The door closed with a precise click and Effie sank onto the bed as if her knees had buckled. How much had her world changed over the course of this past week? She had left not one home but two; she had sat in a car, caught a bus, jumped on a train. She had climbed stairs, looked in a mirror, seen her face fully for the first time in her life. After eighteen years of living to the same rhythm as her neighbours and family, suddenly it felt like life and all its varied experiences were on fast-forward as she tried them for size, one after the other.

She pulled off her wretched boots and examined her latest batch of blisters before nestling her feet in the coloured rug. It would be the last thing she felt as she climbed into bed at night, and the first thing as she got up in the morning. How could she ever have foreseen – this time a little over a week ago, as she had chased after her beautiful dog on a clifftop – that she would come to be sitting here, in a pretty room in a great house? Outside there could be a howling gale, and she would know nothing of it. The roof didn’t leak. Lights came on without oil lamps. Heat was funnelled through hot pipes. A basin meant she could wash indoors . . .

Already she could feel her sinews beginning to relax and her body starting to sink into this ‘softer’ life they had heard of on the mainland, where life wasn’t just about survival but beauty and culture, too: music, fashions, art. Things that looked good, felt good . . . A sensuous life, not a hard-bitten one.

She lay back tentatively on the bed. It creaked. A spiderweb clustered in the far corner but there was no sign of its owner and she stared up at the frame that went around the edges of the ceiling. She could hear distant voices and the sound of glass bottles rattling somewhere down the corridor, footsteps crunching over gravel, a household in motion.

His household. His home. Could she really be in it? She couldn’t sense him here.

Outside, the sky darkened, grey clouds scudding. Was a storm coming? It was harder to read here, without the winds and the birds and the sheep . . .