They summoned the dead, wearing headdresses made from the fat spiked leaves of the hawthorn tree.

A prayer was said for Bethany Reid, the girl who was swept away from the dogleg jetty to a watery grave in 2011. The sea surrounding Lark claims a child every seven years, so in the coming year, they all knew – time’s up. There had been doubts that Bethany’s death counted; she had turned sixteen the summer before, so was a woman, not a child. Would the sea be a stickler for its conditions? No one was sure. Mothers held children’s hands very tightly until the calendar turned to 1 January with no other soul lost. Rejoicing went on behind closed doors. Bethany was the sacrifice after all! God save the rest of us!

The Eldest Girls asked Bethany to speak to them via a swinging pendant – a small chunk of green stone strung on a silver chain. Britta held the piece of jade aloft; Anna asked the questions.

‘Will you help us? Circle for “yes”, go back and forth for “no”.’

Did Bethany respond? This is not a question you can ask if the truth and the light is genuinely in your heart.

They moved on to someone else. The girls asked ‘him’ to come to them, to speak, to enter them.

The young man with the gun eagerly reported this part.

He was out for the foxes, keeping down their numbers, when he was distracted by female voices, drawing him from the wood to the brink of the stones. This ‘him’ they were trying to summon came with no capital H; the young man was sure of it. No one asked for the Lord to come unto them like that, barefoot in the open air, arms aloft. They weren’t pulling themselves, hand-over-hand, closer to heaven; rather they were reaching high as they sank down to where Old Harry lives.

The story travelled through the Billet House, the Customs House, the Anchor. The Eldest Girls were an abomination, they said, for raising up heathen persuasions that Lark had long ago put to bed. But in the silence that followed these rough and noisy judgements, as the men sipped their beer in small groups of trusted fellows, sure that the girls’ fathers – the two who were still living – weren’t within earshot, they raised a tentative question: What kind of spell, do you think, those girls are casting?