‘He wasn’t. But that didn’t stop him from taking our parlourmaid into his bed.’

‘Good Lord!’

‘Brigid’s come up in the world since then. She cooked the fish you’re eating.’

‘You mean you kept her on?’

‘She would hardly have cooked the fish if we hadn’t.’

‘So that child …’ the Bishop began, and did not continue.

‘Kings of England have come into the world so,’ Mrs Rolleston said. ‘Kings of Ireland too, no doubt.’

The visitors, intrigued by what they’d heard, consumed their fish in silence. Then John James mentioned the bridge, offering a fresh topic of conversation. Long anticipated, he reported, the work had begun in the spring.

‘A bridge?’ repeated the Bishop. ‘I did not know this.’ He frowned severely. First there was the elderly bridegroom, then a child illegitimately born to servants, now the information that the island was to change its nature. The Bishop glanced at his wife and saw that she, too, continued to be nonplussed. A necklace of garnets, inherited a year ago, decorated the folds of her neck and was the only sign of life about her, for her features had gone blank and her knife and fork lay still on the plate in front of her. He had witnessed this before when she suffered bewilderment.

‘Girders,’ John James said, ‘are already set in cement.’

The Camiers had observed the understructure from the ferry and had remarked to one another that a bridge appeared to be in the process of construction. Villiers Hadnett had noticed nothing. Nor had Lady Rossboyne.

‘This is truly singular,’ the Bishop declared, raising his voice so that it would carry to his wife and rouse her. She gave a little jerk and dutifully turned to Lionel to talk about her children. ‘Our older son’s in India,’ she said. ‘Managing a tea plantation.’

If people would like it, John James suggested, tomorrow they might walk across the island to see what progress the bridge was making. He observed that a feature of life nowadays in Ireland was that little was brought to completion. He mentioned the Limerick tramway and the loss of the middle section of Daniel O’Connell’s statue. He drew attention to the plans there’d once been for a park in memory of a temperance priest.

‘But we might see for ourselves,’ he suggested, if that would be agreeable.’