The Island Wife

by Jessica Stirling

Genres: Sagas

Synopsis

Set in 1878, this is the story of Biddy and Innes, two young girls from a large crofting and fishing family on the Isle of Mull, whose world is thrown into confusion by the arrival of a handsome young shepherd. Tragedy follows when they both fall in love with the same man.

Release date: March 29, 2012

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 446

Sample

ONE

The Coming of the Sheep

Out beyond the skerries the sea lay smooth as cornsilk in the oppressive heat of the August afternoon. Inshore, south of the farm, great beds of kelp and bladder wrack heaved sluggishly against the ledges of basaltic rock that slack water had exposed. In the bay itself there was no motion at all, save where the burn fanned into the sea’s edge like a tuck in a seam, as if, Innis thought, the island itself had shrunk in the hot spell and needed restitching.

She disliked the hot, breathless days, the brassy evenings when the sun hovered long over the Treshnish Isles and made the big blue mountains of Skye seem sullen and ominous. Fortunately such spells were rare on the west coast of Scotland. This one had lasted near a fortnight, though, and had rendered Innis and her sisters bad-tempered. They would girn and grumble and might even have given way to wrestling on the grass, like Neil and Donnie, if their mother had not been there to remind them that not only were they supposed to be ladies but that there was work to be done.

Heavy work it was too in that dusty summer of 1878. In the field on the shoulder of Olaf’s Hill the oats and barley crop was almost ready for the sickle. There were calves to be weaned and hay stooks still to be brought in. The running of the farm was left to Vassie and her daughters, for her husband and sons could not be expected to sacrifice so much as one day’s fishing, not even to help erect the boundary wall. To hear Vassie speak of it, digging out a drystone dike that had lain half buried since long before the Campbells had set foot on Mull was hardly more than casual repair work. But apart from drawing milk and gathering eggs, farm labours had been put entirely to one side while Vassie and the girls unearthed the ancient wall that divided the fields of Pennypol from the rest of the Fetternish estate.

Shrouded in weeds and bramble-thorn the wall ran from the edge of the pine wood to the shoulder of the burn. From the outset the girls had known that it would test their strength and stamina but the advent of sultry weather had turned the task into racking drudgery.

What they could not have foreseen was the strange effect that uncovering the ancient stones would have on their sister Aileen who had grown hardly at all in stature or intelligence since her tenth year – she was now fifteen – and who could not read, or write more than her name. Until recently Aileen’s simplemindedness had seemed harmless. In the past year, however, it had taken on a sinister tone, for she was for ever sneaking off to kneel among the standing stones or hide in the ruins of the old fort at Dun Fidra to commune with the people under the hill. She claimed that the fairies spoke with her and played the timpan, the fairy harp, for her benefit and, in payment, she fed them curds and gulls’ eggs and offered them wild flowers and berries to appease their mischievous natures.

‘Well, now,’ Father had said, when Vassie expressed concern about Aileen’s mental state, ‘Aileen would not be the first in your family to be going the way of the devil.’

‘Do you think it is the devil that is in her?’

‘Since it cannot be the fairies, who can it be but the devil?’

‘Is it not yourself, Ronan Campbell, who has been carried away by the devil?’ Mother would say. ‘The devil that comes out of a bottle. There is nothing wrong with Aileen that could not be cured by a better example.’

Ronan Campbell was as broad and bulky as a bale of wool, Vassie as thin and sharp as clipping shears. When they argued about the children or the future of the farm, Vassie’s voice would rise like the squeak of a nail on wet wood and Father’s patient sighs would become wheezy. She would scrape away at him all night long and squeeze no more out of him than a slow, lopsided grin that was so smug and arrogant that Innis did not know whose side to take and, unlike her sister Biddy, wound up taking no side at all.

In temperament if not appearance, Biddy was very much her mother’s daughter: all teeth and temper. At twenty she was still without a husband in spite of her beautiful auburn hair, sea green eyes and statuesque figure. While the look of her attracted men like bees to clover, there was within her a devouring quality that soon withered the horns of male lust. Only Aileen, with hair as pale as bog-cotton and eyes as blue as infinity, could render Biddy speechless, for Biddy stood in awe of her little sister and treated her if not with affection at least with caution. There was precious little time to fret about Aileen’s antics during August, though, for work on the wall consumed all the girls’ energy and attention.

