Outside on the cobbles, Father Daniel leads the community in songs of sorrow and mourning. Margaritte Carruthers stands alongside him, arms raised to the sky, her blouse unbuttoned enough for them all to see the upper markings on her chest. The curate with the spiky hair moves about the crowd with a wooden voting box and slips of paper, assuring everyone who offers up testimony that they may remain anonymous, if they wish.

The Customs Officer and the handsome coycrock teacher steer the headmaster and the doctor out through the lobby into the unforgiving day. The sight of the red dog lead on the wrist of the housekeeper’s daughter sends the red-haired coycrock bursting across the threshold, to be reunited with her animal familiar, to rub her face into the damp roughness of its fur.

A horn blares, deep and resonant, and heads turn to see a distant grey vessel on the horizon. The April ship.

Margaritte Carruthers takes this as her cue to raise the dead, to honour them – the fishermen drowned, the spirit of Bethany Reid, the boy whose body lies in an open grave of bramble and fern.

The crowd jostles the headmaster and the doctor in the direction of the stocks. The girl’s dog barks in her arms, offering condemnation of its own.

‘Shoot that damn’ dog, Luke! Take a shot!’ slurs the headmaster venomously into the blustery air.

It is an order that makes the coycrock girl clutch her companion even tighter, the name wrenching the attention of the three girls still locked in the embraces of their mothers.

Luke. The sacrifice. The body in the woods.

The headmaster must be delirious, they imagine, or else forgetful, using that name.

‘Let the dead rise up!’ croons Margaritte, head thrown back, eyes closed in rapture. ‘Let them see us reborn as this divine child, a new vision of God within us!’

And the dead seemingly do as they are told, because there he is – the boy with the gun, Luke Signal, flesh and blood, alive. He lopes towards them from the direction of the smokehouse.

The Book of Leah

THE BOOK OF LEAH

I boarded the April ship.

I could see no other choice, no place for me on Lark. I stood awkwardly between its past and its future. In that meeting room, I had said what I needed to, but only as a means of opening a door that others might walk through. If I could summon up the arrogance to think that I held such importance, I might say that I’d performed the task that I had been put on the island – on this earth – to do. It was done, and now I was done.

He arrived on the cobbles a different man – Luke Signal. His lope that day was born of deep sorrow and guilt, all his customary swagger wiped away.

His little brother was dead when it was supposed to have been him.