Those with children in the senior classes reported how the hand of the lovely Miss Cedars had shook as she distributed the letters at the end of school. Some embellished this account to give her reddened eyes and a particular catch of the breath. It made sense. The word ‘strangers’ was mentioned no less than three times in the letter, and Leah Cedars had been seen entertaining that new teacher more frequently than was necessary. An excursion, just the two of them, to view the sunset from the west coast was extending hospitality too far. The woman’s easy trust of the man was folly.

‘Plus, she spends every Tuesday evening with Margaritte Carruthers.’

This became the main topic for discussion at October’s pop-up hairdressing salon, Elizabeth Bishy, the doctor’s wife, as usual, cutting the first turf.

‘And when she’s at Margaritte’s house,’ she went on, ‘they close the curtains, so we don’t see what that kind of woman gets up to.’

Hope Ainsley paused in her application of perming solution to the rows of tightly wound curlers on Elizabeth Bishy’s head. Martha Signal, who was rereading the letter in the Chronicle, her hair an armadillo of highlighter foils, looked up aghast.

‘Are you saying that… ?’

Elizabeth nodded firmly and mouthed the word, so she might not be blamed for raising something from the island’s history considered long dead – witchcraft.

Quietly, knots made from rowan twigs went up in the corner of doorframes. Old odd shoes poked out of spare gaps in rafters. Front paths were sprinkled with salt, ostensibly for the prevention of slugs, an explanation that did not account for the collection of stones placed there too, ones selected from the accessible edges of the East Bay specifically for the holes in their middle – hag stones, whittled by the action of the sea.

‘They’re pretty and unusual,’ said the women who threaded them onto ribbon and scraps or garden string and hung them from fence posts and railings. ‘We just like the way they look.’

These same women fell in love again with their arrowhead brooches, wearing them prominently on sweaters and jacket lapels. They told young children, more forcefully than before, to smash a hole in the bottom of the shell when they’d finished their boiled eggs: ‘So that the remains can’t be used as a boat.’

The children were bemused. Who could make themselves small enough to make a vessel of an eggshell? The women would not say. If you were to talk of who, that was an admission that they existed, that your own trust was being placed in talismans and rituals and that you, in your bid to ward it off, were engaging in black magic yourself.

Theories shifted once more.