Biddy handled the pick and Innis the spade. Hair spiky with sweat and eyes vacant, Aileen dug out the smaller stones and washed them in the buckets of salt water that Mother lugged up from the sea. She washed them as if they were objects of great value and would croon over them and cradle them in her arms for a moment before she chipped off a rough edge or shaped a coping with the little road-mender’s hammer that her father had found for her.

Weather-brown face shiny with sweat, Vassie did most of the lifting and setting and only the biggest of the stones defeated her wiry strength. One hundred and eighty-eight yards of stock-proof boundary wall were gradually redeemed from the earth at the rate of twelve paces a day. Eight days in the fortnight were scorched by bright, glary sunshine. Six were dunned by grey, oppressive heat. Ronan and the boys would come up from the shore in the evening and inspect the wall and, nodding, would stoop and lift a flint or a pebble, fit it into a crack or little vacancy and give it a delicate tap. Then they would step back and murmur with self-approval as if that one stone was all it took to make the women’s work complete.

But there was more to unearthing the old stones than Vassie Campbell had imagined. The wall did not end at the Pennypol burn. It swarmed away across the moor and up over the clifftop and across the ridge that led to Quinish and inland to Dervaig, and, for all the Campbells knew, continued on to Mornish and Calgary and the shores of Loch Tuath. If all the buried hummocks and mounds had been unearthed a great chain of stones might have been found to link the lost communities of the Hebridean coast and unite the fragile settlements that the landowners’ greed had all but swept away.

Biddy and Innis were too exhausted to consider the wall’s historical significance. All they wanted to do was flop on the grass and idly watch the clouds form overhead. They could no longer be bothered to enquire what strange creatures Vassie expected to come trotting down the glen to snuffle at the dike that they had helped her build.

They were two or three yards short of the burn when the first of the sheep stuck its head up out of the bracken. Perched on a short wooden ladder, Vassie stiffened and yelled, ‘By God, they are here already,’ then she stepped backward into space, landed like a cat and sprang for the dump at the back of the house before Innis and Biddy even knew what was upon them.

Biddy stood motionless, hands on hips, staring inland towards Crove while the bleating came closer and dust from the drove road rose in a pall like smoke. Innis glanced out to sea in the faint, fond hope that Father’s boat might come winging around the headland; of course, it did not. So, stirring herself, she scampered down the slope to help her mother with the rusted harrow that she, Vassie, was dragging up from behind the house.

Vassie had knotted a tattered rope to the broken frame. She dragged it like a sled, bouncing and snagging on the tussocks, and yelled at the pitch of her voice, ‘Keep away. Keep away,’ as if it were Vikings pouring over the hill to pillage and rape and not just a flock of knee-weary sheep seeking green grass.

The first thing Innis saw of Baverstocks’ invaders was a rough-coated black and white collie. It reached the wall top with a sharp little scrabble of claws and peered down at them curiously, tongue lolling and tail wagging. Then there was a whistle, and a shout in the English tongue, ‘Roy, come down at once.’ The dog twisted round in a dainty half-circle and leaped out of sight.

‘Quick, quick, we must be quick,’ Vassie cried. She yanked at the rope and brought the harrow – and Innis with it – to the gap at the end of the wall.

The wooden frame, split in an ugly vee, was not as high as the wall but its spikes would be enough to deter any sheep, however nosy, from breaking through. A rake of stones and brushwood would finish the job well enough. Dipping and ducking through the bracken, the Baverstocks’ sheep emerged in single file, silent at first, then, when they reached the turf that lapped down from the moor, breaking into a loud baa-ing and bleating that grew deafening as the flock coagulated, bewildered and rowdy, against the base of the wall.

The shepherd was a spare young man, not much more than twenty-five years old. He was sallow, with jet black hair, sleek as sealskin. He wore a flannel shirt open all the way down so that his lean, hairless chest showed and his flat, hairless belly, down to the belt that supported his breeks. He had no hat on his head and carried nothing but a crook. He said nothing as he approached and did not smile. He seemed as neat and solemn and as out of place as the big, spongy sheep that he drove before him or the lithe collie that tripped obediently at his heel.

Biddy was first to find her voice. She addressed him in English, not Gaelic. ‘What is it you are wanting here?’ Hands on hips, hair like a mane, bosom heaving, she was so tall and haughty and handsome that even the collie, never mind the shepherd, stopped and blinked.

