‘Psst – did y’ hear?’ Rachel MacKinnon said in a low voice, across the way to Jayne, her eyes tracking Mrs Buchanan in her office at the far end of the factory floor. ‘There’s talk of a ceilidh at the weekend.’
‘Oh, aye?’ Jayne asked back, looking pleasantly surprised, her grey eyes lighting up. ‘Are we allowed to go?’
‘Allowed? It’s for us, they’re saying! A welcome.’
‘Och, that sounds grand. How thoughtful . . .’ Then she pulled a face. ‘Will we need to wear our boots?’
Rachel shrugged, her auburn hair loosely styled in a topknot; without the severe St Kildan winds to endure, the island women were already beginning to experiment with hair fashions – enjoying the privacy of sitting in front of their mirrors, in their upstairs bedrooms, as much as they did the finished result. ‘It should probably be taken as a given now.’
‘Aye,’ Jayne sighed, disappointedly. ‘Oh, and did I tell you? I ran into that Mrs Cameron in the churchyard last evening. She said . . .’
Flora sat at her loom behind them, hearing their conversation without listening. The rhythmic rattle and clack of the shuttles working the wefts was now the soundtrack to their days; already she yearned for the sound of the heavy slump of the waves on the shore in Village Bay. She missed the incessant cries of the seabirds and even the constant moan of the wind.
She didn’t gossip with her co-workers. Grief for her lost fiancé gave her a pass of near-silence and the local women just smiled at her with pitying eyes whenever she walked by.
The loom beside her sat empty. Effie had handed in her notice after a single day. She had come to blows – quite literally – with Mrs Buchanan when she had turned up late the first morning, having assumed she would work with the men at the Forestry Commission. A drawn-out battle of wills had looked inevitable as Mrs Buchanan had instantly asserted her authority and Effie her independence, but to everyone’s surprise, the young woman had walked in provocatively late the next morning and resigned her post instead. She had been offered a role working for the Earl of Dumfries and she and her father were relocating once again, to his Ayrshire estate.
She wasn’t the only one gone. Lorna had travelled straight to Sutherland to be reunited with her family and Mhairi too had departed for imminent married life in Harris. The poor girl, still grieving her baby daughter, had been wretched with apprehension at what lay ahead and hadn’t left her bed at all for the first four days after getting here. Flora wished she could have fallen apart too; she wanted to pull at her own threads and unravel herself, become nothing. She was a ghost of herself, but her family needed her to work. To keep going. Money was their master now and jobs were hard to come by. They were fortunate, she kept hearing from the local women, that roles had been found for them all.
How had it come to this? She remembered midsummer’s day, not so very long ago, when her happy ending had shimmered as brilliantly as the ring on her finger and she had sat in Glen Bay with the girls, plucking the fulmars while making promises to them of full bellies and pretty dresses. But the world had inverted and her only comfort in these early weeks had come from curling around Mhairi at the end of each day as they lay in her bed and talked in low, hushed voices of all they had lost. Now, with Mhairi’s departure, even that was gone.
Flora knew she appeared whole, but in truth she was hollowed out inside. Grief had dug its claws into her and left her deadened. Every morning when she awoke, she felt veiled with a numbness that made even her heart beat dully; and as she sat at the loom, she wished away the daylight, willing the moon to rise so that she could slip back into the oblivion of sleep. Only Mrs Buchanan seemed pleased with this new, docile version of Flora MacQueen who kept her head down and worked hard, her hands moving in a synchronized pattern and her feet operating the pedals; she didn’t stir from the loom from the moment she arrived to the moment she left.
The St Kildan women had picked up their new roles quickly in these first few days here so that when they sat at the looms, they could scarcely be told apart from the locals except by the red plaid shawls they wore around their shoulders. Only when they moved away from the machines did they stand out: their home-made clothes didn’t yet have the finesse of the mainlanders’ wardrobes, their colour palettes too muted; their skin still too sunburnt and wind-whipped, their tread heavy as they moved about in boots all day.
In the afternoons, when the working day was done, they walked slowly through the village like a flock of hens, trying to get used to the coins jangling in their pockets and food being readily available to buy. Meat hung on hooks at the butcher’s; fish glistened on ice on the fishmonger’s shelves; fruit and vegetables in a rainbow of colours were heaped in baskets at the grocer’s. Meanwhile, the men had taken to going to the public house for an ale before coming home for their teas; it was a ritual that would have been inconceivable back home but the reverend was no longer here to castigate them, having slipped into the mainland morass to his new posting in the Lake District. They had been released from his watchful eye, and life was already different – none of the St Kildans had unlooped a rope since they’d set foot on the mainland, and none had killed for their supper. There was something to be said for ease.
