‘Aye, I know.’ Effie, sniffing, looked back to land too. Neither of them had really seen their home from this vantage before; the women and children were very rarely allowed in the boats and never this far out in the bay. She could see now what the fishermen meant about Village Bay being a glad sight. The stone cottages curved with the land, bedded into the jaw of rock, withstanding the worst of the elements, stubby protectors in a wild place. Could they really be abandoning them? Would no more children play on the grass, no more fires puff up the chimneys? Was this to be left to the birds and the landlord’s own remaining sheep?

‘Where’s Mhairi?’ Effie asked, realizing that their friend was missing. She had seen her last in the dinghy with her family, looking stricken.

‘Below deck. She’s not up to it.’

Effie felt her tears catch in her throat. ‘No.’ Losing Poppit was a devastating blow. Mhairi, though, faced far worse. The day she had dreaded was finally here.

Effie looked at her beautiful friend. Only Flora was to get a happy ending, a bright new beginning, but she didn’t look overjoyed. She looked stony and rigid, holding back emotions she didn’t want to show. She had always boasted she would leave at the first opportunity and find a bigger life than this, a grander one, but now that she was getting what she had wished for . . .

The captain blew the horn three times and the chain of the anchor rattled as it was winched in. Flora’s hand gripped her tighter as they began to untether themselves from this place. Their home.

Slowly the boat began to swing round, engines beginning to roar and thrusters grinding the water. Effie felt her emotions surge to a peak, tears brimming her eyes again and her throat stoppered shut as she looked back to land – taking in for the last time the sweeping but infertile slopes that had tried their best to support them, the ancient majesty of Connachair and Mullach Mor on whose cliff-faces she had played with cocky delight. Her eyes followed the line of the dyke that had been their sole distinction between civilization and wildness; she took in the empty fanks and the abandoned bull house; the whistling loneliness of the burial ground where her mother and her brother lay; the babbling burns still rushing regardless of whether anyone stood in them; the featherstore, the bright white factor’s house . . .

She stared at the stony beach as they began to pull away. She saw him – golden-haired and smiling, splashing in the shallows, his laughter rebounding through the glen and settling in her bones. He wasn’t from here, or of it, but he had become a part of her and she couldn’t see it now and not see him.