The incomer answered in English. ‘I want nothing here.’

He was no islander, Innis felt sure. He was more like one of the young lairds that came to open the cattle show or one of pursers off the steamers that plied the sightseeing route round Staffa. He had a clean, scrubbed look to him, an expression not so much patronising as patient. In case he was more educated than he looked, though, she tried him in her native tongue. ‘Do you not know whose land this is?’

He shook his head and shrugged. He did not understand.

Innis could smell the sheep now. Two hundred Cheviots had a different smell to the handful of little Blackfaces that had once cropped the neighbouring pastures. She had seen enough of Cheviots to suspect that they would not fare well on Fetternish.

‘I don’t speak the Gaelic, miss. I’m sorry.’

Biddy said, ‘Are you an Englishman, then?’

‘No, nothing as bad as that.’

‘I asked if you knew what place this is?’ Innis said.

‘The estate of Fetternish, I believe.’

Although his voice lacked the formal quality of island speech it was quite comprehensible, unlike the grating of gruff Glaswegians or the twang of Aberdeen trawlermen whom Innis had encountered on visits to Tobermory. And, thank God, it was a far cry from the mewing of the southern gentry who spilled across the Hebrides in such profusion every summer.

‘Aye, sir, the ground upon which you are standing may be the estate of Fetternish,’ Vassie said, ‘but if you are taking ten more steps then you will be on my ground and I will be putting you off it as a trespasser.’

‘Are you afraid I’ll eat your grass, Mrs Campbell?’

‘So you know who I am, do you now?’

‘I’ve been told who you are. And what you are.’

‘And what is it that I am then?’ Vassie demanded.

‘You are the proprietor of Pennypol, so I’m informed, and as fine a farming lady as is to be found this side of Morven.’

Vassie gave no sign that his flattery pleased her. She was still quivering with the effort of hauling the harrow up the hill. Innis, though, hid a smile behind her hand, for she realised that the young shepherd had been instructed, probably by Mr Thrale, not to antagonise the quarrelsome Campbells.

‘It is my father, Ronan Campbell, who is the owner,’ Innis said.

This, of course, was a lie. Ten minutes’ conversation in the McKinnon Arms at Crove would supply the incomer with the whole truth about Pennypol, whether he wished to hear it or whether he did not. Land, house, stock and plenishings, such as they were, belonged to Vassie not Ronan Campbell. His sole possession was the boat. The arrangement was unique on the north part of the island and the fact that a crofting woman owned land in her own name and in her own right was considered somehow shameful.

‘What is your name?’ Biddy said.

‘My name is Michael Tarrant.’

‘What are you, Mr Tarrant?’ Biddy went on. ‘A hired drover, or have the Baverstocks appointed you to look after their flock?’

‘I’m here to stay, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Where did you come from?’

‘Up from the pier at Calgary.’

‘She is meaning where is your home,’ Vassie said.

‘I was raised in the Ettrick Hills in the Border country.’

‘Is that where these damned sheep also come from?’ Vassie said.

‘They were bought at the Perth sales, so I’m told.’

‘Were you not there when the purchase was made?’ Biddy said.

Michael Tarrant shook his head. ‘The purchase was made by Mr Thrale, who I think you already know.’

‘Aye, we know Thrale only too well,’ Vassie said.

‘Will you be settling on Fetternish, Mr Tarrant?’ Innis asked.

Uncertain of his bearings, he gestured towards Olaf’s Hill. ‘In the cottage over – over in that direction.’

‘Then we will be neighbours,’ said Innis.

‘Friendly neighbours, I hope,’ said Michael Tarrant.

‘We will never be friendly neighbours,’ Vassie informed him. ‘You are with the Baverstocks and the Baverstocks will not be our friends, neither them, nor their hirelings, nor their damned sheep.’

‘Have you met the brothers, then?’ Michael asked.

‘No, I have not met them,’ Vassie answered. ‘Nor will I be likely to meet them since they are Edinburgh gentlemen and will not be wishing to hob-nob with humble folk like us.’

‘Well’ – Michael shrugged – ‘I haven’t met them either, Mrs Campbell. But by all accounts they are honest enough and intend to do well by Fetternish.’