‘Doctor!’
Flora was resetting the heddles when the word first came to her ear and she looked up, but the windows only allowed in light and were set too high to see through. Still, she knew the man’s voice and she knew the tone. Something terrible had happened.
‘Please! Someone help! Where’s the doctor?’
The St Kildan women recognized the voice too because they left their posts and rushed towards the double doors with alarmed faces. Behind the glass walls of her office, Mrs Buchanan looked up from her desk with a scowl.
‘Hai! Back to work, it’s not your break-time!’ she called as the women in red shawls congregated outside on the forecourt.
‘David, what is it?’ Flora heard Rachel MacKinnon ask as she got to him first.
‘There’s been . . . an accident,’ he panted, his voice dropping now that people were spilling out onto the street, his plea answered.
‘What? Who?’ the women cried.
Flora strained to hear her brother but only stray words drifted above the hubbub. ‘At the forestry . . . bleeding . . . We need the doctor!’
Flora began to walk towards the doors too; she felt her heart quicken but her feet were leaden. The birth was behind her – the milk had dried up, the bleeding stopped, her girlish figure returned – but her body still refused to do anything at speed.
‘Miss MacQueen, what is the meaning of this?’ Mrs Buchanan asked her crossly as she came and stood with her by the doors. She saw the St Kildan women’s faces were white with fear, clutching hands as they talked in their huddle. David, always the fastest of the men on the island, was running again towards a white cottage with a black door on the other side of the road. Had he run all the way here? It was several miles to the forestry site.
They watched as he hammered it with his fist until a man in glasses opened it. The two exchanged a few rapid words before David stepped back and the man disappeared inside the house again for a moment, reappearing with a large leather bag in his hand. He strode towards a car parked on the street.
David looked back at the gaggle of women and made a beckoning motion to their mother. Flora’s heart dropped and she pressed a hand to her mouth. Did that mean . . .?
‘I’ll ask you again,’ Mrs Buchanan repeated. ‘What is going on?’
David desperately scanned the crowd again, looking for another face. He stopped as he found her by the factory doors and made the beckoning motion with his arm once more. ‘You’d better come too, Flora,’ he called.
She felt her blood pool at her feet, her worst fears confirmed. ‘. . . My father’s been hurt,’ she whispered. And somehow, she ran.
They heard the cries before they saw the blood; the men had managed to get her father onto a long table and covered him with a sheet that they held above and away from his injury while they waited ‘for the doc’.
‘We were concerned with sawdust getting in the wound,’ a moustached man said, crossing the yard in five strides as the doctor jumped out of the car. The foreman had a bushy moustache and thick forearms with bulging blue veins. On one was a ragged scar running the length of his elbow to his wrist. Another accident?
Flora, in the back seat beside David, watched through the window as their father cried out at the sight of his wife running towards him. Christina rushed to his side, clutching his hand in hers and kissing it over and over. ‘There, there now, Arch,’ she soothed him, smoothing his hair back from his brow. ‘It’ll be fine, you’ll see. The doctor will take care of everything.’
‘Aye,’ Archie agreed, looking up at her as if she was the one who would save him, not the medic. He was panting with the pain.
David opened her car door and Flora looked up at him in surprise, for she hadn’t noticed him stirring beside her; she had been transfixed, appalled, by the sight of her father laid out on high, his body hidden from sight by the sheet.
‘Come, he needs us,’ he said quietly, extending a hand and pulling her up.
Her body resisted, images of blood, of emergency, of disaster flashing through her mind. It was too soon . . . she couldn’t endure another loss. She simply couldn’t.
Her brother, seeming to understand her distress, tucked her hand under his arm and slowly led her across the yard.
The day seemed not to have registered this violent tear in its silken drape. The sky was sullen, sheep grazing in nearby fields, wildflowers winking in the grass, birdsong a melody that couldn’t be caught. The ground was soft underfoot, even in boots; sawdust and chippings scattered thickly, vast tree trunks stacked like walls, denuded of their branches and leaves. There were various large outbuildings and some strange vehicles that seemed to be just giant wheels with a seat on top, chains attached to the back.
‘Aren’t we just so lucky we’re here now and not back home?’ Christina was saying, still gripping her husband’s hand. ‘You’d be in a tight spot over there.’
Archie nodded, closing his eyes as his wife’s voice babbled like a cooling stream, passing no comment that no such injury could ever have occurred back there, on an island with no trees, with no mechanical saws.
