrying an armful of folders.