Little debate was needed to arrive at a consensus. They were girls – what else could it be? It was a spell for love, for a certain kind of communion. The three had recently come of age, and that did something funny to a woman. They’d be thinking of nothing but marriage now, babies – common-sense flown from the window. Sense enough would remain for them to see the bleeding obvious, though: the number of eligible men on Lark was diminishing. Too many traitors were leaving for the mainland. The girls were calling on every bit of help they could get – from up above and down below – to snare themselves a mate.

Eyes went to the young man with the gun when this was said, and he began to see how they saw him. As something special.

Those girls could not rely on their soft looks. Even Britta Sayers, the one with the blackest hair … she had flaws in her genes. Take one look at the mother, Rhoda, on her shift at the Provisions Store – that jutting tooth, the heaviness of her brow, her body gone to fat. Britta might be bonny now, if you liked them feisty, but the men knew their proverbs. As is the mother, so is her daughter. Who wanted to go to bed with a vixen one day and wake up beside a toad?

Jade-Marie’s mother, Mary, was no guarantor for her offspring either. There she was, working at the foot of the gamekeeper, trying to claim a job that rightly belonged to a man – to a young man with a gun, to be precise. It was unnatural. Mary Ahearn had been forgiven for a while, with a dead husband and all that, but kindness had its limits.

As for Anna, she was angelic-seeming now, but she had French blood, Scandi blood, who knew how that might turn out?

Yet, you still would.

That’s what the men said, leaning in, smirking. Now that those girls were full-grown, you absolutely would. And despite all the attention given to their differences, there was no sense in picking a stand-out beauty. Each girl had an allure that was intensified, multiplied, by them being one of three. Their number made the men greedy. The appeal was to own the full set.

They had pricked one another’s fingers, said the young man with the gun, warming to his role as storyteller, and red had dripped onto the white of their nightdresses. They offered their fingers to each other to be kissed and sucked, whispering promises.

They knew they were being watched then, the older men told the young one, why else would they have smeared their lips with the stuff, if not for show? The young man went on to tell them of the rose petals, the trail of them leading from wood to circle.

The men sat back in their chairs, arms folded, case closed.