‘To do well for themselves, you mean,’ said Vassie. ‘I do not have to be meeting them to know that they will be no different from all the other lairds that have come to ruin the Highlands.’

‘Because they cleared the crofters’ land to make way for sheep, do you mean?’ Michael Tarrant said.

‘Because they destroyed what was here before they came.’

‘And what was that, Mrs Campbell?’

‘Crofts and townships …’

‘And poverty?’ Michael Tarrant said. ‘Dire poverty?’

‘Poverty!’ Vassie yelled. ‘Do you dare to talk to me of poverty? I tell you I have seen the people here who would eat the husks of the oats and gnaw at the tips of the heather plants to fill their empty bellies. I have seen folk standing in Loch Cuin on a winter’s day dredging for crabs that even the herons would not take, just to have something to put in their children’s mouths.’

Innis had heard the accounts of the enforced evictions so often that she could recite the litany of suffering in her sleep: Calgary in 1822. Mishnish in 1842. The scouring of Ulva in ’51. Treshnish in ’62. The callous deceptions that had been perpetrated on the crofters of Dervaig to cheat them out of their grazing land. The cottages of Sorn burned down to make way for sheep.

Only a mile or two along the coast, a certain Mr James Forsyth had erected the towering castle of Glengorm, a monument to arrogance and ambition. Though Forsyth had not lived to occupy the place it had become a landmark for every salt and sightseer who rounded the Point of Ardnamurchan or slid past the rocky corner of Ardmore.

Fetternish too had been cleared. Nothing remained of the old communities now except heaps of stones and patches of bright green grass where the middens had been. Fetternish had changed hands several times since then, for none of the owners had been able to make it thrive. Now the long spit of cliffs and moorland had changed hands again, had been put up for auction and sold to two brothers who had never set foot on Mull and who knew little or nothing about farming.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Campbell,’ Michael said. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’

Innis felt a certain sympathy for the incomer. He had much to learn about the pride of the islanders and the scars that history had laid upon them.

‘Go away,’ Biddy shouted. ‘We are cattle people and have no dealings with sheep or with shepherds.’

Michael Tarrant regarded Biddy with interest. He watched her shake out her auburn mane and swell her breast and, Innis thought, present a picture that was both alluring and ridiculous at one and the same time. She wondered if they had girls like Biddy on the Ettrick Hills or if, like so many things on Mull, her sister was unique.

‘I see you have built a fine wall here, Mrs Campbell,’ Michael Tarrant said. ‘But, like all walls, it has two sides to it.’

‘What is that supposed to be meaning?’ Vassie said.

‘As you have pointed out, it’ll keep me and my sheep from straying on to Pennypol but it will also keep your kye from straying on to Fetternish. The grazings belong to my employers now. I have every right to remain where I am until every blade of grass, every buttercup and docken has been devoured down to the root. Here, where I stand, is not your ground, Mrs Campbell. You have no right to shout at me to move on.’

‘I am not shouting at you,’ Vassie yelled. ‘I never shout.’

‘Then all I can say is that conversations on Mull must be conducted at very long distances,’ said Michael Tarrant. ‘Frankly, Mrs Campbell, I have heard railway engines make less noise coming out of tunnels.’

Vassie had never seen let alone heard a railway engine. Even so the meaning of the insult was clear. She opened her mouth to protest but no words came only a little ‘uh-uh-uh,’ like a ewe in labour. She leaned against the broken harrow and pointed at the shepherd as if she hoped that she might put the sign of lightning upon him and shrivel him on the spot for his audacity.

Biddy was less backward. She rushed at the incomer with her fists raised but before she could deliver a blow Michael Tarrant tripped her neatly with the tip of his crook and caught her as she fell. He held her as no man had ever done, very tightly, smothering her flailing arms with his hands and deflecting her knees with his thigh to prevent damage to valuable parts of his anatomy.

‘No, Miss Campbell,’ he murmured. ‘No, that will not do at all.’

‘Let me go. Let – me – go.’

‘If I do, will you behave yourself?’

‘Let me …’

He put his cheek against her cheek, not affectionately, and whispered something into her ear.

Biddy was still in an instant. He released her and stepped quickly away.

‘I’ll be going now,’ he said. ‘Not because you have ordered it, Mrs Campbell, but because it is high time I got these poor sheep on to the home pasture. How soon will it be dark?’

