Three days later
Ten perfect fingers. Ten perfect toes. Flora cupped her baby boy’s downy head in her palm as he greedily fed. They had each got the hang of it quickly and it was a relief for them both as her milk let down. ‘You’re a natural,’ Lorna had smiled. She felt the weight of him against her stomach; it was already almost flat, deep contractions pulling her back to her old shape as he fed. Pregnancy fading as motherhood bloomed.
Her hand moved automatically in gentle caresses as she felt herself glow with love for him. It had been instant. All the sorrow, pain and horror forgotten the very moment Lorna had laid him on her belly. His cries had risen into the night sky, no louder than the wren, and she had gasped with disbelief that he had survived it.
She had screamed in distress as she had realized what was happening – her grief ejecting him from her several weeks too early – so certain that Mhairi’s fate would become hers too. But things had been different this time. They hadn’t been there alone; after several days of grumbling contractions, they had started in earnest early in the evening, last night, and Lorna had arrived in time, as she had promised she would; she had monitored everything that could be measured, mopped her brow and for every one of Flora’s cries that she couldn’t do it, Lorna had quietly reassured her that she could. Mhairi had held her hand, just as Flora had held hers only a few weeks before, urging her to push when she just wanted to die; and when they had heard the first cry, all three women had wept with relief and joy that one of them had made it.
He was so small, so very perfect, a fuzz of dark hair beginning to sprout. She looked for signs of James in him but he was still so wrinkled and curled up, no sign yet of strong ankles and straight shoulders; only his eyes – gold-flecked hazel and not her sharp green – showed that he was his father’s son.
His hand patted her breast lightly, as if understanding where his survival lay, and tears fell from her reflexively, splashing his cheek. She rubbed them away gently with her thumb but the tears continued to run and fall because she wouldn’t be his survival. Not after today. These were their stolen hours together and the only ones they would ever know.
In the corner of the cabin, Mary cleared her throat. Flora looked up, her hand automatically cupping her son’s head, keeping him latched onto her, keeping them as one.
But rupture was coming. The most unnatural division in the natural world.
Donald stood by the door, guarding it, his gaze on the floor. He was keeping others out, rather than her in, but he could scarcely look at her.
The baby pulled back, sated for the moment, one skinny arm pulling back in a sweep, the hand pulled into a miniature fist as he stretched and gave a small scream.
‘He needs winding,’ Mary said, stepping forward and already reaching for him, assuming the duties – and identity – of his mother.
Flora’s grasp tightened on her child, instinct prevailing, her heart rate accelerating.
No.
‘Let me wind him, Flora,’ Mary said in a placid tone, standing before her. ‘He’ll need feeding again before long and then you’ll be back down here again. Go up on deck while you can and show your face, else people will wonder.’
Flora didn’t stir. She knew this was what had been agreed. ‘It’s the only way,’ Lorna had whispered sadly as she had wrapped the baby in her lambing scarf and carried him over the ridge in the dead of night to the McKinnon cottage.
She looked at Donald, impelling him to meet her gaze. He was a good man, suffering too. The pain in his eyes matched her own and he took no joy in making her loss his gain. He had had to be convinced that it was the right thing to do, Lorna’s implacable logic overriding sentiment for the good of the baby. Without a husband, Flora had no viable way of providing for her child, and the villagers still, mercifully, believed Mary to be pregnant. They all had to be selfless, Lorna argued.
Donald nodded and she surrendered her hold on her child with a gasp. Mary took the little bundle and settled him over her broad shoulder, beginning to pace as she patted his back. He screamed in protest and Flora felt every cell in her body strain for him. She needed to hold her son in her arms. Feed him from her breast . . . But a plan was already in place for that too – Donald would use the ambergris money to secure a wet nurse on the mainland; Lorna had contacts in the nursing world over there. ‘They’re professionals,’ Lorna had reassured Flora, stroking her hair as she wept. ‘He’ll thrive and grow.’
She moved, tentatively, off the bed. She had been ‘lucky not to tear’ but she was bleeding still, as was normal apparently, a thick pad fashioned from old dressings pressed into her undergarments.
‘I’ll get some air then,’ she said quietly.
‘That would be best, aye,’ Mary said in a low voice. ‘Show your face, make sure everyone sees you.’
Donald stepped aside and opened the door for her. ‘Is she on board yet?’ he whispered. Flora knew he meant Mhairi. These were their final hours together too.
