He was younger than her, Viola deduced, fourteen, fifteen maybe, though it was hard to say for sure. The kids at the harbour who looked to be her age physically, seemed young in their behaviour, childish – except perhaps for that blonde girl at the store. The island did it to them, Viola presumed, built them heartier, kept them innocent. You could only blame the lack of internet.

‘I’m named after a character in a play,’ she told him, trying to impress.

‘Oh, yeah. Which one?’

He was definitely younger. Either that, or more of a dunce than her.

‘The Shakespeare one,’ she enunciated.

‘Well, he wrote a ton of plays, didn’t he?’ the boy countered. ‘You’re going to have to narrow it down.’

‘The one with Viola in it,’ she said, toying with him.

She didn’t fancy him; she wasn’t flirting. There was just an easy familiarity between them – big sister, little brother – and she liked being teasingly superior, used as she was to being the younger one, if only by a few minutes.

‘Has it got sex in it?’ the boy asked. ‘The Viola play?’

She wondered if he had misunderstood their rapport, if he was flirting with her, but his enquiry seemed genuine.

‘Not really. Just a bit of cross-dressing.’

‘That’ll be why then,’ he said.

Why what? she would have asked if he hadn’t leapt in and flipped the subject.

‘So, are you heading for the Sisters’ Stones too?’ he asked. This was followed by a monologue about the perfect circle of nine Neolithic stones that lay beyond the wood, and a deconstruction of all the hypotheses for why it had been built in the first place – time-telling, worship, the strange proclivities of ancient druids. The tenth stone in the centre of the circle – a hollow stone – had healing properties, he said, if you crawled through its middle.

‘Have you tried it?’ Viola asked, triggering another lengthy speech from the boy, this one on local legends, including the giant’s bite story. He told a tale of how the sea surrounding Lark claims a child every seven years, then something about black-haired virgins – the word ‘virgin’ making him blush profusely – before he arrived at his point.

The Sisters’ Stones, as their name suggested, belonged to the women of the island. Everything else on Lark belonged to the men, which they could share with the women, if they chose to, but the stones … The boy couldn’t go near that hollow rock, even by invitation.

‘It’s bad luck for a man to enter the circle,’ he said gravely. ‘It invites a terrible fury.’

Dot strained impatiently at her lead. Viola hadn’t gained enough knowledge of the landscape yet to let her run free. Everywhere was the risk of an unexpected cliff edge, a drop into the sea.

‘Where does the fury come from?’ Viola asked. ‘From God?’