Innis opened her mouth to answer but Biddy got there before her.

‘In four hours.’

‘Thank you, Miss Campbell.’

‘Biddy. I am called Biddy.’

‘Bridget – an Irish name?’

She blushed, gave her hair a shake and nodded. ‘After my grandmother.’

‘A very pretty name,’ Michael said. ‘And you, miss?’

‘Innis.’

‘And what about you, wee lady?’ Michael said.

None of them, apart from Michael, had noticed Aileen. She had climbed the inside of the wall and rested her forearms on the coping, her chin supported on cupped hands. Without a trace of fear she stared down at the collie, at the milling sheep and at the stranger. For once her vacant blue eyes had a glitter of interest in them. She did not answer the shepherd’s question, though. Instead she giggled, lifted her shoulders, and cocked her head so that her face was coyly veiled by strands of fine, pale hair.

‘She is called Aileen,’ Innis said.

‘There now,’ Michael said. ‘Have I met you all?’

‘Aye, Mr Tarrant, so you will be knowing who we are and how to avoid us.’ Vassie had found her voice again. ‘There is nothing here for the likes of you.’

He smiled for the first time, a broad grin that showed white, even teeth.

‘I would not be so sure of that, Mrs Campbell,’ Michael Tarrant said.

It was late in the evening before Ronan Campbell and his sons, Neil and Donnie, returned to the jetty at Pennypol at the end of a profitable day’s fishing.

August was the best month for lobsters and the haul from the pots strung out along the reef had been good. They had ferried the catch straight to the slipway at Croig where Mr Drury, a fish agent from Oban, was on hand to pick up the best of it, and servants from the big houses had come to buy fish and shellfish straight from the boats. Since this was the height of the shooting season the island was thick with visitors all demanding to be fed, and the lobsters had fetched higher prices than usual.

There was no inn at Croig but it was just a short sail to Fergus Haggerty’s turf-roofed cottage under the cliffs at Arkle where Fergus kept a still going in the byre and maintained a reputation for being able to supply whisky untainted by an exciseman’s gauge. The whisky was very dark and tasted of seaweed and peat ash but it was palatable enough after you got the first glass down. Some lairds even claimed to prefer it to the stuff that came out of labelled bottles and presented it to their hardier guests as ‘the real McKay’, by which they meant that it could lay you on your back faster than a blow from a ten-pound hammer.

Fergus’s illicit whisky – any sort of whisky – was good enough for Ronan Campbell. Forty odd years of imbibing the stuff had numbed him to its injurious effects. Nobody could recall ever having seen Ronan the worse for drink, possibly because nobody could ever recall having seen Ronan completely sober. The equitable haze that enveloped Ronan Campbell’s mental faculty was the sole reason for his popularity. It was impossible to argue with him, to rouse him to disagreement, let alone passion. He seemed so easy-going that even sharp-witted fish merchants and wily cattle dealers could not find it in their hearts to cheat him by much and he appeared to drift through life without a care in the world. No money either, of course. Never a penny to spare to give to his girls to buy earrings or a card of petticoat lace. Never a sixpence left to put into the bank for a rainy day. The farm fed him, the fishing supplied him with money for drink, and as far as Ronan was concerned this system worked just fine.

Whatever small luxuries the Campbells had acquired had been wrested from Ronan’s clutches by stealth and deception. Lying was endemic to Vassie’s relationship with her husband. It had spilled over into the girls’ relationship with their brothers too, so that at times it seemed as if there were not just two sexes sharing the Pennypol cottage but two warring clans. Only on the rare occasions when farm labour demanded more muscle than women could provide would Ronan forsake his creels and lines.

With a sigh, Ronan would say, ‘Well, now, Vassie, I suppose you will be needing us for the cutting tomorrow. What do you say, lads? Do you think we should be lending a helping hand?’

‘We will have to be thinking about that,’ Neil would say, frowning.

‘The crop will not wait for you to do your thinking,’ Vassie would say. ‘It is ripe for the sickle and the weather is dry.’

‘It is a pity that there is such a fine run of lobsters on. Still’ – the smile, the sly, crooked smile – ‘still, if that is the way of it I suppose it will just have to be. And a bit of a rest from the boat will do us no harm.’

‘It is a pity about the lobsters, though,’ Donnie would put in.

