Not long after, Old Paul died and was buried in the garden of the island’s tiny chapel, where his bones lie to this day. Mam and I, and Biffa, stayed on in the farmstead.

A little while after that, a church official came to tell us we must move out, as a new priest was coming to live there. That is when we decided to leave the life-pearl box in its place.

“It is safe here,” declared Mam as we walked down the steep and rocky cliff path to the cave. “No one will find it.”

It had been about ten years since we had performed the little ceremony on that windy evening with the puffins skittering overhead. Nothing had changed.

“Should we check?” I asked Mam. “You know: that it is still there?”

She smiled her wise smile. “Why would it not be?”

“Because…” But I dried up. It was impossible for it not to be there.

“So I think we should just leave it, Alve. We both know it is there. We are the only ones who do. It can come to no harm. I feel easier in my heart when it is not in our home. This island is not going anywhere; that stone”—she was pointing at the large boulder—“is going nowhere, either.

“And if one of us should be called to the Lord”—that is what Mam used to say: instead of dying, you would be “called to the Lord”—“then the other will come straight here, administer the contents of the life-pearl, and begin the process of growing older. If that is what he or she wants,” she added.

It was a thought that filled me with awe. That this immense power—the power both to create and to end immortality—lay in a small clay box buried in a dry sandstone cave on a windy island in Northumbria.

And lies there still. Undisturbed for centuries.