She had already swept the cottage, raked out the ashes from the fire, had the sheets blowing on the line and put the cast-iron kettle on to simmer when she heard the car pulling up at the bottom of the rise. There was no way the car could get all the way to the door. She ran down to greet Mary Kate and help her carry her case.

Michael was lifting a cardboard box out of the boot by the time she reached them and in his hand swung a small metal churn of milk.

‘I helped milk this,’ said Mary Kate as she took the pail from Michael and handed it to Bee. ‘I thought I might have forgotten how, but not a bit of it. She even knew it was me, I swear.’

Bee grinned. ‘Get you – straight back into the country ways. And how do ye know that? Did she say, “Good morning, Mary Kate” when you walked in?’

‘No.’ Mary Kate smiled. ‘She said, “Thank God ’tis you with your silky-soft hands and not him – the milk will be sweeter for it.”’

Bee laughed, relieved to see a spark of Sarah coming through in Mary Kate. ‘Well, that’s true enough,’ she said as she put out her arms to take the box from Michael. ‘I’m just about to bring those sheets in from airing—’

Mary Kate wasn’t listening to Bee. She had taken a few steps forward and, cupping her hand over her brow, was surveying the cottage. It stood side on to the ocean to protect the door and the window from the worst of the gales, and there was something about the limewashed walls, the heather thatch, the stone buttress one end that she had no idea who had erected since she was last here. She had rarely been to the cottage. Angela had died long before she was born, but it was as if she knew every nook and cranny. This view of the cottage from the side, silhouetted against the cloud-heavy sky with the gulls circling high above… It suddenly struck her that this view had been in her dreams every night she’d been away from home.

‘Come on, let’s go inside,’ said Bee, who almost jolted as the shifting sands of time moved beneath her feet. She took Mary Kate’s hand and for a shard of a second was thrown into the past. She was taking the hand of Sarah, Mary Kate’s mother, and they were running up the escarpment together. Only this time there would be no Angela waiting inside to greet them.

*

McGuffey had got out only just in time. He stood behind a rock from where he could see the side of the cottage and ducked down before hobbling back towards the cave.

Despite his pain, he smiled to himself. The young woman looked too much like Sarah not to be his granddaughter, Mary Kate. A plan formed in his mind in moments. She was his means to the money he desperately needed. If she was going to stay at the cottage, it would be easy to kidnap her, make the Malones pay to get her back, and then get himself away as far and as fast as possible. Jay Maughan would help and McGuffey would split the ransom with him.