Martha Signal did not share Luke’s need for self-punishment. She and her husband had been occupied that morning in the lifting of the broken body of their younger son from the place where he’d been beaten to death before delivering him back to his bedroom – forever his childhood bedroom – as a temporary resting place. Soon, they would face the unbearable task of lowering him into the ground. This was punishment enough; too much, in fact. Martha wished to mete out some punishment of her own.

She swooped across the cobbles like a harpy, her son’s avenging angel, and was not for a moment softened by the sight of the four girls on their knees, weeping at the revelation of what they had really done. Martha had defected from her friends in support of these girls; she had helped to found the Easter Committee with the girls’ interests at its heart – and this was how she was repaid? They’d meant to rob her of a child however the night had turned out. Martha wanted a scalp.

She seized one of them, any one of them. If a boy was to stand for the wrongs of all men, this girl could pay for the crimes of her sex too. Viola still had hair, shining vividly in the lunchtime sun, and Martha took a fistful, dragging the girl towards the harbour’s edge.

There were screams and protestations, a desperate battle at the waterside to restrain a woman hell-bent on drowning a novice witch, a murderous girl. Gasping her threats, Martha promised to hold Viola’s head beneath the surface for the terrible thing she had done. Ben and Saul left their guard of Crane and Bishy in the stocks to wrestle with Martha, in defence of a red-haired coycrock.

I stood back.

Over and over in my mind I replayed the moment I had caught Michael in the shadows of the Billet House. What are you doing here, Miss? I wished to rewind the hours, send him home to his mother. I prayed that I would be able to forgive myself, in time, but I knew I would never forgive the girls. Maybe one of those four did have to die. And mine eyes shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth…

When I thought of all the damage she had wrought, Viola seemed, like Luke, to be the best candidate for sacrifice, and in saying that, in expressing my desire to see her suffer, I understood that I was demonstrating how contagious evil can be. It passes from mind to mind, from hand to hand, dressed in the guise of justice, until we cannot distinguish the face of the enemy from our own.