Effie carried on righting the few pieces of furniture they owned as she listened to the distinctive tap-tapping of him tamping the tobacco. She brought over the candle so that he could bring the flame to the bowl and he took three sucky sips.

He exhaled slowly and the smell of St Kilda was suddenly around them. She closed her eyes, transported: she could hear the birds again, see the bay in all its moods, feel the grass beneath her feet, overhear the chatter of the ‘evening news’ on the Street as everyone walked after dinner. She could feel, still, the embrace of her neighbours living together in that small glen, the joy of childhood games and the kiss of a bright-eyed man as she had clung to a rope. But there was heartbreak too – a collie airborne over a cliff, a storm shelter that had been anything but a refuge, half a rope swinging from a cliff . . . All the memories were marbled into a swirl inside her and she could no sooner remember one than conjure the others too. They all lived on in her still, the moments gone now, but not forgotten.

She opened her eyes again and looked around at the gloomy place. Perhaps it was to her advantage the damp was so bad, the light so poor. They couldn’t settle here and now her father would see it too.

The sooner they left, the better.

The heather moor was in shade but a blade of pink light still glanced off the treetops as she flung back the garden gate and began walking, arms swinging, up the road to their neighbours at number 4, an hour later. She had unpacked the trunks of their linens, made up the beds and aired their clothes from the salty sea crossing; the pots and pans now hung from hooks inside the walls of the chimney. The furniture was all set on its right sides and with a clear path so that her father wouldn’t trip. The sheet still hung halfway between their beds.

Her eyes darted like dragonflies as she strode out, trying to get the measure of her new landscape. Incredibly, it was more barren in many ways than the place she had left – fewer seabirds, no cliffs – but she couldn’t deny the trees were a marvel, their canopies like many-fingered hands from a land of green giants, hiding and housing whole other kingdoms; creatures she had only seen in books – red squirrels, pine martens – leapt and scampered through the woody branches, disappearing into secretive homes before she could approach. Hirta held no such mysteries; she was what she appeared – a land of granite rock and ancient immovability. She could weather, withstand, endure; she would not falter but neither would she protect. It had been for the villagers to find their own shade behind painstakingly stacked rock walls, to learn to climb the vertiginous cliffs where their sustenance awaited if only they were brave enough to dare.