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to his native Cumbria. He wanted to join the navy. He longed to see the world. What life would that be for the wife left behind? Worse, even, than being married to a fisherman; at least a fisherman comes home with the tide. Nonetheless, she presented God with the option. John Hall was wealthy enough, and old enough to accept the responsibility, but his wife might have objections; and besides, he had a tendency to turn cantankerous when drunk. Marion considered excluding this option, but concluded that God was probably already aware of it, so she placed it squarely before Him along with the other choices. Should she raise the baby alone with no father in the picture at all? That was a real option too. Or should she demand that all three candidates submit to a blood test? Then the real biological father could be identified and perhaps persuaded to marry her and help her raise the baby.
    There were altogether too many choices for Marion to make a decision herself, so she delivered the alternatives to God from her pew in St Menfre’s church on a January day in 1978.
    Little is known about Saint Menfre, who gave her name to the parish church and to the village in which it stood. She is believed to have been not Manx, but a Cornish saint – or perhaps even a Welsh saint, or possibly even Irish, depending on how far back you chose to go. She was one of the twenty-four children (by three wives) of the fifth-century Irish saint St Brychan, who married into the Welsh kingdom of Breckonshire. Unfulfilled by his life in Wales, and the county that now bears his name, Brychan travelled south into Cornwall to spread the Christian gospel. How, or why, or when his daughter came to the Isle of Man is not known. Menfre’s claim to fame, if we can call it that, came when she threw her comb at the Devil. He had come upon her while she was combing her long red hair – Irish hair, no doubt. The Devil’s intentions, it seems, were dishonourable. The throwing of the comb was a riposte that would have commended itself to Marion. From what we know of Marion Yves, we might well imagine her doing the same thing. She too was a redhead, as was her daughter Azalea.
    So Marion prayed, but neither God nor St Menfre was forthcoming with advice. Leaving the church, she came upon the vicar arriving through the churchyard gate. He eyed Marion with a hint of suspicion as if, perhaps, she had been stealing the silver. The relationship between the two, pastor and parishioner, had not recovered from the visit that he had made to her cottage a year or so earlier, after Gideon moved in. Neither could the vicar bring himself to forget the frank, even intimate , revelations that Marion had felt obliged to share on that occasion. Nonetheless, because he was a holy man in a holy profession, he summoned a warm smile and wished her a good day.
    â€˜I wish it was a good day, Father,’ Marion said.
    â€˜Is something troubling you, my child? Would you like us to pray together?’
    â€˜If you want.’
    â€˜It isn’t what I want that matters,’ said the vicar. ‘What do you want?’
    They sat together on a small bench that overlooked a knot of graves. Beyond the churchyard lay the slate rooftops of the fishermen’s cottages on Menfre Hill, and beyond these the blue sweep of the bay flecked with the foam curlers of the incoming tide; and out on the bay, lost in the haze, were the lobster boats, and beyond them, smacks fishing for mackerel, and further still, beyond sight, the trawlermen and the pilchard ships. There you might find Gideon Robertson in his yellow rubbers and his striders, hauling on ropes until the salt burned his skin, slopping fish across the decks, packing down ice with his big hands, buried behind his beard, toiling against the waves and the wind like some creature who had been born upon the sea. For such men no other life existed; their brief spell on land, sleeping and waiting for the tide, were mere