Without even reading what was written on the paper the reverend slid across the table, she did spy the month. Shocked so much time had passed, she held the quill in her shaking, twisted hand, repulsed by the long, filthy nails, and signed. What she’d confessed to she didn’t find out until later.

Returned to her cell, she collapsed on the floor. It was over. Her ordeal was over. Nettie, Nicolas and Isobel crawled to her side. Wrapping their lacerated arms around her, their heads close together, they simply lay there. She couldn’t speak; not because her voice was taken but because she didn’t want to tell them what she’d done — not so much that she’d signed — they would have guessed — but that she’d given up.

One by one, the women were dragged out of their prison (for that’s what it had become), before being returned hours later. Nicolas was so brutalised by the pricker she’d been carried. Just like Sorcha, the women had lain upon the cold, soothing stone floor, while hot tears and blood flowed. For the first few hours, they kept their backs to each other and, like Sorcha, stared at the blank wall. They were facing their weakness, their shame and, while forgiving it in others, hated it in themselves.

It wasn’t until after Nettie was brought back, crawling on her hands and knees to close the distance between them and forcing Sorcha to turn around, that Nettie told her she too had signed.

Over the following days, they forgave each other their broken promise to withstand the men, the pricker, the reverend. Their promise to each other.

At least, Nettie said, they would be released now.

But as the days and nights passed and no one came to unlock the door, except to pass them vittles and messages, they began to lose hope all over again. This was the cruellest blow. At least in confessing, they’d been given a glimpse of the end of torture, of release. While the brutalising did stop, they remained locked in the cell. Too mortified to stand at the window and reassure friends and family they were alive, too weak to cry out for news, they lay or sat, talking quietly of what their lives had been before — when they were free. As if it was a shared dream, they spoke of their loved ones, the ocean, the currents, the slippery herring, the sweet faces of the seals and their hoarse barks, the prickly seaweed and raucous gulls, with wonder and longing. They took it in turns to describe each of the fishermen who worked the boats, the fishwives too, sometimes chuckling at their memories, how different they were. They shared confidences and aspirations.