me. I wanted to be buried. If I must depart this life, I thought, let me live on in the soil: let me feed the earthworms, nourish the roots of the trees, like my mother and her mother before her.

Sometimes, Violet wondered whether Father wasn’t trying to protect her from the village. Whether it was, in fact, the other way around.

There’s no way her hearing is that good. She’s imagining things, like she used to as a child. ‘Come down from those clouds,’ her parents used to say, catching her in one of her reveries.

It was her mother and grandmother that she longed for. She hadn’t known either of them, not really, and yet she felt their loss as keenly as a missing limb. For

Sight is a funny thing. Sometimes it shows us what is before our eyes. But sometimes it shows us what has already happened, or will yet come to pass.

Recently, Violet had had the disturbing realisation that she was old.

She never managed to match her speech to the cadence of theirs, never quite correctly timed a joke or a laugh.

Altha. A strange name. Soft and yet powerful. Like an incantation.

Father planned to throw a big party for her ‘coming out’. Then – he hoped – she would catch the eye of some eligible young man, a lord-to-be, perhaps, and swap this prison for another one.