Her voice woke me. She paused and then she spoke again, asking me if I, too, dreamed about what I had sought to banish from my memory years ago. I shook my head, but as I did so all that had distressed me then returned. The red-haired child ran over heather and rocks, chased out of a hovel that smelt of turf smoke and potatoes boiling. His feet were bare, his jersey ragged. He ran as swiftly as a hare.

‘Did you ever know, Sarah, that his father had long ago gone from the island to find a passage to America? A half-witted uncle—Drunk Paddy they call him now—shared that hovel with the child and his mother. God knows what became of the father, a lot of them just disappeared.’

‘Mrs Rolleston, all this is over and done with. It’s really best forgotten.’

‘My grandchildren hunted a child, Sarah. My grandchildren and your brother. As of right, they hunted. They were the children of Carriglas.’

I rose and moved across the room. I took her hands, hoping my touch would shake her melancholy off. But she repeated what she had said already, her voice unwavering and strong. I knew the details she pressed so urgently upon me. I did not want to hear them.

‘Shall I fetch you something warm? Milk? Or cocoa?’

‘As soon as their father returned to the regiment the shotgun was taken from the wall. As soon as there were only two women to deceive.’

‘They did not realise. Children often don’t.’

‘How often, that summer, did the thought of their game excite Villana while she recited her poetry for you in the nursery-schoolroom, or bent her head over the sums you set? Do you wonder about that, Sarah? Do you lie awake and wonder?’

I placed her hands beneath the bedclothes, and settled her pillows. As I returned to the fire, goose pimples ran over my arms and legs. In a moment she said:

‘One of them drove him on to where another waited. His feet bled on the gorse he ran through. He stumbled and fell down. Is that as you have seen it, too? In dreams, Sarah?’

I did not reply. I steadied a shaking in my hands by pressing them into my thighs. It was not something I had ever dreamed about.

‘Exhausted among the rocks, his fearful tears, the shotgun aimed. Is that what you have seen, Sarah? And have you heard the children’s laughter?’

‘Of course I haven’t.’ My voice rose, almost shrill in the quiet room. ‘You punished the children. They understood.’

‘Yet they did not obey me. They obeyed neither of us, Sarah.’

‘Mrs Rolleston, do please try to rest. No matter how it was, it belongs to the past now.’

‘The past has no belongings. The past does not obligingly absorb what is not wanted.’