She ran and caught them up, listening in as they chatted about the visitors and the news from ‘abroad’, meaning Skye.

‘. . . friends of the landlord,’ David MacQueen, Flora’s eldest brother, was saying. ‘So we’re to make it good.’

‘Shame the wind’s up or we could have gone further round,’ her cousin Euan said.

‘There’ll be no tips if they’re sick as dogs,’ Ian McKinnon replied.

‘But the cliffs are lower here.’

‘This will do them fine. It will all be high to the likes of them.’

She fell into step with Mhairi’s older brothers, Angus and Finlay.

‘What are you doing here?’ Angus asked with his usual sneer.

‘Same as you,’ she shrugged, slightly breathless as their longer legs covered more ground than hers.

‘We’re not fowling. This is just for display.’

‘Aye, so there’ll be tips.’

‘Then knit them some socks!’

‘You know I’d get a fraction of what I can get up here and the agreement is whenever you’re all on the rocks, I’m allowed to be too.’

‘You’re a pain in my side, Effie Gillies,’ Finlay groaned.

‘And you’re a pain in mine,’ she shot back.

They rolled their eyes but she didn’t care. Her brother’s friends, her friend’s brothers, they had been teasing her all her life and she knew to give as good as she got. They had all grown up playing hide and seek in the cleits as children, learnt to read together in the schoolroom beside the kirk, and kicked each other during the minister’s sermons.

But she couldn’t ignore that things were changing. Or had already changed. A tension existed now, a low-level hum, that hadn’t been there before. Her brother’s death had profoundly affected them all and she was no longer John’s little sister to them – or anyone but herself; sometimes she caught them looking at her in a new way that made her nervous. Finlay’s eyes seemed to follow her wherever she went and Angus had tried to kiss her as she cut the peats one evening; he hadn’t yet forgiven her for laughing.

For visitors wanting to take in the view – and they always did – this would be a forty-minute to hour-long walk, but she and the men did it in under thirty and were already spread across the top and looping out the coils of rope by the time the dinghy appeared around the cliffs. Birds whirled and screeched around them, feathers lilting on the updrafts. From this height, the boat looked no bigger than a bird either. Effie glanced down a few times, scanning the rock face for the line she wanted to take, then casting about for a rock with which to drive in her peg.