And also, there had been Saul.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I did deceive you.’ I am Leah, it was what I was named to do. ‘But I wonder,’ I told him, ‘if that doesn’t make us even.’

Margaritte’s cards were accurate; he was my Knight of Cups, my charming fraud. His friendship with the Eldest Girls, his protection of them, was heartfelt certainly. But where did that leave me in his affections? I wasn’t told the truth of his relationship with them in case I was in league with Crane, complicit, delivering hysterical girls who sang too loudly in chapel straight into his grubby hands. To not trust me, I could understand. To want to have sex with me anyway – it was incomprehensible.

‘What were you running away from?’ I asked. ‘In the first place, I mean. What did you go to Lark to escape?’

He pretended not to understand.

‘A girl?’ I offered.

He shrugged.

‘Yourself?’ I said – not really a question.

He changed the subject. He asked me what I was going to do when I reached the mainland – did I need his help to find a job? I shook my head and told him I was going to track down my brother. It was the truth, but I still haven’t managed it. I live within Paul’s telephone area code and though this covers hundreds of square miles, one of my fellow lodgers told me, apropos of a separate matter, that it’s surprising how often you bump into friends and acquaintances in a city of several million. Maybe Paul will find me if it’s meant to be, if he is ready to be found.

‘So, were you really going to take the Eldest Girls away on the August ship?’ I asked Ben.

He took his time to answer, playing with the remnants of a chicken curry, ploughing furrows in the yellow-stained rice. ‘I was going to take their stories,’ he said, as if this equated to a ‘yes’.

‘They trusted you,’ I told him.

‘And they were right to.’ He believed that. ‘I still have the laptop. I still have their stories.’

‘Yeah? And what are you going to do with them?’

We held one another’s gaze. This was all that united us now, our knowledge, the great burden of carrying it.

Or else, we could let it go, look away.

The last night on board, I dreamt, in the sickeningly vivid way the ship’s motion provoked, that I had watched Ben throw his laptop over the side of the ship, the Eldest Girls’ first-person accounts irrevocably gone. The dream stays with me and I can convince myself that it really happened, though I am likely mingling my conjured-up image of that dented computer falling to the waves with the real memory of a phone being swallowed by the blackness of a well.