‘Tea then?’

‘Fine, that.’

Grusche got up too and moved the kettle on the range. ‘Look at that fog coming in from the sea. What a dreadful summer it’s been for fog! Lowrie and Caroline are supposed to be flying south tomorrow, but I’m not sure the planes will go.’

‘Where are they now?’ Sandy was wishing that Grusche would leave the room. He would feel more comfortable talking just to George.

‘Out with their friends from Sletts. It’s their last night. They’ve walked along the path to the boat club. There’s some sort of do going on there.’ She sounded disapproving. Perhaps she thought it was disrespectful for the younger folk to be out when two people had died. ‘I’ll leave you to make the tea, George. There’s some shortbread left in the tin. I have my spinning wheel set up in the other room and I’d like to get that fleece spun.’ She walked away.

They both drank tea and sat across the table from each other.

‘I’d been wondering about Elizabeth Geldard,’ Sandy said.

George looked up at him, but said nothing.

‘In those days it wouldn’t have been so likely for a couple to have a baby when they were in their forties.’

‘Not unheard of,’ George said.

‘I wondered if maybe they’d adopted her.’ The idea had been rattling around in his head since he’d been talking to Louisa.

George said nothing.

‘It was a long time ago.’ Sandy drank tea and reached into the blue biscuit tin for some shortbread. ‘We look at things differently now. No shame to having a child born out of wedlock.’

‘It depends who the father was.’

There was a moment of silence. ‘But the mother was Sarah? Your great-aunt and nursemaid at the big house?’

Another silence. ‘That’s the story in the family.’

Sandy thought that would make perfect sense. Sarah would have been hardly more than a child when she got pregnant. Fifteen at the most. Probably ignorant about sex, and taken advantage of. And the couple in the big house were desperate for a child, so it would seem the perfect solution to pass the baby off as their own. The Geldards would spend a lot of their time in the south anyway, so nobody would be surprised if they arrived in Unst with a new baby. No doubt Sarah would have been spirited away to relatives in a different part of Shetland, once the pregnancy started showing. And when she returned the Geldards employed her to take care of her own child. Who better to look after the little girl? And it would explain why she was so upset when Lizzie died, why she felt she had to run away from the islands. And why she’d named her second daughter Elizabeth.