“I’ll help you,” she said. “ You’ll have to tell me what to do, but I’d enjoy it. We can start this afternoon.”

“Not this afternoon,” he said. “ Not on a Sunday.”

“So you do care what they think.”

She thought at first that he was angry, but he laughed and caught her round the waist.

“Do you want breakfast?” she asked.

“No. I had some at Buness.”

They went into the bedroom to change for church. He put on his wedding suit. She was looking for a respectable dress when she stepped on something and bent down to pick it up. It was the pin caught in the square of paper which had been attached to her wedding dress. She looked again at the words. “He should have been mine.” Now they had some meaning. She was quite convinced that the message had been written by Elspeth.

Jim’s back was turned to her. He was facing the mirror, knotting his tie. She quickly screwed the paper into a ball, took it into the kitchen, and threw it on to the fire.

As they walked to the kirk the sun came out and lit up the water in the bay. The kirk was just beyond the hall, built of the same stone, with a steeply sloping roof and a bell above it in a small open turret. The bell was ringing a single, monotonous note. They walked past the hall and nearby, just in a field and surrounded by a drystone wall, was a graveyard. Sarah remembered the night of the dance, sitting by a gravestone, thinking that everyone else was in the hall and hearing the running footsteps.

Jim’s uncle James was the preacher. Sarah had expected primitive religion, Old Testament Christianity, a rigid formality, but there was nothing of that. James spoke sadly and gently about Mary, about the difficulty of maintaining faith in the face of such tragedy. He gave no easy answers. Then the school choir sang a modern children’s hymn accompanied by guitars and recorders. She found it disconcerting. Had she wanted the island to remain a museum, as Jim had said, old-fashioned and predictable, to satisfy her sense of the dramatic? It might perhaps have been easier.

Melissa sat at the back of the church. She had arrived late so that she need talk to no one, but she would have to see Agnes before she and James returned to Kell. Agnes had lost a child now. They had something in common again. As she listened to the children singing she began to weep, and she wondered if the sound of the sweet, high voices was having the same effect on Agnes.

When the service was over, the worshippers stayed in their seats until James had walked down the kirk to the door so that he could greet them as they left.