The voyage across the Irish Sea was long and rough, but Clorinda endured her sickness without fuss and went straight from the portside to Bishop Street, where she found Kathleen, huge in her ninth month of pregnancy, packing Aisling’s few clothes and possessions into a sack.

Not bothering to enquire how her sister-in-law might be faring after her journey, nor offering to brew tea, she said, ‘oh it’s you, then. But what do we call you now. M’lady, is it?’

Clorinda ignored this. She looked around the cluttered room and saw Aisling’s bed, jammed in close to the fire. Kathleen delved into her apron pocket, handed Clorinda an envelope and said, ‘Michael has left ten shillings, to be put towards Aisling’s keep. But as I understand it, we’re doing those spinster women a favour, so we are. No child of their own, have they? And no husbands to give them one. So they kidnap somebody else’s girl! But they will be punished, by my reckoning. They will soon come to see what a bad-tempered child she is.’

Clorinda sat down on Aisling’s bed. She asked Kathleen for a drink of water. She was parched from her seasickness and made nauseous afresh by the sight and smell of the unventilated parlour. She wanted to describe to Kathleen how, at the house near Ennistymon, Aisling had shown no bad temper at all, that she had, in fact, behaved like a different child, but she kept silent. All that mattered was getting Aisling away, starting early the next morning, retracing the journey across Ireland they had made together in early summer, until at last they arrived at the ancient house and Maeve and Elizabeth McKinnon came running out to meet them.

Frost had rutted the roads and made the horses slip and stumble. Clorinda and Aisling clung together under a tartan rug in the draughty carriage, but Aisling said she wasn’t afraid of anything now. If a wheel fell off, it could be put on again; if the carriage tilted over, no one would be harmed by more than a bruise. She was going to her ‘new home’ and God would find a way to bring her safely there.

As they neared the sea, warmer air seemed to waft in and at the next pause in the journey, Aisling found a bush of snowberries growing by the wayside and asked if she could pick a few branches to give to Miss Elizabeth ‘for using in her painting’. Clorinda agreed, so they journeyed on clutching the snowberries, tied together with a thread from a sack which had once been filled with hops for the Anchor Brewery, but which now contained all that Aisling possessed in the world. As the dusk came on, the white berries lit up the dark interior of their carriage with an obstinate sprinkling of light.

But they were almost there, now. They had passed through Ennistymon. They could hear the rush of the waves. And then, in the darkness, they could see the flicker of the oil lamps burning in the kitchen window of the cottage and even before the horses had been pulled up, the front door was opened wide.