Mhairi was already kindling the evening fire as Flora marched back down the slopes of Glen Bay. The valley was a wide, grassy bowl, dotted with cleits and sheep fanks and bordered on the eastern shoulder by the hulking mountain Mullach Mor. On the western flank, the headland of Cambir Point sat lower, stretching out into the sea like a cat’s paw and looking onto the nearby isle of Soay. The glen was cleaved by a stream that fed into a narrow, rocky cove, splitting into two small waterfalls that splashed upon the emergent rocks there. Most of the year, except for a few stray days when the wind flipped to the south-east, the waves would pound the cove, interrupted in their march from the Arctic by the sudden obstruction of the archipelago. But during the summer months, the sea at large was sufficiently tame for Mhairi and Flora to climb down and wash in the waterfalls every evening, the waves merely pooling around their ankles on the granite slabs.
Their home for the summer was the souterrain known by the tourists as the Amazon’s House, playing into the ancient legend of a fearsome huntress. There were several underground dwellings on the isles, usually just long pits dug a couple of feet below the ground and lined with stone slabs – they were ideal for sheltering in during harsh weather if an islander should happen to find themselves away from the village and an empty cleit. The men had stayed in one such on Boreray just these past few days for their sheep-plucking trip, for there were no trees to provide protection from the elements. The Amazon’s House, however, was a far greater feat of Bronze Age engineering. It had a narrow entrance leading into an oval space that fed down into a larger circular chamber, with sleeping pods off the sides. It was just deep enough for them to stand, but it was dark and damp in there, no fires possible on account of the lack of chimney and restricted ventilation. For growing a baby, however, it was perfect. Mhairi said she had never slept so well, and Flora had to agree that the pervasive darkness of the souterrain made waking with the dawn strangely difficult.
Their days were passing with a pleasing rhythm of quiet industry as they milked the sheep, checked the lambs were putting on weight and monitored the late-tupped ewes. Sometimes the two of them talked or sang, but other times they moved around in companionable silence, each lost in their own thoughts of their coming futures and divergent fortunes. It was hard for Flora not to feel guilty at all the good coming her way and the tragedy facing her friend – waiting for it all to happen was possibly the worst part of all. With every sunrise and sunset, with every starlit sky that twinkled above them, the clock kept ticking, bringing them both closer to their fates.
Flora could feel her happiness growing inside her – she thought of James constantly, longing to tell him all her news – and she had to bite her tongue to keep from wondering aloud about their reunion, when she knew Mhairi was facing a desperate separation.
‘Oh, thank God!’ Mhairi cried, spying her and gathering her skirts as she walked awkwardly to breach the gap between them. Flora saw Mhairi’s face fall as she approached, as if a sixth sense confirmed her worst fears. ‘. . . Donald?’
‘Aye,’ Flora nodded. ‘But he’s going to be fine. Lorna’s looking after him. She’s staying with Mary for the next few nights, just to see him through the worst.’
‘Wh-what happened?’
‘He slipped and knocked his head on some rocks – but Lorna is certain he’s going to be well in a few days.’
Certain? Hopeful had been the nurse’s word, but Flora couldn’t bear to see the terror in her friend’s eyes.
‘I should go over there!’ Mhairi gasped, her eyes wide as she looked over to the ridge, as if preparing to run.
‘That wouldn’t be wise,’ Flora said, letting her gaze fall to Mhairi’s swollen belly; she had another seven weeks before the baby was due but was beginning to show properly now and Lorna had warned her to expect a rapid growth spurt in the final weeks of the pregnancy.
‘But he needs me!’
‘Yes, but that’s not possible right now.’ Flora caught her friend’s hand and squeezed it. ‘You have to trust Lorna; you saw how she was after Molly died. She’ll not let anything happen to him if she can help it.’
It had been almost six months now since the ‘sheep drama’, and their friend’s death was still an open wound. It had hit Lorna particularly hard, and in the weeks that followed she had channelled her grief into anger, her shock into action. She had spent hours talking with the minister and the village elders, discussing – no, petitioning – the idea of an evacuation to the mainland. ‘No one should die of pneumonia in this day and age,’ she kept saying at dinner tables and on the street and at the burn, pale eyes blazing. ‘We’re vulnerable here when we don’t need to be.’