‘I’ll check. I’ll send her down here.’ Flora passed him into the corridor, her body rigid with the effort it took to move through these motions. The door closed again with a decisive click.
‘Flora.’
There was surprise in the word and she looked up to see Jayne sitting on the short, steep staircase that led up to the deck. She, too, was pale-faced, a haunted look in her eyes, and Flora wondered about Norman’s silent beatings behind thick stone walls. The evacuation had taken a toll on them all.
Jayne straightened up, smoothing her skirt as she forced a smile. ‘Were you in seeing the baby?’
Flora hesitated. ‘Aye . . . he’s a bonny wee thing.’ Her voice was small, unlike herself.
There was a small pause, Jayne also seeming to struggle to find words. ‘It’s a blessing for them, at last.’
‘Indeed,’ she swallowed, having to cast her gaze to the floor as she endured the lie. ‘Are you waiting to see him?’
‘Oh—’
‘Only I think they’re trying to settle him to sleep.’
‘Of course. I’m sure I’ll catch them at some point.’ Jayne’s hands splayed against her skirt, the fingers stretching long as Flora’s twitched against hers, unseen.
‘Well, I suppose we should go on deck and . . . get some air,’ Flora said after another pause, as Jayne made no move to leave.
She stirred, as if being roused. ‘Aye. I suppose we should. Say our final goodbyes.’
Flora waited as the other woman began to climb the steps but she stopped and turned back again. ‘Flora, I just wanted to say – I’m so awful sorry for your loss. James was a fine man and he loved you dearly. Hold on to that, won’t you?’
Flora watched her go, feeling her heart pound. She wanted to tell Jayne there was flesh-and-blood proof of their love behind that door – but she couldn’t hold on to him either. Memories were all she would have of either one of them; they were the only treasures she had left.
There were more faces than she had ever seen gathered in one place, handkerchiefs fluttering in the breeze as multitudes of hands waved a singular welcome. Cheers rose into the sky, men working busily on the quay as they wound the ropes around the bollards to tether the ship for its first call.
Flora glanced down at her own hands, clasped so tightly together that her fingers blanched. There was dirt and blood beneath her fingernails, she realized, and she curled them into a claw; her mother would have something to say about it if she saw. Family honour came down to such things: cleanliness, modesty, prudence. Flora pulled the red shawl tighter around her waist – she had lost the brooch securing it, somewhere in the move, and it kept working loose, threatening to betray her lack of both modesty and prudence at a stroke.
On deck, the passengers stood like chess pieces, chins up as the ramp was thrown down and their new lives lay before them suddenly, just a few steps away now. What had started as anguished cries of ‘why?’ following poor Molly’s death had somehow led to this: a rampart on a summer’s evening, strangers’ greetings and a benign landscape where trees took root and crops could grow.
Life would be better here. Gentler. That was the promise of evacuation. They would no longer need to swing from ropes to eat an egg, nor save driftwood for coffins; they wouldn’t be cut off from the rest of humanity for seven months at a time by monstrous waves; pneumonia would no longer be a killer.
And yet, hesitation gripped her with cold fingers.
Flora watched numbly as Ma Peg went first, assisted by Lorna down the short but steep slope. Some men in fine suits and bowlers were gathered in a cluster at the bottom and set apart from the other mainlanders by an officious calm. They didn’t wave their hankies in the air but tipped their heads slightly. One of them began to speak to Ma Peg in a low voice – but it was Lorna who spoke back.
Flora glanced at her father as the first dislocation announced itself. There would be a price to pay for this easy life: the old ways were behind them now and that meant speaking English and not Gaelic, paying with coins and not favours. The younger generation, taught in the schoolhouse by the minister’s wife, were well equipped to navigate the leap: they could read, write, perform arithmetic, and they spoke English with careless fluency. The middle-aged islanders – Flora’s parents and the like – could certainly converse, albeit with grammatical errors; but for the older folk, a language barrier had sprung up on this crossing, and easy discourse with close neighbours would no longer be a given.
Another spark of panic zipped through her. Were they really all to scatter on account of failed crops, hard winters, a preventable death? She caught the tension aboard the boat as the islanders stood poised between two lives, and knew she wasn’t the only one to feel this had been a grave mistake. The St Kildans had left behind not just their home but their whole world – a two-and-a-half-mile, cliff-walled island in the North Atlantic that had kept others out as much as it had kept them in.
