But Villana didn’t want me to go to bed immediately. She led the way to the kitchen, where the butler who’d been silent in the drawing-room welcomed me gregariously. I saw him properly now: sallow-faced, black-haired, an angular, good-looking man. ‘Linchy,’ Villana said by way of introduction. ‘Daddy stole him from a hotel in Dublin.’ The butler gave his head a sideways wag and did not deny that. ‘The cellars are through there,’ Villana said, pointing at a door, ‘but don’t ever go in. They’re full of bats.’ Two maids were in the kitchen, one of them sewing at the table, the other looking for something in the dresser drawers. ‘A bat is harmless,’ Linchy said. ‘A creature of high intelligence.’ At this there was a shrill protest from the maid who was sewing, an insistence that a bat would have your eyes out. An older woman—who Villana said afterwards was the cook—entered the kitchen at that moment. ‘Cease that dreadful noise,’ she testily ordered. The maid who was opening and closing the dresser drawers shook her head and abandoned her search. Brigid her name was, Villana said when we had left the kitchen. The cook’s name was Mrs Gerrity, the maid who’d shrieked was Kathleen Quigley.

We crossed the cobbled yard, Villana leading me to an ice-house and then through a shrubbery to the kitchen garden, where peaches ripened on brick-lined walls. We passed among apple trees to a secluded tennis-court, and continued on a path that skirted the grounds, eventually arriving at the inlet where the island’s river flowed into the sea. Rhododendrons were clumped along the riverbank, a path led to the pebbled shore where a boathouse and the landing-stage referred to by Haverty were, both of them disused. In gathering twilight we reached the ruined abbey at the heart of the island, and then climbed up to the standing stones that marked a burial ground on the hill above it. Later we stood on the edge of black-rock cliffs, where there was a view of only sea and sky, darkness claiming both before we turned away. These were her favourite places, Villana said, the abbey and the standing stones and the cliffs. ‘I’m looking after that hen,’ she explained as we walked back to the house. ‘The poor creature’s far from well.’