‘Where’s Mathieson?’ he called down to someone on the pier, one of the men in cloth caps sorting the cargo now that all the Lochaline passengers had disembarked. ‘MacLeod’s factor?’

‘Not here,’ was the reply.

Hamish cast an enquiring glance to the other men working alongside him, but they muttered back the same. ‘Not here.’

‘He’s got my money!’

‘Not here.’

‘The smack left after the Dunara Castle yesterday!’ Flora called up to him.

Yesterday? Hamish scowled, his quizzical look carrying over the crowd and finding her father, who merely shrugged.

‘Oban, then!’ someone shouted.

‘Aye.’ Hamish gave a reluctant nod, pulling back from his position over the rails, but his scowl made plain he was displeased.

‘What was he doing entrusting money to that man anyway?’ her father muttered, shuffling into the car.

Effie sat beside him without comment, her hands flat on the smooth seats that were the colour of plums, her heart beating fast.

Chapter Fifteen

The journey was mercifully short. Just the sound of the car starting up had almost done for her father’s heart, and neither one of them enjoyed the rolling sensation along the bumpy roads. For two people who had never moved off their feet in their lives – with not even a horse on the island – it was an altogether disconcerting experience. On all but Sundays, they walked the earth barefoot, connected to the land in a way that already felt alien here.

Effie restlessly wiggled her toes in her boots again, forced into them by Lorna, who had gone around the deck and done a ‘check’ as the mainland drew into sight. It only added to her feelings of restriction and unease here now. It was difficult enough to change lives, much less in heavy shoes. Then again, her entire body felt like it belonged to someone else. Her hands – now idle and cold – were used to the familiar comfort of Poppit’s fur coat, threading silky ears through her fingers, tapping out a single pat on her thigh that brought her companion straight to her side. Her ears were used to straining to distinguish the thick lattice of bird cries that always criss-crossed the sky in a shrieking cacophony around them; but here, only singular notes rose into the dusk, solitary songbirds twittering out of sight, hidden in that feature most curious to St Kildans – the trees.

Mr Croucher stopped outside a low stone wall and cut the engine. ‘Home sweet home,’ he said, seemingly without irony.

Both Effie and her father peered past the glass windows at a low cottage. But for the fact that it was white and the roof wasn’t tethered down with iron straps, it wasn’t so very different from their old home: a single-storey building, with a window either side of a centrally placed door.