There were no more grand scenes of rebellion during worship. The girls’ protests in chapel became silent. They stood for each hymn, books open at the correct page, but their mouths remained flat lines. It was assumed amongst the teachers (and those pupils concerned with the fair meting out of justice) that Mr Crane was overlooking their behaviour as some kind of strategy – like a mother quashing a toddler’s public tantrum by deliberately ignoring it. He did not slam his hymn book against the oak lectern, issued no instructions to sing, just lifted his gaze to check on his charges at the end of each verse. The girls paid him no notice; they took their lead from the women in the biblical scenes in the chapel’s windows and on its walls, casting their eyes reverentially downwards or up high, as if in holy awe.

And this was what chafed against the community the most – the way the Eldest Girls became stingy with their attentions and their courtesies. They had been nice young women who looked their elders in the eye and replied yes, sir and no, miss without a trace of contempt. They’d started mannerly conversations made up of polite enquiries, pleasing a speaker by giggling at their jokes, whether funny or not. But now? In the words of a Third Year senior, the Eldest Girls had become, ‘up themselves’.

In the Provisions Store one Saturday, the usual conversation around the fresh produce shelves was reduced to dust by a sudden, blasphemous shriek.

This toddler tantrum could in no way be ignored.

If it had been Britta Sayers, named for St Brigid and her constant fire, behind the outburst, there would still have been shock, though less surprise. Britta’s mother, Rhoda, who worked at the Provisions Store counter, could be as rough as a bear paw in arguments over rations. Even clumsy Jade-Marie was a more likely candidate for this public, sacrilegious display, considering her past record in chapel.

But Anna Duchamp … She was an angel, couldn’t have looked more like one if she’d grown six wings and cried holy holy holy. Her mother, Ingrid, cut her daughter’s blonde bob into an immaculate copy of her own, and spent her days, when not tending to a horse she stabled with the hunt animals, making demure pastel dresses for Anna in dainty flower prints. If Britta and Jade-Marie were ever colluding on some ill-considered plan, it was Anna who would preach prudence, ‘Oh, but do you think we should?’

Yet, that day in the Provisions Store…

‘God damn you!’ she yelled into her mother’s face, her cheeks as pink as if they’d just been slapped, before striking out at a display of Egremont Russets, sending the crate to the floor, reducing them to a crop good only for cider, making all of the collected shoppers gasp.