Flora had assumed the villagers wouldn’t take kindly to being told they were failing where their ancestors had succeeded – especially by someone who, like Lorna, wasn’t a St Kildan by birth. But perhaps that was why her impassioned speeches struck a nerve, for she had never been low on grit. The facts were, the islanders had endured several bitter winters in succession where the crops had almost entirely failed and emergency provisions had had to be sent over by MacLeod. Added to that, the stories the fishermen kept bringing back of technology and fashions and medicines on the mainland, of new jobs and flourishing industries, had made the younger St Kildans start to dream of an easier life over the horizon – and survival here was dependent upon youth: strong, agile bodies that could haul and lower themselves on the cliffs, fast runners, strong lungs.
In the end a letter had been sent to Westminster requesting an evacuation, with an ‘all or none’ caveat pledged among the villagers. Nothing had yet been heard back, but nobody was holding their breath. After all, they had been requesting another boat, a radio mast and a regular postal service for years, and those meagre pleas had fallen on deaf ears.
‘But she may not be able to help him!’ Mhairi cried, unappeased. ‘Molly needed a hospital and we couldn’t get her there. The pneumonia would have been treatable on the other side. What if Donald needs the same – help there that we’ve not got here?’
‘If she thought he needed to go over the other side, she’d have sent him, you can be sure of that.’
‘How?’ Mhairi’s hands slipped from her grasp, fluttering skywards like startled doves. ‘We’ve nothing here!’
‘Actually, we do; it’s why I’ve taken so long to get back. There’s a sloop in the bay that just came the other day. If Lorna needed it to take Donald to the mainland, do you think there’s anyone brave enough to stop her?’
Mhairi blinked. ‘No.’
‘Exactly. He’ll be fine. Stop worrying.’
With a gentle hand on her friend’s back, she turned her to face downhill and they headed for their summer home. Mhairi took several deep breaths and shook her hands out, trying to calm herself. Flora could tell her friend had gone to a place deep inside her own head.
‘But why were you over there so long?’
Flora looped her arm through Mhairi’s, pleased to have an opportunity to change the subject. ‘Well, it’s quite the story. You won’t believe your ears.’
‘Tell me,’ Mhairi replied, sounding intrigued.
‘It belongs to the Earl of Dumfries. He’s one of MacLeod’s friends – sailed over with his son and they brought over the factor too.’
‘Ugh, no,’ Mhairi groaned, much the same way Flora herself had earlier.
‘I know, and he’s as odious as ever.’ Flora rolled her eyes. ‘The visitors, however . . . They’re spending a week here, bird-spotting and catching eggs – and Effie’s being paid to guide them.’
‘That’ll make her happy,’ Mhairi murmured.
‘Aye.’ She leaned in closer. ‘Especially as the son, Lord Sholto, is as handsome a man as you’ve ever seen.’ Flora had met him with Effie on the rocks just before she’d headed back here; she had gone in search of Jayne, wanting confirmation that she’d had none of her foreboding dreams before she came back to Mhairi.
Mhairi looked at her in surprise. ‘As handsome as James?’
Flora hesitated. ‘Different. He’s golden. Like a sun god.’ James could hardly be called a man of the soil, but he had a grit where Sholto had gloss. He was a man of action, industry and enterprise.
‘Really?’ Mhairi breathed, looking engrossed in someone else’s story for a change. ‘So don’t tell me – now he’s in love with you, and you’re going to throw James over and marry him instead?’
Flora was indignant at the outrageous tease. ‘No! No, I’m not, but not because of that.’ She turned and looked straight at Mhairi. ‘He’s wildly in love with Effie. A blind man could see it.’
‘What?’
‘Aye! And she’s in love with him!’
‘No! Effie’s in love?’
‘Aye!’
‘. . . Effie’s in love?’ Mhairi whispered as she began to see that Flora wasn’t joking. ‘But he’s a laird, you said. An earl’s son.’
Flora’s own smile faded. ‘I know. And I had to tell her it can never be.’ She bit her lip. ‘The way she looked at me, Mhairi, I think I broke her heart. I told her she can’t stay in the village, not until he leaves again. She’s going to come over here in the morning.’
Mhairi let her gaze travel skywards, instinctively reading the clouds and haze on the horizon and understanding what it meant: a storm was coming and the visitors would need to get ahead of it. Poor Effie was about to lose the man she loved too, but his departure would come in mere hours, not months.
‘It’s just all so quick!’ Mhairi said, looking back at Flora again. They had been over here for only two weeks and yet something momentous had occurred. None of them had ever thought they’d see the day when Cupid caught their friend.