She had always yearned for a bigger life – for the past year she had dreamt of little else with James – but now she craved the secret places of the cleits and cliffs, the familiarity of the humble cottages, the reassuring sight of the dogs sleeping in the grass and washing lines hung with clean linens stretching down towards the bay. If they’d stayed there, she could have raised her son there. To hell with the shame; knowing what she knew now, she would have endured anything to keep him with her.
Mad Annie and Old Fin went next, arms linked as if they were about to reel but for once, Mad Annie’s dark eyes weren’t dancing. Old Fin nodded his head as they walked, as if engaged in a silent conversation.
Flora dug her nails into her palm, steadying herself, as she watched Effie Gillies follow after with her father, the two of them tall and thin and as brittle as hazel sticks as they stepped into the crowd. Flashbulbs popped around them, the pressmen lunging and leaning in for their pictures, the mainlanders regarding Effie’s long, tangled, sun-bleached hair and wind-burned skin with open curiosity. Flora watched them take in her rough, thick drugget skirt, pulled in at the waist by a bent nail, her calloused hands – developed from years of cragging – at odds with the daintiness of her bones. She watched the onlookers marvel at all the ways her best friend was ‘wrong’, and Flora wondered what they would say if they knew Effie dressed in boys’ clothing most days and that this – in her boots and skirt – was her at her Sunday best? Or that Mad Annie was showing rare restraint to disembark without her pipe dangling from her bottom lip?
‘I can’t! I can’t!’
Flora looked up at the sudden commotion to find Mhairi grabbing the bow rail. There was a collective intake of breath from the islanders on deck as their silent stoicism was interrupted. Dignity suspended. Flora felt her own heart hitch, all her carefully packed emotions suddenly pushing to the surface with a violence that felt uncontainable. She watched, breath held, while Mhairi’s father grappled with her, as if her friend’s fate still dictated Flora’s own.
Ian MacKinnon tried to hoist Mhairi to her feet, but the girl was limp and overwrought, the enormity of the moment finally washing over her. From here, the boat would sail on to Oban and the few remaining passengers – the Big Gillies and the McKinnons – would tomorrow step ashore to their new lives twenty miles south of here.
From the corner of her eye, Flora saw Donald twitch as if to move – as if Mhairi’s panic was a stray lightning bolt, leaping the crowd and striking bodies at random. But Mary, holding the newborn, stopped him with just a hand upon his arm, telling him without words that this – she – was not their concern. Not any more.
Donald’s gaze lifted off Mhairi and met Flora’s own, and she saw in his tortured soul the marbled mix of love and loss, of grief and gain that had sprung from these last few months. Arrangements had been reached – but at what cost? Flora saw the promise held in his eyes as they stared at one another across the deck: he would protect her son and raise him as his own. He’d be the father James could now never be; he’d be the father her son deserved. And yet it felt as if her heart might leap from her chest like a salmon swimming upstream and she could see in him the same instincts, twitching and quivering for release. An unnatural stillness was his only defence, as if a single movement would obliterate his resolve. Only his eyes betrayed his desperation. Only her finger, tapping against her skirt, betrayed hers.
Stop this madness, she wanted to scream, to lose herself like Mhairi. It didn’t matter that everything was unfolding exactly to plan; nothing could have prepared them for how it actually felt, living through this and doing what must be done.
It’s the only way.
Trembling, she watched Rachel MacKinnon usher her young brood down the gangplank, the baby strapped to her chest, as Mhairi was half-dragged behind them by her father, her red hair dancing like a flame as she tossed her head in anguish. Her younger brothers Alasdair and Murran, awed at first by their big sister’s spectacle, instantly forgot the drama as they caught sight of parked motor cars, shiny and gleaming like beetles in the setting sun. Trophies of this new world. They ran ahead for a better look, St Kilda already just a memory for them.
‘Boys! Get back here!’ Rachel cried as they escaped their mother’s skirts and darted into the crowd. Flora’s gaze followed them, catching on the back of Effie’s head as she and her father were led towards one of the cars; Flora willed her friend to turn back for a final look, but a slight tug on her hand from Bonnie was the cue to start down the ramp herself.
