The story of the last two years filled the room, as light as air, as heavy as smoke, but at last sleep overtook us, one by one.

I was the last to bed. I picked my way across the floor of the sleepout, stepping over Stivvy and Clementina, both of them snoring. The bairns were curled into each other like sleeping kittens. I crouched down beside them. Look at them there. The full curve of their pink cheeks, so much like Clementina’s. I reached out to press a fingertip kiss on each, but drew my hand back quickly. That rough hand with its pits and ridges, its deformed shape. It was so ugly, they so pure.

A glance at the carriage clock that Gracie had insisted we bring with us—a ticking of time that once sat above the fire of the Tullochs’ but-and-ben in Sandwick. Nearly three o’clock. In a couple of hours I would need to rise, to be at the factory by six.

3

Imagine it, lambsie:

A noisy place, and airless, hot in summer, freezing in winter. A tin-shed of a factory that sprawls across a whole block. But if you close your eyes and breathe it in, you might truly think yourself in heaven.

Hundreds of Shortbread Cream halves cooling on trays, slabs of Currant Lunch baking. The sweetness of butter and currants, vanilla and cloves, cinnamon and lemon peel hanging in the air.

Smell is more than a sense, lambsie. Did you know that? It has substance that settles, you cannot help but taste it as you breathe. Ask any gutting quine with the bitterness of blood and slime on her lips and her tongue. Girls at the Mills & Ware biscuit factory—always girls, no mind the age—they grumbled a lot about the heat from the ovens, the flour that made them cough, the concrete floors and windowless walls. But oh, that smell! No matter how hard the day, you couldn’t help but smile when the rotation changed and some new deliciousness floated through. Chocolate Creams. Gingernuts. Macaroons. Even the plains—the Thin Captains and Milk Arrowroots, the Cabins used as ship’s biscuits—they filled the air with something like … what’s the word? Oh, just goodness, aye. As comforting as a pot of tea.

I used to listen to the grumbling, nod to be companionable, murmur to get along, but the memory of fifteen hours without a break at the farlins, knee-deep in muck, was part of me. I’d not speak of it—who would have believed me, eh?—but it was in my mind while the girls prattled on about conditions, because to me this job was a gift dusted in sugar like the Nice biscuits we made.