‘Damn you, girl! This is no time for your devilment! Get down!’

Time was speeding up, it seemed. Behind him, the cemetery had emptied of life. Mad Annie, Old Fin and Ma Peg were shuffling down to the jetty with bowed heads; Mhairi was on the rowing boat now with her mother and young siblings, and Jayne. The three youngest MacQueen children and Effie’s own cousins were already clustered around the Harebell’s bow-rails with her Aunt Mary, who was calling out with mournful laments. Within the next few minutes the last men would expect to row out with them to the ship and St Kilda, after two thousand years of human settlement, would finally fall into silence.

Only, people were beginning to notice the ruckus on shore. The smart navy men were staring from the jetty at the sight of her father waving his stick. Figures on the boat – red hair, black hair – and faces on the beach were turning, searching, finding her bright, spry form on the rocks, the brown dog in her arms. Her name carried like the birds’ cries, layered and criss-crossing one another. She heard the exasperation that always covered it like a coat.

‘Effie!’

She looked down. Lorna was running towards her over the grass, her dark skirt like a sail. She was a few hundred feet below the ledge where Effie was perched, but the wind carried her voice like it was a petal to be caught.

‘What are you doing?’ Lorna called up, panting.

‘I’m not going!’

Lorna looked at her with astonishment. There had been an excitement earlier when Mr Bonner, the reporter from The Times newspaper in London, had been found hiding in one of the cleits. He had had an idea to stay behind after the evacuation; no one could understand why. It had been one thing to winkle out his foolish notions. But hers? After the night they had all lived through?

‘You know it’s impossible. We must depart.’ Lorna’s tone was kind but firm and Effie knew what she really meant: she might not want to leave, but she certainly couldn’t stay.

The woman who had travelled to live here, who had embraced island life with a vigour even the natives didn’t possess, was now urging her to quit and leave without looking back. And Effie would have. After a fretful, heart-quaking night, she’d have been first on the boat and away from here if she could have. But the drownings had sent her running instead, the instinct to protect stronger even than self-preservation.

‘I won’t let them kill Poppit!’ She looked across and saw the white-uniformed navy men were standing now beside her father, listening as he waved his stick angrily in her direction.