For a while, Ruby played with the baby, who would bring things to her, hand them over, and name each one as she did so. Leonie knew the name of everything, even correctly identifying a tarantula in a nature book.

“She knows so many words,” said Ruby.

“Yes.”

“And she sings. I’ve never seen that before. Not that I see a lot of children this age. Usually they sing, but they don’t really sing, you know? They just sort of yell.”

Constance turned her head and smiled at Leonie. “She’s done it since she was tiny. I could sing a note, she could sing it back. She was just a baby in the cradle.”

“Tuss!” said Leonie.

“Tuss?”

“She means tortoise.”

“Tortoise! Of course.” Leonie went over to the toy box, and Ruby turned to Constance. “So,” said Ruby, “you’re from Orkney?”

“Not Orkney. The island is West of there, in the Hebrides. He bought me that picture because it reminded me so much of the sea near where I was born. I look at it, and I can see my family.”

“You have family out there still?”

She nodded. “I have everything there. When I came here, I lost it all.” As she said this, they both looked over at Leonie, and Ruby was puzzled. How could she say she’d lost everything if she’d gained this astonishing child? The relationship with Gregor might not have worked out, but Leonie was something, wasn’t she?

“Your family must visit, though? And you visit them?”

“No. They can’t; they won’t. Not after I left the way I did.”

Ruby felt suddenly very sorry for Constance, for the predicament she found herself in. How on earth could she go back if the agoraphobia was keeping her prisoner? Quite apart from the traveling required to get there, Ruby wondered how a person afraid of the outside would fare, living on an exposed island in the middle of nowhere. No wonder she was homesick. “Tell me about them?”

Constance stared at Ruby, holding her gaze for the first time, for so long that Ruby felt sweat prickling on her forehead. It was the intensity of it that unsettled her. The woman radiated an unstable energy, nervous and full of something else, suppressed rage perhaps. She spoke, eventually, through a clenched jaw. “I’m not sure you’d believe me either.”

Ruby said, “Try me,” and for a while Constance just continued to stare, distrust etched on her face.

Then she tipped her head, deciding. “We’re a community. Like a clan. We have our own island.”

Ruby thought it sounded wonderful. She imagined the women in long, rough-hewn dresses, waiting on the shore for the fishermen to return. “Sort of like a hippie commune?”

“What? No …”

“I don’t mean that offensively …”

“We are Roane,” said Constance.

Ruby didn’t understand. “Is that your surname?”