She walked briskly over the moor – not for her the road – resenting the boots that were already rubbing her heels. It had been a morning of false starts, following a night of broken sleep and restless dreams. The floor beneath her bedstead was uneven, the bed listing with her every move, and just when her exhausted body had accepted and succumbed to the intermittent rocking, the early-rising sun had poked at her with bright fingers, a perfect beam of light falling across her cheeks through the same small window which had offered no such hospitality on their arrival yesterday. Breakfast had been the last of the oatcakes and weak tea brewed with spring water from the burn.

Her father had got a fire going with the wood, though he kept muttering it was a travesty to be burning the stuff; timber’s scarcity on Hirta – only washing ashore as driftwood or shipwrecks – meant it had a rarity value that back home would have seen it put to far better use, such as a new table leg or a window lintel.

The day wasn’t cold, nor set to be – the hen harriers soaring on the thermals told her there would be another day of warm winds – but the flames dispatched the brackish damp from the rooms and when she had left, her father was sitting in his chair by the door and whittling a stick with his pocket knife. The loom, no longer needed and with no yarn to weave, sat idle in the front corner beside the spinning wheel, taking up space needlessly. What would he do with himself today, while she worked?

From the map Mr Croucher had given them and her recollection of the road they had taken when being driven from the village, she had been able to work out her route to work this morning. It wasn’t a foolproof plan. It hadn’t been able to forewarn her of the bog just past the bridge and she’d had to sink a leg almost to her knee to find it out herself. It also hadn’t forewarned her there was a colony of ground-nesting bonxies until they dive-bombed her out of their territory; one had managed to get a claw to her hair and no matter how much she pressed it smooth, it still stuck up.