The Dunara Castle had finally left yesterday evening and gone ahead with all the livestock and their worldly possessions. Now the elders were standing in the wall-encircled graveyard, saying goodbye for the last time to their own blood – withered grandparents who’d never seen land beyond this isle, eight-day-old babies that had never seen beyond their mother’s breast. Flora’s eldest brother David was throwing a bucket of dirty water into the run-off as he cleaned a floor that would no longer be walked upon. Ian McKinnon was bent double, fastening the last of the letter sacks; the St Kildan postmark had become so highly collectable in these final weeks, he had been up most of the night, stamping over eight hundred postcards. Mhairi was haltingly leading her weeping mother and six younger siblings like a flame-haired pied piper along the Street for the final time. Her hands kept reaching for the walls, palms pressing against them, her face downturned.

Jayne Ferguson was standing alone on the jetty and staring intently back at Mullach Mor, at the village where the cottages already lay empty. She was oblivious to the navy men in their white ducks waiting to help her into the rowing boat and take her out to the SS Harebell, the ship sent to them by the British government. After years of neglect, with no MP to represent them, no way to vote, no postal service, now they were being given the gold standard, with three braided officers on board to welcome them on the first step to their new lives. Effie’s wide eyes skimmed over the parting scenes, coming to rest again upon the men standing in the shallows and now tying rocks around the dead dogs’ necks to sink the bodies.

‘Effie Gillies!’ Her father’s voice boomed again. She could see him standing on the Street. His body was bent as if worn down and reshaped by generations of howling winds but it was the arthritis in his bones that had the greatest power in pulling him earthwards. She watched him look up to the hills – Connachair; Mullach Mor; Ruival . . .

He found her at last. A bright speck against the dark rock, his eyes as keen as the eagle’s. ‘Get yourself down here!’

‘No!’ The wind, carrying his words, threw her own behind her, but he knew from the very set of her shoulders what she’d said. She wore her defiance the way Flora wore her scarlet shawl.

He shuffled forward a few paces in warning, his weight heavy upon the stick, but he had no influence here. She had been up close and personal with real threat; she knew the metallic tang of it, the way it hung in the air, silent and fetid.

Effie looked back at the beach. The drownings done, the men were wading back to shore, leaving the shadowy shapes in the water behind them like a kelp forest.