For a moment, her feet wouldn’t obey; she was still inordinately weak and she felt heavy-footed in her boots after a summer barefoot on the grassy slopes, but her sister’s small fingers gripped her own a little harder, as if in reassurance, as if she could feel how Flora trembled.
Their three brothers – David, Neil and Hamish – pigeon-stepped in an impatient arc behind her parents, but their father’s limp meant they moved at a shuffle and Flora had a sense of them as a small herd being rounded into the sheep fanks back home. It felt somehow demeaning and she lifted her chin, staring haughtily but blindly into the crowd. In all her nineteen years, almost every face she’d ever seen had been either a friend, neighbour or relative – the distinctions were merely titular – but this was a land of strangers now and she had no care to look. The only face she wanted to see wouldn’t be there.
Suddenly lights popped rapidly, one after another, the sky a symphony of explosions, screaming white, so that the MacQueens were blinded to their first steps on the mainland.
Stray voices babbled like water over the stones back home. ‘Her eyes . . .’
‘. . . hair . . . see how it shines . . .’
‘. . . and so thick . . .’
By the time the dazzlement had passed and their eyes had cleared, it was impossible to tell who had spoken, but gazes fell upon her like weights. Flora turned her head away, not wanting to be seen. If they knew what secrets she held, what horror she was living through in this very moment—
‘Where’s Mathieson?’ a voice behind her called. She didn’t need to turn to know it was Hamish Gillies. ‘MacLeod’s factor?’
Flora flinched, drawn from her torpor. Amid the sea of strangers, her gaze found Mhairi’s and behind her, Effie’s too – stalled beside the car.
‘Not here!’ a man on the dock called back, passing along a bag.
The three young women stared at one another, held in frozen poses.
‘He’s got my money!’ Hamish retorted.
‘Not here,’ the man said again, with a shrug.
Flora saw the puzzlement begin to settle on her neighbours’ brows. Dawning realization. There had been so much commotion in the packing, so much high emotion on the crossing . . . the landlord’s man on the ground hadn’t yet been missed. ‘The smack left after the Dunara Castle yesterday!’ she called up carelessly, though it took all her strength to do so. The cargo vessel had left with all their worldly possessions last night.
She felt heads turn towards her once more, eyes settling upon her face with a rapture that befitted Cleopatra on her golden barge. The white flashes came again in a flurry and the factor was forgotten.
‘Oban, then,’ someone called, uninterestedly.
Flora looked back at Mhairi and Effie, both haunted and stricken by their dealings with the man, but in the next moment they were taken from her sight, the crowd swallowing them whole.
She was losing them. Losing everything.
‘Keep moving now,’ a voice said in her ear. Norman Ferguson – tall, broad-shouldered; a handsome man with an ugly temper; his wife silent beside him. ‘Give them a show, Flora. We can’t stop here.’
He was right. She wanted to turn around and run straight back up that ramp, take back what was hers and never let it go. Her body already ached with longing – but it was already too late. The past had slipped her moorings and disappeared over the horizon. This was the future now and she could no sooner reclaim her old life than blood could flow backwards.
She could only go on.
Thrusting her chin in the air again, she stepped into the sea of nameless faces – and felt herself disappear.
It took a couple of trips by car to transport the MacQueens – all seven of them – to their new home in Lochaline. Her parents separated for the journey, lest a calamity should befall them in the motors and a parent be needed, but the passage was smooth, speedy and almost disappointingly uneventful. In the space of mere minutes, they travelled past shops, an inn and a schoolhouse, along a rolling road up a hill, around a bend, to a leafy lane that reached out towards a distant heathered moorland. The explosion of space was an undulating and good-natured landscape, unlike the vertical cliffs of home, the dying sky silent but for the chirrups of unseen birds hiding in the trees.
No one spoke in the vehicles, all of them trying to absorb the barrage of new sights and sensations – the rumble of the motor beneath them, the smell of gasoline, the smooth yet soft leather seats. Flora stared out the window, seeing how the house doors were painted in different colours, unrecognizable flowers growing from small boxes on windowsills. She spied a horse grazing in a field, passed a bus and saw streetlights. In one six-minute journey, she saw more new things than in all her previous nineteen years – and yet, she was blind to it all. When she blinked, she saw her baby son behind her eyelids. When she closed her eyes or looked into the distance or glimpsed her own little brothers . . . he was all she saw. All she could feel. Her arms ached to hold him, to feel his weight against her.
