‘This will get their attention,’ Anna said. Her eyes were already dead, her voice a flat line. ‘It will bring the mainland authorities here, like when Bethany killed herself, but I’ve got you to tell them it was no accident. You can tell them why I did it.’ She began to mutter a prayer in the same voice they had used for their spells. ‘O Almighty God, King of all Kings and governor of all things, whose power no creature is able to resist …’ These were her last rites.

Viola stood behind them, breathless, watching their swaying outline, three girls as one body, lurching towards the tow of the black sea beyond, heels driven into mud, inches from the edge. She knew she should step forward, help wrench the girl back, but she was gripped by something – the truth of what Anna had said.

‘But why does it have to be you?’

At Viola’s voice, Anna’s supplications petered out, the words dropping like shingle from the ledge. Her head turned, her pull slackened. Jade-Marie seized the moment, enveloping her shivering friend, if only for one last embrace.

‘Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends,’ incanted Anna.

‘Yes, there should be a sacrifice,’ said Viola. ‘But why should that sacrifice be you?’

Viola stepped towards them, the circle forming without her asking. They breathed as one: earth, fire, air and water; north, south, east, west; black, blonde, brown, red. Their heads touched, and a strange light, at once imagined yet real, formed itself between them, glowing brighter, gathering into an enthralling shape.

‘It’s not a sacrifice,’ said Jade-Marie, ‘unless you offer up something that matters.’

‘Yes,’ said Viola. Then she corrected that note, ever so slightly, making the harmony ring true. ‘But why,’ she asked, ‘must it matter to us?’

The Book of Leah

THE BOOK OF LEAH

We are Lark. The island is its people. We are its future.

You can believe but not practise.

You can find out how to be a better person, a different person, one the island deserves.

You can put one foot in the water, hold one foot on land and feel the difference, but you will never really know until you wade in, cross over.

You can make a bed, you can lie in it and accept the consequences.

‘I’m moving back to the harbour cottage,’ I told my mother over breakfast. ‘So I can prepare to leave on the April ship.’

She paused in the sipping of her tea, that was all.

‘I’m going because –’

‘I know why you’re going,’ she cut in.

I nodded, wondering if she really did. This was how we got to be the community that we were, how we arrived in this miserable position, because we were never willing to listen. We always assumed, always believed we knew the answer before we’d heard it, before we’d even asked for it.