I got up and went to her basin and rinsed the locket, drying it on the hand towel, and then I clipped it once again around my neck. I saw my face in the mirror but did not want to meet my own thoughts. Behind me, Mary looked up and caught my eye and I could not, as hard as I tried, read her.

The remainder of the afternoon we spent quietly, but she was unhappy. She had not wanted me to know. Was she afraid that I would be disappointed? Did she think that I would tell someone? Why would she not trust me if she trusted Hettie?

Slowly, the wind rose around the house and the trees shook, making shadows on the faded wallpaper. Miss Gillies returned, weary and pale, and fell asleep with a whisky on the tray before her. Mrs Lenister brought broth and oat cakes to the playroom but I could not eat, and although I tried for conversation, it seemed that every word I uttered cut deeper into the silence between us.

Bed could not come too soon and I lay listening to the wind pulling at the island. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I sensed it again, something bent in my logic, something I had missed, and I felt as if I were falling – falling through water, through the unseeing cold, and missing some truth that would not show itself. I had lost the voice tinged with pipe smoke, lost the sound of Clara’s laugh. All I had left was the fragile stem of my own bones and my love for Mary. But that too left me cold with doubt.

The storm came and left in its wake a sort of unearthly stillness, as if the tide itself was holding its breath before breaking loose again upon the shore.

The following morning, the fires burned downstairs and the scents of Iskar seemed new – the breath of paraffin and wax, of peat and cooking, and behind that, always, always the smell of the sea and its clinging brine. It was absorbed in everything – in the fabric of tree and grass and rock. To live here was always to be somehow part of it.

At breakfast, Miss Gillies chatted inconsequentially, her mood lifted by an onerous task discharged, and Mary sat more quietly than ever, although we caught each other once in a sidelong glance and her eyes found my locket.

It was a strange walk that we took that morning, across a beach littered with broken branches, pieces of fence, a twisted lobster pot. The sun was hidden, leaving no shadows on the sand. Later we made our procession to church, Miss Gillies in front, Mary at her side, and I could not take my eyes from their stiff figures: aunt and niece, the last of the Gillies line. Halfway up the path, Mary turned and regarded me with a flat look.