Had the ship left harbour again? Was he drifting further from her with every passing moment? She thought of James floating in the blue and the pain of her losses flattened her.
She unfurled herself carefully from the car, feeling like a crispy autumn leaf in the spring blush. Her movements were laboured and with every step she worried about the padded cloth Lorna had pressed between her legs in a final act of mercy. But no one noticed her tentative hesitations. Not today.
They had stopped outside a short stretch of whitewashed conjoined houses, with three strips of lawn running down from the coloured doors – yellow, red and green – to matching painted wooden gates. The slate roofs appeared, to her eye, to have been put on sideways, running from front to back rather than across the width of the buildings, as at home, but it gave them an open, elevated aspect, as if mildly surprised. The property between the two ends was narrower, its roofline slightly lower, and was set back a little, as if it had been nudged out of position.
There were already two other cars parked on the verge, the yellow door at the far house left open. A red-haired girl suddenly burst through it in hot pursuit of her younger brother: Red Annie and Murran MacKinnon. In another instant, they were back inside the house again, but their squeals could be heard from the lane.
Flora felt the tension within her ease a little at the realization that Mhairi was but two walls away. A small mercy. She wondered where Effie had been taken. Would it be too much to hope that she and her father had been placed in the smaller property between the MacKinnons and the MacQueens? She thought she might somehow bear this if they were all still together.
Her parents were already standing at the green door with the man in the suit who had accompanied them; he was moving with efficiency, her parents with curiosity. Flora had missed his name – she felt as if she was underwater, voices distorted, words shapeless – and she made her way slowly up the narrow path, after them. Unlike the torrid young MacKinnons, the MacQueen children – that bit older – walked in a slow-moving crocodile, following after the man in respectful silence as they passed through various well-sized and bright rooms. The biggest surprise was that the kitchen and sitting areas had been separated, split either side of a staircase that led to bedrooms upstairs. No one on St Kilda had ever had an Upstairs before and Flora stood at the foot of it, staring at the treads as if they led to the heavenly kingdom instead.
The kitchen had a range, indoor taps and a wooden floor, luxuries that had been unthinkable back home, where even driftwood or a washed-up whisky cask was considered treasure. There were radiators that heated the rooms and electric lights that switched on like magic. The room opposite was dressed with a large table, wooden settle and some chairs, a fireplace and cloth-covered settee positioned by the window overlooking a back garden. Upstairs were three bedrooms and a water closet. They had never seen a fixed bathtub before – at home, their tin tub was propped against the back wall and brought in front of the fire in the evenings. Flora watched, impassive, as the younger children squashed into it, their boots already abandoned at the front door.
‘Get in with us, Flossie,’ Bonnie implored, but even if there had been room, she wasn’t up to playing and she removed herself to one of the bedrooms, lying down carefully on the unmade mattress. Her body relaxed into the unfamiliar softness, vaguely aware that there was no prickle of horsehair as she allowed herself to grow heavy.
She stared at the wall, recognizing from the lilt of her mother’s voice that she was pleased with what she saw, for this was all a distinct step up from what they’d known back home. Even her father was limping more quickly than usual, opening and closing cupboard doors and rattling open the windows as the man in the suit tried to run through the schedule for registering for work in the morning. The men had been found jobs at the Forestry Commission and were to report to the manager’s office for eight o’clock; most of the women had to work too, for it would take more than one wage to support a large family this side of the water, and both Flora and her mother would be working at a local tweed factory. On St Kilda, weaving had been the men’s job – the women carded and spun the yarn – and there’d been a collective hesitation when the news was first broken to them. Everything here was familiar and yet different, the world skewed off its axis by a few degrees.
Flora closed her eyes, her body and soul weary as she tried to block it all out. Her breasts were full, too full, of milk she could not rid herself of, a dull ache beginning to spread. A fat sunbeam was falling across her shoulders, trying to warm her, but she was cold inside. She had left the most vital part of herself behind today and she knew she would never recover from it. Her life from this point onwards would be feathered, warm and soft, a charade of dead-eyed smiles and cold beauty.
She felt something pressing against her hip and she stirred, reaching a hand into her skirt pocket. She pulled out the golden barrel that had been her talisman for so many months. But not any more. It was a reminder of all she had lost, the emblem of a life that would never now be hers. A bullet to the heart.