Viola had wanted to stand over her mother too, find out which class she was being enrolled in. She had failed her GCSEs on the mainland, missed too much school in the wake of the incident and fallen behind. She had come to think of herself as a dunce, a div.

As it was, whatever Deborah Kendrick put on those forms was of no consequence at all.

On their trip to the Provisions Store that weekend, Viola’s mother had enquired of one of the aproned women behind the counter how she might go about ordering something to arrive on the last August ship. The aproned woman had pointed them towards the Counting House, where upstairs they had waited in line to use a computer. Deborah Kendrick had clicked, scrolled, bought.

A chill lifted the hairs on Viola’s skin, despite the clement weather that final summer month, when she watched her mother unpack the box that arrived. Teaching materials for Maths, English, Geography and French were arranged neatly in their corresponding piles on the kitchen table.

‘I’m really going to enjoy this,’ her mother had trilled, breaking the spine on a Tricolore textbook. ‘Et toi?’

There they were, on the remotest property on the remotest island, and now Viola was to be home-schooled. Yet, she said nothing – could find no way to protest. Just as she was careful not to wake Dot as she dozed in the radiating warmth of the kitchen Rayburn, Viola could not risk disturbing her mother from this lightness, this reverse of sleep. She had seen how delicate Deborah Kendrick’s mindset was in that brief moment with Miriam in chapel. She was under a precarious spell, one that could be easily broken.

So, the battered kitchen table became Viola’s school, her pencil now piercing the paper whenever a sentence crossed a groove in the wood.

‘Do you think they used to butcher animals on here?’ she asked her mother. ‘Slaughter them, even?’

‘It’s a timed test, you know,’ was Deborah Kendrick’s reply, ‘you shouldn’t be even thinking about chatting.’

Viola only spoke to break the silence, make the situation feel normal and not a step too far, an isolation within an isolation.

In the timed tests her mother set, Viola felt no urgency. The pink grains of the hourglass flowed slower on Lark. One – eeeeeeelllllleeeephant. Two – eeeeeeelllllleeeephant…. With no distractions – no texts from friends, no radio, music or television – the silence stretched. It made Viola restless.

In the afternoons, lessons done, she clipped on Dot’s red lead and headed out, south, down the main track from the farmstead. Her mother had been uneasy the first time she had pulled on her boots in the hallway.