Flora thought of Lorna, of her calm, capable manner and the way she exuded authority and confidence even in a crisis. She had always said she was ‘just’ a nurse, but she had done everything a doctor could do – nursing them through sickness and fevers, cleaning and bandaging wounds, delivering babies – and if anyone did die, it was always on account of lack of supplies or medicines, not medical expertise. Flora would have chosen Lorna over a doctor any day.
‘Show me,’ the doctor said, standing by his patient now. The men holding the sheet lowered it and Flora felt an icy wind whip through her. David immediately hooked an arm around her, her big brother holding her up as she fell back slightly; the whiteness of their father’s face had served as a terrible contrast with the vast slicks of bright, arterial glistening blood pooled on the ground, but the injury itself . . .
Her father’s right foot hung limply at a grotesque angle. It had never been good following a climbing accident in his youth when he had fallen on Connachair and his life was saved only by the rope tightening around his ankle. He had dangled, upside down, for more than an hour before help had come, but the damage to the nerves had been done and he’d walked with a limp ever since. It was a matter of personal pride that he didn’t need a stick, but he couldn’t climb well or run, and he had made a point of ‘pulling his weight’ by becoming the strongest rower instead.
‘Tell me exactly what happened, Lennox,’ the doctor said in grim tones, bending down to inspect the wound. The flesh of the lower leg had been badly mangled so that Flora could see bone through the flailed tissue. The cut wasn’t neat either – no merciful sword strike but a jagged, raging mess. Someone had tied a rag around her father’s knee and his leg was supported on a wooden block.
‘Willie McIntosh and Barnaby Munro had just finished up on a fir in the prep hut . . .’ The foreman pointed towards a long, low building with double doors. ‘They were overdue their break so they set the misery whip down and went off. Callum here says a freak gust of wind blew in as they went out and the whip toppled – just as this poor fella came by. He couldn’a get out o’ the way in time.’
There was a collective groan from the men at the bad luck of it all.
‘What’s a misery whip?’ Flora asked her brother in a whisper.
‘A two-man cross-cut saw,’ David murmured. ‘It can take them a day to saw through the bigger trees.’
‘Oh.’
Everyone fell quiet as the doctor examined the wound closely, his eyes slitted as he observed the torn skin, muscles, tendons and ligaments. After a minute, he rolled up her father’s sleeve and tapped firmly on his exposed elbow joint.
‘You men did well to get the bleeding under control,’ he murmured, rubbing something Flora couldn’t see into Archie’s skin. He reached into his bag and pulled out a needle and a small clear bottle of liquid. Setting the bottle upside down, he pierced the cap and began to slowly draw.
‘What is that?’ Christina breathed as the doctor began to inject the liquid into her husband’s arm.
‘A sedative,’ he murmured. ‘I’ll have to put some stitches in here to get him stabilized before we move him. It’s a Grade Three laceration, a deep tissue injury. It’s unfortunate it is so untidy; he’ll need to be transferred to the infirmary for surgical treatment.’
‘Where’s the infirmary?’ Christina asked, sounding scared but trying not to show it.
‘Fort William. Reasonably close as the crow flies, but unfortunately there’s a loch to cross.’ He looked at Mr Lennox again. ‘Get on the telephone to the Corran ferrymaster and tell him we’ve an emergency. He’s to be waiting for us, north side, in two hours. He must be there, tell him. For as long as the wound is open, the patient risks infection.’
‘Two hours?’ Christina echoed.
‘To the ferry. Then another hour on the other side,’ Mr Lennox supplied as the doctor moved his attention off her, reaching back into his bag and pulling on a pair of rubber gloves. ‘The journey used to be a lot longer with the horse-drawn ambulance, but we took delivery of the motor ambulance just last year. So that’s something.’ His attempt at optimism fell on deaf ears and he disappeared a moment later into an office at the far end of the building to make his calls.
‘I’m afraid this will hurt,’ the doctor said, immediately sousing the wound with a liquid that made her father cry out, his body arching and rigid.
Flora blanched; she had never seen her father express pain before. David too dropped his head, unable to watch, his fingertips pressing into her shoulder.
‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor murmured, wincing as he continued to squeeze the bottle, clear liquid oozing into and out of the injury. ‘But it must be done. It’s necessary to clean the site as best we can; I don’t want to sew in any foreign bodies . . . You should start to feel drowsy in a few moments.’
‘Is my husband going to recover, doctor?’ Christina whispered, clutching Archie’s hands in both of hers. His return grip was already weakening, the fingers beginning to straighten as the sedative took effect. Within moments his eyes were closing, his body relaxing.
The doctor carefully threaded a curved needle. ‘That depends on what you mean by recover. He should survive, provided there are no complications . . . but whether he’ll ever walk again . . .’
His eyes met Christina’s for a brief, apologetic moment, before he looked back down again and began to stitch.