‘But it is, isn’t it,’ Flora shrugged. ‘When it’s right, you just know.’ They were back at the souterrain now and she poked the burning peat slab to get the flames leaping; Donald had brought the prized metal poker over for them ‘for protection’, though quite what dangers he thought they might face here, apart from the odd bad-tempered ewe, was a mystery. ‘I wish I could have let her have her happiness, but you should have seen the way he was looking at her. And her at him. They’re not fooling anyone. It’s plain as day what’s happening between them. She’s an innocent. Eff’s not like us, she doesn’t have a mother to guide her through this; she might not realize the consequences . . .’
‘No.’ Mhairi looked away, her hands on her belly, and Flora knew what she was thinking – she had a mother and it hadn’t saved her from her predicament. Her own love story had snuck up on her, a tap on her shoulder when she had been looking in entirely the opposite direction . . . Love didn’t follow a rule book and when it came, it flowed like a flood, tearing your feet out from under you and washing you away. Knowing the rules was very different from being able to enforce them.
‘But it’s for her own good. She’ll never see him again once he leaves here. She has to be realistic.’ Flora could hear the anxious note in her words. She had done the right thing, hadn’t she?
‘Aye.’
‘I warned her. I reminded her what happened to Kitty,’ Flora said flatly. The fate of Flora’s cousin was the cautionary tale flagged up to all the young St Kildan women after she had jumped from the rocks, pregnant and abandoned by the naval man she thought loved her.
Mhairi just nodded, looking saddened by it all. She knew only too well that the right thing could still be the wrong thing – and vice versa. It was wrong that Donald was married to Mary and not Mhairi; it was wrong that Mhairi must marry a stranger and not the man she loved; and it was wrong that Effie must forsake a real love on account of class, money and station.
Flora reached around her waist and unknotted the red shawl. ‘Here, thanks for this,’ she said, handing it over and watching as Mhairi draped it around herself instead, the shawl covering the gap where her skirt could no longer close. It was harder now for Mhairi to see past her belly, and Flora bent down to help her fasten Donald’s brooch to secure the layers of skirt and shawl together.
‘There,’ she smiled, straightening up again and meeting her friend’s trepidatious gaze. They both knew it was a rudimentary patching, but for the moment at least, it was holding.
‘Who’s that?’ Mhairi asked, looking up from her stool in the sheep fank and shielding her eyes from the sun as she watched the advancing figure on the slope.
Flora lurched up at Mhairi’s question and followed the line of her pointing finger. ‘At last! Better late than never,’ she rejoiced. They had been waiting on Effie all morning but there’d been no sign of her, much to Flora’s concern.
‘No . . . I don’t think that’s Eff,’ Mhairi murmured, her voice dropping off.
The two women stopped and waited, staring impatiently at the dark dot, willing it to reveal itself. Steadily the figure grew as it neared with every step, but the gait rapidly became distinctive. And there was no sign of Poppit.
‘Oh no, it’s Mathieson,’ Flora groaned. ‘What’s he doing over here?’
Mhairi gave a sound of fright.
‘Quick, we’d best make ourselves decent,’ Flora said, picking up the filled pails and heading for the souterrain – but Mhairi stood rooted to the spot. ‘It would hardly do presenting ourselves like this to him now, would it?’ she pointed out.
The humidity was stifling and they were wearing just their slips for the milking, sweat beading at their brows. The sun had risen with a silent brilliance but as the day yawned, a storm had gathered its armies along the edge of the sky and the hot air was now turgid. Menacing towers of bruised clouds were billowing and spreading, rolling over the horizon like dark chariots, the breeze sucked away like the undertow of a tsunami, preparing to disgorge.
Mhairi jolted back to life and followed after her. The grass was spiky and dry underfoot and the sheep were listless. After the suffocating heat of the day, the damp coolness of the Amazon’s House was a welcome relief and Flora dressed quickly, but when she emerged into the communal space a few minutes later, she saw Mhairi sitting on her sleeping shelf, still dressed in her slip. Her pregnancy could be largely obscured in the bulky layers of her skirt and blouse – the skirt was cut from a heavy cloth that hung away from the body and was so long as she stooped forward a little, the swell of her belly could still be disguised. The thin cotton slip, however, revealed everything, and Flora stared at her in surprise.
‘Why aren’t you dressed?’
‘. . . I can’t. I can’t do it. He mustn’t see me.’
‘Of course you can. It’ll be fine.’
‘I can’t, Flora. I can’t lie to a man like him. He’s too clever for me.’
