I stepped across the threshold, offering up my excuses – the latest rules from the mainland on testing, along with the implementation of the new GCSE grading system meant my workload was immense, the paperwork never-ending. I kept talking in this way until the perverse urge to confess deserted me. I have been spending almost every evening with the stranger, Mum. I thought that I loved him but it seems he’s not the sort of person I should love, a man who leads young girls to the devil.

Then I might have spoken more truths. Since Paul went, since you made no effort to stop him, this feels like no home at all.

I divulged nothing, having no wish to burden her or compromise her position in Lark’s hierarchy. I perched on one of the stools at the kitchen island – a kitchen that was the envy of all the women for its shiny white cupboards and flecked marble surfaces – and I watched her chop vegetables and baste a chicken too big for the three of us, especially on this evening that was supposed to involve a fast.

In front of me, she placed a bowl of olives, something she had taken to ordering in large jars when the ships were running, and I picked at them as she embarked on an anecdote about the Earl.

‘They thought that he’d died at the weekend,’ she said, eliciting the gasp from me that she so clearly wanted. He may have been an invisible ruler, the Earl, a disenfranchised one, at his own discretion, leaving Lark’s deciding to the Council, but the idea of him dead was terrifying. The island would be a ship without a captain, without a figurehead, without a rudder.

The climax of my mother’s story had Hannah Pass, leader of the Earl’s diminishing housekeeping team and mother of Abigail, one of my Fourth Years, breaking into his locked bedroom to see if he was still breathing. The anti-climax: he was – still breathing, that is. He had merely taken to his bed for a few days, as was his way. The worst of it was that the ‘gazunder’ – the chamber pot – was full to overflowing.

My mother moved on to updates of the latest movements of Elizabeth Bishy and Diana Crane, Martha Signal and Eleanor Springer. Her sweetly worded aspersions on these women, her friends, were not dissimilar to those made about her in return – conversations that I was not supposed to overhear.

‘I wouldn’t trade my kitchen for Susannah Cedars’ “spaceship” for all the riches of Abraham.’

‘And isn’t that exactly what it cost her to have it sent over?’

‘Imagine how it shows up the muck!’

That was how I knew for sure my mother was envied.