The old woman, Jane Warner, didn’t say anything. She and Louisa craned their necks away off their shoulders and swiveled their heads around, trying to see in back of them to watch as the plane landed. But I had to keep my eyes on the road.

We passed the aerodrome entrance and its guards’ shed. The lane gives a sharp turn there, heading downhill. Below us now, Windyedge village lowered itself cottage by cottage into its dark and narrow harbor. Down there was a post office playing at being a shop, a handful of cold-looking stone dwelling places whose thatched roofs were tied down with rope so they couldn’t blow away, and a Presbyterian chapel behind a shut door, all with small, deep-set windows to keep their inhabitants in a state of eternal darkness. Beyond the harbor lurked a little beach, but you couldn’t get to it through bales of barbed wire and concrete blocks that were supposed to keep German tanks and troops from unloading there. It felt like the most unwelcoming place on God’s earth in 1940.

You had to go into the village a ways and back up another narrow lane to get to Nancy Campbell’s pub. The pub was perched above a row of four stone arches built right into the hillside, like underground lairs. Heavy oak-and-iron doors fit into the archways, and these were soundly locked and bolted to keep folk out.

“Those are limekilns,” I told Louisa. “Where they used to make lime, for concrete and plaster, back in the day. That’s why the pub is the Limehouse. Then they got used as a prison, for deserters in the Great War, and—”

I shut up my blethering. She didn’t need to know that my two uncles had been locked up in those limekilns for a week after they got caught “trespassing” on the airfield ten years ago, in peacetime—snaring rabbits. That’s my family connection to Windyedge. It doesn’t fash me—it made my mam split her sides laughing when I told her I was getting paid to work there now. But I wouldn’t want anyone to know.

The Tilly whinged and complained as it slowly climbed the steep lane past the old limekilns. Waiting for us at the top of the hill was the hodgepodge of granite walls and blue slate roofs of the Limehouse, like an old laird’s castle collapsed into the moor. A few tall Scotch pines tossed their limbs restlessly about above it in the wet wind.

The pub sign was a painting of the four limekiln arches. Louisa gave a shudder as we pulled up in front. “I expect you’ll find Scotland a great deal colder than where you come from,” I said. “But you’ll be warm enough inside. There are gas fires in the bedrooms.”

“I’ll be fine,” Louisa answered through tight lips. “I’ve only come from London just now.”