Flora didn’t reply immediately, not denying the truth in her friend’s words. The factor was nothing if not astute. He had a sly cleverness to him, with watchful eyes and a sharp tongue. Flora knew how to make a man look where she wanted him to look, but Mhairi – never confrontational anyway – was neither confident nor wily enough to deceive him to his face. She would cower before his raptor’s gaze and her secret would be out within moments; all this would have been for naught.
‘Please,’ Mhairi implored her. ‘He’s come down to check on the slops, it must be that he’s here for. Won’t you just show him yourself? Tell him I’m poorly.’
Was it the slops he wanted to see? Mhairi had been stirring them for him ever since the dead sperm whale had exploded in the bay last summer and he had retrieved the curious, stinking viscera, believing it to be a cure for his mother’s gout. Twice every day, Mhairi had to refresh the water in the pail and stir the slops. It was an odious errand, but he was paying well and the money was welcome, for her father had ten mouths to feed besides his own.
‘But you know he despises me. I won’t flatter him and it only ever makes things worse.’
‘No, he’ll not do that now you’re engaged. James is a powerful man, he knows that. Please . . .’
Still Flora hesitated – the stakes were high for her too, but she reminded herself that she had seen the factor just yesterday with Effie and the chance meeting had been uneventful. If anything, he’d seemed to make a point of not looking at her but past her, as if that would reduce her power.
‘Fine,’ she groaned. ‘But you owe me.’
‘Anything.’ Mhairi handed back the brooch and shawl without needing to be asked, and Flora tightened it at her waist as she stepped back into the glare of the sun and waited for the factor by the smouldering fire pit.
‘Mr Mathieson, to what do we owe the honour?’ she asked, forcing a levity and welcome into her voice that she did not feel. It was one thing asserting her equality with him in the safe confines of the village, but over here, without the protection of her neighbours, she felt acutely aware of the power – physical as well as material – of the man. He was not tall or athletically built, like her fiancé; his bones did not speak to privilege and good breeding, but rather his was a body conditioned by the streets, fashioned from a hard childhood of neglect and beatings, where fists were used in place of words. Flora had heard he had been a fighter in his youth, and his physique bulged inelegantly with muscles that strained beneath his clothing. His skin was pocked with scars and his complexion often flushed, serving to highlight the coldness of his pale blue eyes. Flora guessed his age to be somewhere in the mid-thirties but she couldn’t have said for sure – only that he was older than her, younger than her father. She swallowed as she felt his gaze settle on her, a gun upon the bird. ‘This is quite a stroll, coming all the way over here.’
‘Fetch Mhairi. I need to speak to her.’
The sharpness of his tone was startling and she sensed that the mitigating effect of the villagers’ presence cut both ways: without them, she had no protection and he had no need of social niceties.
‘I’m afraid she’s resting,’ Flora said quietly but firmly, summoning her poise. ‘She’s poorly.’
‘God’s truth,’ he tutted, casting a blank gaze around the glen. ‘Effie said the same.’
Flora’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘She did? When?’
‘This morning.’
‘Oh? We were hoping to see her today.’
‘Aye, she said that too, but she’s ditched coming to help you for learning to swim with his lordship instead.’ He surveyed the bucolic scene of sheep grazing, the lambs skipping wanly in the heat. ‘She’s completely forgotten herself; her father’s in a rage.’
Not just her father, Flora observed – his own lips had drawn white with anger. Effie had told her he’d warned her away from the high-born guests, saying she would embarrass his employer. ‘Well, I’m . . . sorry to hear that.’
‘Why? It’s nothing to do with you,’ he snapped. Was he fishing for an argument, she wondered, an excuse to raise a hand to her? She somehow knew that he wanted to; she felt his hostility like a bristling heat.
‘I just meant, it’s not nice to think of people being upset.’
He turned back to her, with a look that suggested it pained him to do so. ‘Well . . . where are the slops? Fin MacKinnon told me Mhairi brought them over here with her.’
Flora gave a ready smile, relieved to get to the point of his visit. Soonest satisfied, soonest gone again.
‘Aye, they’re over here,’ she said, pointing ahead to where Mhairi had carefully positioned the pail in a sheep fank, lest a boisterous lamb should accidentally kick it over. ‘Mhairi’s been diligent in turning them and keeping them in the sun. She goes down to the cove every morning and evening and refreshes the water. She’s not missed a single day since you left last summer.’
