‘Sir,’ Effie nodded, her father dumbly doing the same.

The two of them walked to the doorway and watched as the earl passed through the garden gate and stepped into his gleaming car, the door held open for him by a man in uniform with silver buttons. Effie was rapt – the car and the driver were her first glimpses into his real life, the one that had been hidden from her on St Kilda. What else would be different, she wondered, when they got there? Fewer seabirds, disappointing hills; that was all she knew.

The car pulled away with a purr and Effie waved haltingly.

‘So? Are you going to t’ tell me what that was all about?’ her father demanded, pulling his pipe from his jacket pocket and dangling it from his lower lip.

‘He offered me a job,’ she said quietly. ‘Organizing his bird egg collection.’

Her father looked unimpressed and she knew the foibles of the rich must seem ridiculous to him. ‘What nonsense,’ he muttered.

‘A museum in London wants to put on an exhibition of them. It sounds important. He’s prepared to pay me a man’s wage but we’d have to move to a cottage on his estate in Dumfries; it would mean leaving here. I said I’d have to ask you first. It’s your decision, Father.’ Her heart thudded as she gave away control of the situation and she didn’t know what frightened her most – if he’d say yes, or if he’d say no.

He was quiet for several moments as he lit his pipe. ‘A man’s wage, you say?’

‘Aye.’

‘And we’d have our own cottage?’

‘That’s what he said. But in Ayrshire, a hundred miles from here.’

Her father’s eyes rolled over the damp stone walls, the rough floor, the barren landscape outside the window. ‘. . . Tell him yes, then.’

She felt her heart – which must have been holding its beats – gather into a gallop. ‘You’re sure?’

‘If it comes down to being hungry here or well-fed there, then I’m sure. We need the money now.’

She swallowed. ‘But what about Old Fin and the others?’

His lips turned down. ‘What about them? If they’re two hundred yards away and I can only walk twenty, then they may as well be two hundred miles away.’ His voice was flat, his eyes hooded with despair. ‘The old days are gone, lass, and there’s no point in wishing otherwise. We asked for this and now we must live w’ it. Lochaline or Dumfries, if it’s no’ Hirta, then it makes no difference t’ me.’

Chapter Eighteen