During the crossing, Viola found refuge in, if not a comfort from, her religious beliefs. She and her mother were the only passengers except for an anxious vet and a chain-smoking groom, who took it in turns to sit in a stall in the ship’s bowels, calming a sweating horse, bound too for the island. A day in, when there was nothing to see but the roiling grey of the North Atlantic and the breathless emptiness of the skyline, an eerie gloom beset everyone on board, the crew not exempt. The ugly vessel gave off its industrial chug, the moody wind whip-snapped across the waters and a desperate Viola Kendrick searched the never-ending horizon for dry land. Ireland had long ago vanished in their wake. To the north, there were no glimpses of Iceland or Greenland, something the maps that they had studied before leaving suggested would appear. How could the real world be this much vaster in scale? On the second day, Viola convinced herself she had spied the ragged coast of Canada up ahead but it was nothing but the reflection of a cloud – a hallucination. Please let there be something out here, she begged a God she was unsure existed. Please don’t let us die too.

And Viola’s absent god responded.

Lark appeared.

They clung to the rail of the deck to watch the island’s evolution from a distant smudge to jutting cliffs. Drunk on relief, Viola and her mother narrated each new detail as it revealed itself – the high green broom of woodland, the startling yellow tufts of wild grass on the rockface, the hawk riding a thermal as it scanned the ground below for mice. The ship rounded the northern headland and they could see then, in all its strange glory, the hollowed-out curl of the cape. In days of yore, when Lark lay much closer to the main British Isles, a giant took a bite of the rockface and didn’t like the taste, so he pushed the island far, far out to sea; that’s what they say. Deborah Kendrick recounted the fairy tale as the ship idled inelegantly into shore. Viola had heard this story before, but it had meant nothing on the mainland. Back there, it sounded slippery and fake – a tale told to charm tourists. Yet in context, with the sun glinting from the windows of the harbour cottages making a constellation of daylight stars, with fishermen on the decks of nearby tethered boats emptying buckets of fish in great silvery spills, seagulls turning hopeful circles above them, Viola heard it anew, and she was charmed. She was enchanted.