‘The knickers off her pussy, more like!’ was what was said in the Anchor, laughter echoing out onto the harbourside. At the bar, there were congratulatory slaps on the back at a wisecrack well made, and a call for another round of drinks.

‘Oh, quit with the sour face, Eleanor,’ barked the waistcoated landlord to his unsmiling wife. ‘You’ve got to be able to stand a joke if you’re going to be serving here on the weekdays.’

Then came a roar. The coycrock-turned-harlot was darting for cover.

‘I see you! I see you!’ thundered Leah Cedars, out on the cobbles, rounding in on her prey. ‘If you lay so much as one finger on that girl, Luke Signal, I will slit you from throat to belly like you did that goat, like you did those foxes that you left on our doorstep, as God as my witness.’

God was her witness, and not the only one.

She spat in his face, said some, who watched from their windows.

Then she was gone, the boy too.

In the alley beyond the smokehouse there was a flash of vanishing fur as the headmaster and the doctor stumbled out of the pub, towards the harbourside, pink of cheek, torches swaying. They stopped, they conferred, they continued on – off in the direction of Cable’s Wood.

They were not the only ones.

The island would get its production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream after all, with so many bodies moving through the gloom, answering the irrefusable call of the trees and of the stones. They all needed their wits about them on a night like that, when you couldn’t see your hand in front of your own face, let alone a trail of petals on the path. Every one of them had supped on a potion of their choosing – alcohol, disappointment, power, lust – as disorienting as a dose of belladonna in a mid-Lent teacup.

Intoxicated like this, changed, they entered the gloaming, destined to lose hope, to return home frustrated, not willing to talk of what happened, deciding instead to consider it no better than a dream.

Except for one.

One of them would answer the song when it came, lifting up from the north cliff to reorient those who drifted through the night; to gird the loins of those who must act; to cleanse the soul of the sinners before they sinned.

‘Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus’, the hymn rang out, ‘Born to set Thy people free.’

Come, said the girls, come one man to stand for all the rest, one loss that can be accounted for, explained away at the gates of heaven when it is time to beg admittance.