As they argue in the hallway I sing quietly to my daughter. I won’t live in another part of town – visit once a year! My mother didn’t ever lay with my father other than to have us. She said it was worth it only for that. He went with women on all of the islands. Fought their husbands. Burnt down barns. My mother had no fear of him in the end. After he beat her she went to lay with the priest. The priest loved my mother (witch or not) and he was the only man my father ever feared. She came home and taught my brother and me what she learnt in his library. I can’t think of my brother even now without a hot spear of loss. He would have adored the baby so much. A niece to love. To wiggle his ears at. My mother soaked up everything she could about maths and geography, history, philosophy, religion, English, art, chemistry, physics. Her most passionate subject was women who do extraordinary things. She must have known. A granddaughter was coming. My mother read to us at night. Tales of Ching Shih, the Chinese female pirate who commanded a fleet with 80,000 outlaws, Boadicea and Joan of Arc, the Virgin Mary, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Jane Austen, Ada Lovelace, Angela Coutts, Mary Wollstonecraft, Josephine Butler, Mary Shelley, Mary Seacole, Cleopatra, Elizabeth Fry, Mary Anning, Catherine of Siena, Hypatia, Sacagawea, Nellie Bly, Catherine de’ Medici, Isabella Bird, Aphra Behn, Artemisia Gentileschi, the Pankhursts, Sarah Breedlove, Prophet Deborah, Mary Somerville, George Eliot, Murasaki Shikibu, Clara Schumann, Beulah Louise Henry, Aisha, Yeshe Tsogyal, Sophie Blanchard, Émilie du Châtelet, the women on this street, on roads at night – all of those women were beloved to my mother.

I can see her looking out of the croft.

Watching those skies – storms coming in low and high at the same time.

My father hammering coffins together.

Sheep up on the hills.

Rock grey and hard and rubble and all the earth a hard unforgiving seedless place.

He is still in that crevice.

Staring out all the way across the North Atlantic swells.

My coffin bobs on the docks.

I’ve got blood on my mother’s only good dress.

Elise will have to loan something to me.

My hands pause caressing the baby’s head.

Two nubs!

So small – only I know they are there.

I will call her Hope – she is so warm and perfect.

She lays heavy and happy on my chest, sleeping, dreamless and fed.

This will be the most blissful sleep of her life.

Those tiny fists make me hold my breath.