She crossed her arms across her body, fingers drumming on her skin as she walked around the back of the bull’s house. Would Sholto have seen her walking up here from the factor’s house? Perhaps he was keeping watch from somewhere hidden? But she’d been working in the pen for fifteen minutes now, doing everything slowly, buying time . . .

She turned on her heel and began walking back around the cleit, when she noticed something small and white peeking out of the stone wall. She rushed over and pulled out a pinched sheet of paper: Meet me at the storm cleit from this morning. I’ll be waiting for you.

She gave a cry. The storm cleit was up near Am Blaid, easily a twenty-five minute run away from here – but all steeply uphill! Why there? Why couldn’t he have waited for her here? But she knew that was the only private place he knew of, somewhere precise he could stipulate. The tide was turning in forty-five minutes. She’d barely get there before he’d have to leave again. Or he might already have left! He might have thought she wasn’t coming. Could she intercept him?

There was no time to hesitate. She ran. She ran past the cleits across Lag Aitimir and leapt across the burn. She passed on the upper side of the quarry and quickly scaled the crags of Creagan Breac. She covered the land as expertly and innately as a mountain goat because she was a part of this landscape and it was a part of her. The pitch was steep but it was grassy here in the back of the bowl and her bare feet were silent across the earth, her body fast growing tired from the extreme exertion. She pushed herself onwards anyway. They would have only minutes. Ten, perhaps fifteen at most?

She could see the ridge now, the plateau smoothing away behind it. He was up there. She prayed he was still up there, waiting for her. She was almost running with her hands to the ground as she got to the flat, staggering forward towards the storm cleit. There were fourteen hundred cleits but precious few were empty of bird carcasses or feathers or milk churns or peat turfs.

‘Sholto!’ she called out, hoping her voice could get to him before her legs. Hoping he could meet her halfway from here now, up high, in the fading light . . . They could meet, be together, no one would see or hear anything now. ‘Sholto!’

The wind taunted her, throwing her own voice back upon her, returning only with a whistling silence. Was she too late? Had all this been in vain? Had he gone already?