Effie didn’t need her to spell it out. Everyone knew the story of poor Kitty McQueen, Flora’s cousin, a fallen girl ruined by a love affair with a naval officer stationed during the war. When the fighting ended, he had left for home and she had thrown herself from the rocks, her belly already swelling.

She felt desolation sweep over her. ‘Then what do I do?’

‘Nothing. Let Mathieson do the guiding till the storm hastens them off. All you have to do is just stay out of sight and keep away from him till then. Can you do that, Eff?’

Effie blinked back at her oldest friend. Could she?

Chapter Eight

The glen was still in shadow when she crept from the house. Her father had been snoring in his bed as she had tiptoed past, Poppit lifting her head from the old blanket that served as her bed and trotting out with her, no hesitation. The yacht bobbed silently in the bay but the water had lost its glassy tension, small waves rippling the moon’s reflections out of shape and landing with a sigh upon the shore.

Behind tattered night clouds, the sky was a magnificent red, like a fire beneath ashes, just waiting to burn through. Shepherd’s warning. The sun was only just beginning its climb, like her, but the temperatures had scarce dropped through the night and she had been sticky and restless beneath her sheet, sleep a mere kiss that fluttered upon her sporadically.

Girl and dog moved swiftly past the cleits and through the gap in the head dyke, heading straight for the steep slope of Mullach Mor. She swung her arms, the climbing bag with peg and her ropes over one shoulder. She would eat on the other side with the girls and stay there till the ship slipped from the bay, till it was safe again to come home. She had brought a salted fulmar carcass in from the cleit for her father and left it in a pan of water, along with a note explaining she was helping with the summer herd for a day or two. He’d not starve.

Her breath came hard as her legs strode, her gaze downwards as she concentrated on the next step, each one taking her away from a man she scarcely knew, who came from a place she had never known, but who had managed in a few short days to shift her world – and this tiny rocky isle – off its axis. Flora’s words the evening before had left her shaken but she trusted her friend. Flora couldn’t wring a fulmar’s neck or tie a stopper knot but she knew men and how they were with women – what they would do for beauty, for love, for fun. Effie wasn’t to see Lord Sholto Crichton-Stuart again.