Three visitors came that summer: one couple (middle-aged walkers in audible, wet-wicking fabrics) and a solo traveller from the telephone company, trying yet again to convince the islanders of the benefit of installing a mast. The widow Esther Deezer put them up in her spare rooms, serving breakfasts and dinners sparse enough to encourage them never to come back, driving home the message that isolation was neither a tourist attraction nor a problem to be solved. The question of the mast was put to the men of the Council once again in July and as in previous years received a unanimous no.

Until Jade-Marie sang too loudly in chapel, the girls were a mere novelty, known by their collective moniker ‘the Eldest Girls’ – and long before their time. The font of St Rita’s had sat dry and unused for four years now and there had been a similarly disconcerting absence of new babies on Lark between 1998 and 2000. This meant that the three girls, all born in 2001, became the most senior pupils at the end of Year Eleven. Or the ‘Fifth Form’ in old money, the kind of currency the school of St Rita’s understood.

There was Britta Sayers, the true islander, a ‘pure catch’, distinguished by her long ropes of lucky black hair. There was Jade-Marie Ahearn, with her wild brown mane, a legacy of her missionary father, Neil, who’d arrived on Lark in the 1990s, departing it in the Great Drowning of 2002 while Jade was still a babe in her Larkian mother Mary’s arms. Then there was Anna Duchamp, who would be forever marked out as a coycrock – an incomer – by her exotic blonde bob, scissored neatly to curl beneath the ears. Anna arrived on the island at the impressionable age of four, with her French father, her Scandinavian mother and her little brother, Julian.

And now there was another coycrock girl on Lark, arrived on the recent June ship. She too was born in 2001 and with her particular shade of hair, which was considered a bad omen by those who heeded the old ways, she might create a ‘full set’ with Britta, Anna and Jade- Marie. Black, blonde, brown, red. If three became four the inauspiciousness of the girl’s coppery hair might be reversed. That’s what was said; or rather what was not said.

Superstition singled out four as a powerful number – stable, real, encompassing north, south, east and west. A union would make the girls a formidable combination of earth, fire, air and water as they took their seats at the long desk in the north-facing classroom. Mr Crane taught the Sixth Form, alongside his running of the school. Those girls could become their own talisman.

But the small, pale coycrock with the red hair was not present at that first morning worship. She had not turned up for the first day of term.