In the front office of the Customs House, as I took a seat on the hard wooden bench opposite the black-and-white images of the Big House, my feet on the boards where I had once lain with Saul, sacks of post for individual islanders were thrown down and sat ignored. Inside those parcels – clothes, toys, books, cosmetics, so many small shards of mainland life to splinter the Larkian way. Any other year there would have been a queue out of the door in anticipation of these offerings, but that day Saul worked in quiet conference with the ship’s purser at the main counter, logging all that came in and the little that would go out, including me.

In the back office with its vista of sea the mainland crew laughed and drank tea, and at one point the captain came through the doorway to enquire about the gathering of people on the harbourside. What were the hymns in aid of? Was there a reason two men were secured by their feet in the stocks?

‘Island tradition,’ said Saul, without looking up from his paperwork, not missing a beat. ‘It’s the Feast of St Rita,’ he lied. ‘She’s the patron saint of impossible causes.’

The captain returned to the teapot, and I suppose he thought that Saul and I could not hear him when he recounted this information to his crew, adding quietly that we were the strangest of the strange, us people from Lark, not like the mainlanders at all.

I had convinced myself that I knew the ocean – the sound it made as it licked the walls of the harbour at night, how close you could get to the tidemark on the East Bay and remain safe, the agreement that every seven years we owed it a sacrifice. But the feeling of the sea when you are out there upon it is entirely different from how it feels to stand at the edge of the land and look across, wondering.

Holding tight to the railing of the deck, the wind came in crisp, suffocating blasts, the broil of the grey waters causing a constant looming roll. The rules were different on the water; the ship was trespassing. There were no safe places at sea, and I was beginning to understand that that was the case on land too. Lark had been the entirety of my fathomed world but the further we drifted across the North Atlantic, the smaller the place became, its details falling away, questions rising. The last twenty-seven years seemed improbable.

One of the first things I did, once settled on the mainland, was to get a tattoo. I had been looking for a church, but tattoo parlours were startlingly easier to find and Margaritte had always taught me to listen when the universe is speaking.