Every one of the Billet House’s current residents was, in himself, a respected islander, but all of them there together, in that place… it gave me a creeping, anxious feeling. If I could have found the words to explain my misgivings, still I’d have kept them to myself. Around Ben, I was bound tight. I was gagged by my knowledge that he was the Knight of Cups. That he was meant for me.

I believed that unequivocally. His arrival was no coincidence, not a hopeful connection between a random card and an existing passenger list. He was a supernatural gift – and this terrified me, rendered me mute, taciturn at best. It was a disaster. Ben was building an idea of me from a distance, as I was of him, but all he could see was someone serious, difficult, prissy. If only I’d behaved like the old me – sweet, eager Miss Cedars – she was so much easier to love.

Then the rains came.

I told Margaritte of my predicament with Ben one Tuesday evening and my need for some kind of intervention. She had picked the heads of the clover that lived in the cracks in the path leading up to her door. To these, she added some leaves from the climbing ivy at the front of her cottage and pressed them with a stem from a potted jasmine. She wrapped them in paper, muttering as she folded, and told me she would drop them on Ben’s doorstep at midnight. To her, it was a cure as straightforward as a painkiller for a headache.

Margaritte said the subsequent downpour was an answer to my wish; the universe listening and responding. I said that the September rains always found a way in, it just happened to be my classroom’s turn to be flooded.

Michael Signal, my eldest Fifth Year, received the first torrent. The storm growled its approach and when the clouds gave way, so did the ceiling tile above his head. He leapt from his seat, yelping. My pair of Fourth Year girls, Eve Grogan and Abigail Pass, squealed with delight – ‘Michael’s wet himself! Michael’s wet himself!’ – until the ceiling tile above their heads gave into the second spill, destroying their felt-tip diagrams of erosional landforms. That second deluge, the one that fell on the girls, I am willing to believe was divine interference – or divine punishment. Against whom do ye sport yourselves? says the Book of Isaiah. Against whom make ye a wide mouth, and draw out the tongue? No one but yourselves, that’s who.

‘All of you, up!’ I yelled. ‘Into Mr Hailey’s class! Off you go!’ They made swift armfuls of their bags and books, bumping one another out of the room, exhilarated by disaster.

‘Michael!’ I called. The boy turned to me, bedraggled. ‘You’re already wet, so you might as well be the one to fetch Mr Huxley from the harbourside.’