Apparently this conscientiousness was insufficient, for his face folded into a scowl. ‘The cove?’ he cried. ‘But the water’s rough there! If they were to fall in, she couldn’t recover them! They’d be lost to the sea!’
‘Well, there’s nowhere else over here where she can do it, is there?’ she pointed out. The cove was the only sea access on this point of the island. ‘But she’s very careful. She lies on the low rocks as she does it and takes great care with them.’
They had reached the fank now and Flora stood back as he stood over the pail and peered in with strange intensity. It was hard to think of him as a good son and even harder to think these slops could ever help a physical malady. He dropped into a squatting position as he peered in, turning the water slowly so that it began to churn. Flora had seen for herself how they had changed in form from slimy entrails into something that was growing hard and pale, a snail turning into its own shell. The stink, though, remained as bad as ever, and Mhairi often returned with her eyes streaming from dry-heaving as she performed her duties.
To Flora’s relief, he seemed pleased. ‘Very well,’ he said finally, rising again. ‘You can tell her I can see she’s been keeping to her side of the bargain. A few more months and I’ll be able to take them back with me on the smack.’
‘As you wish,’ Flora replied, feeling grateful that in a few more months, she wouldn’t be here to suffer his presence any more. In a few more months, he would be gone from her life forever and the days of standing beside a stinking bucket with a coarse, unpleasant man would belong to her past.
She realized the factor was staring at her and she straightened up, drawing herself taller so that there was barely two inches in height between them. ‘What?’ she asked.
‘There’s something different about you.’
His words chilled her blood as she felt his gaze absorb her with an interest that was notable by its absence on the other side of the isle. ‘Really?’ she asked, flashing him her most dazzling smile so that he might not notice the fear in her eyes. ‘Perhaps it’s the glow of love?’ she asked, echoing Effie’s own words. ‘Have you heard I’m engaged? I’m to be Mrs James Callaghan in—’
‘Yes, I heard,’ he said, cutting her off abruptly. ‘. . . It’s not that.’
Flora’s heart rate escalated. The mention of James Callaghan had been intended as a warning shot, a reminder of the consequences that would follow, should he harm the fiancée of a rich, powerful man. But he seemed uninterested in veiled threats, his instincts leading him elsewhere.
She swallowed. ‘My suntan, then?’ She had read in a magazine one of the fishermen had brought over that they were becoming fashionable on the mainland. ‘We’re working outside here from dawn to dusk. Effie thinks we’re lying about in the sun, but three hundred sheep to look after is a mighty number for just two of us.’
It worked, the factor lifting his attention off her and onto the white-dotted slopes. ‘Yes, McKinnon told me about his new scheme,’ he sneered. ‘It sounds a ridiculous undertaking to me. You’ll be half dead by the end of it.’
For once, Flora couldn’t disagree with him – if the milking and the churn deliveries weren’t gruelling enough, they still had some late-tupped lambing to get through. She was growing more exhausted by the day.
‘Still, what do I care? So long as the rents come in on time, it’s no business of mine how you divvy up the labour.’
Flora turned her head away at the slight, but remained silent. He turned to leave.
‘Oh – Mr Mathieson!’ she called after him. ‘Could I possibly prevail upon you to carry two of the churns up to the cleit on Am Blaid? It would save us an extra loop there and back.’ She spoke to him as a lady to a gentleman, though he didn’t deserve the honour of being regarded as her equal.
The factor looked surprised to have been asked the favour and there was a moment of silence before he gave a sudden laugh. ‘Does a man keep a dog and bark himself?’
‘Excuse me?’ Flora was so stunned by the insult she took a step back, as if pushed.
‘Beauty won’t boil the pot, Miss MacQueen, now will it?’ he asked, his eyes narrowing as he diminished her with his words again. He had got a taste for her humiliation and he waited for her – dared her – to retaliate in her usual fashion.
But she didn’t – she couldn’t risk keeping him here for a second longer than was necessary – and his eyes narrowed as an unusual silence held. She felt his suspicion about her drift back again as he became predator to her prey once more, beginning to sniff, to circle, to close in on her fatal weakness . . . She made herself stand tall; still – a deer before the hunter – but as he saw that he had won, his interest faded. He relinquished his scrutiny, leaving without courtesy.
Flora watched him go, the adrenaline coursing in her veins at having allowed his humiliations, her dignity tattered and hanging like feathers at her neck. But her secret had held; that was all that mattered. Knowledge was power, and he was already dangerous enough.