Effie moved with practised flight, nimble on her feet. The key felt heavy in her palm as she crept past the unlocked cottages of her neighbours. She could hear Old Fin’s snores as she passed by his window. The tiger-striped cat lay curled up on the sill in Mary and Donald McKinnon’s. A rack of fulmar eggs sat on Jayne and Norman Ferguson’s. At the factor’s house – the grandest on the island, being white rendered – nothing stirred at all. She had never been inside, but she wondered now which room the visitors were staying in.

Once past the white house, there were only cleits between her and the featherstore and she relaxed a little more, walking more easily, pressing the key tightly into her palm so that she could feel its teeth against her skin. The storehouse was located at the very end of the Street, right upon the beach near to the jetty, and she looked about her as she slid the key into the lock. Only two people had a key. Officially. The factor and the postmaster. Hers was kept hidden with the books under her bed. There would be no way of explaining that, either.

The door opened with a creak and she stepped inside. The space was warm and stuffy, with little ventilation. The familiar waxy smell impressed itself as she closed it behind her. It was half full already with the products that would be due in September when the factor made his return trip for the landlord’s rents: bolts of tweed in light blue, light grey and brown were piled high against one wall, sacks of feathers against another, some drums of fulmar oil.

Effie moved immediately towards the feather sacks. Their contents supplied the upholstery trade on the mainland and she knew the grey fulmar feathers fetched five shillings a stone but that the finer black ones from the puffins fetched six. She’d never slept on a feathered mattress but she didn’t much care to; she’d slept well enough these past eighteen years on her horsehair mattress and it did her fine. The feathers had only one value for her . . .

She pulled one of the frontmost sacks away and set it to the side, working her way back through the stacks, her eyes down until eventually she saw something – a single sharp-edged corner peeking out from a sack of black feathers.