‘A pity, a great pity. But that is the way of it, is it not? We will just be having to put our work aside to help out the women with theirs.’

The building of the wall elicited no admiration from Ronan and his sons. It was treated as another idiosyncrasy, another of Vassie’s fancies. However much it might appear to the contrary, though, Ronan and Donnie understood only too well the importance of having a barrier to keep out the sheep. Even Neil, a huge lummox of a boy, was intelligent enough to suspect that the sale of Fetternish to strangers would alter things on Pennypol and that the establishment of a boundary wall was no whim but a necessity.

Norman McAlpin, the last owner of Fetternish, had been a farmer of sorts. Consequently he had understood the struggle to make ends meet and had been easy in his dealings with his neighbours. McAlpin, though, had overextended himself and had run into debt. To avoid a shameful bankruptcy he had put Fetternish up for auction in the library of the New Athenian Club where, according to rumour, it had been knocked down to the Baverstocks for a song. The Baverstocks were a different kettle of fish from McAlpin. They were businessmen, not farmers. Their wealth stemmed from tweed cloth production. They had inherited the family manufactory in the Border town of Sangster but prudently left the management of the place in the hands of their brother-in-law, Alister Paul, whom they had made a full and active partner.

The fact that Fetternish had brought three previous owners to their knees did not deter the Baverstocks. They had, of course, an immediate outlet for any quantity of wool that Fetternish might produce and would not be at the mercy of brokers and dealers. They had retained Hector Thrale, McAlpin’s factor, to manage the estate and, so it was said, had grand plans to refurbish and extend the ‘big house’. The coming of the sheep was the first sure sign that the Baverstocks meant business, however, and it was not until Ronan and his sons walked up from the jetty and saw the pale shapes of the Cheviots dotting the hillside that they were willing to concede that Vassie had been right and that it was no bad thing to have a wall behind you after all.

Dusk had come down. The rim of the sun, round as an orange, showed beneath a lid of cloud. Swarms of gnats had risen from bog and beach and hung in spirals in the fetid air. From the calf park and along the shore the roaring of tormented cattle rose loud and prolonged. Inside the cottage a haze of peat smoke and sweltering steam from cooking pots kept the midges at bay and the only annoyance came from the glossy black flies that crawled over pots and plates, impervious to Vassie’s irritable attacks with the back of an iron spoon or a rolled-up copy of the Oban Times.

Curved around the stones of the open fireplace, the Campbells’ dog, a portly lurcher named Fingal, opened one eye, contemplated the arrivals and, by way of greeting, broke wind and yawned.

‘I see that they are here then.’ Ronan seated himself at the table that occupied the centre of the room. ‘Who drove them across from Calgary? Thrale would it be?’

‘No, a shepherd, a new shepherd,’ Biddy answered. ‘He comes from a place called Ettrick.’

‘Aye, like his sheep, I’m thinking,’ Donnie said.

Donnie was his father’s double, small-boned but muscular, with a square cleft chin and small, almost prissy mouth. His grandmother had been a famous Irish beauty and Donnie’s lashes were embarrassingly long, his neck so slender that it made his head seem top-heavy. He was the oldest child of the family, twenty months older than Bridget, who was twelve months older than Neil.

The men occupied the chairs around the table. Aileen perched close to her father on a high four-legged stool that she had used since she was a baby. Ladling and serving were brisk. Broth first of all, then a dish of boiled cod done with potatoes and a thin butter sauce; hard bread sliced thick and tea, tea as black as boiler tar, to wash it all down.

Biddy, by right, took the last chair. Seated on low rush-bottomed stools that placed them beneath the level of the table, Vassie and Innis ate from bowls balanced in their laps. Women as well as men ate quickly, hungrily. Supper was over in ten minutes. Bowls and plates were removed and put outside on the grass for the hens to peck at or for Fingal to lick clean.

Through the open doorway Innis looked out at the darkening sky. The sun had gone down into cloud. There was no iridescence on the surface of the sea and the waves, such as they were, reflected no light in the smothering gloom. There was the sound of them, though, for the doldrums never stilled that rhythm, that soft ‘pah-daaah’ that on calm nights seemed almost like the beating of your heart.

She was sticky with sweat. Her petticoat clung to her hips and her breasts were pasted to the lining of her bodice. Even her bare legs felt prickly, as if she had walked through nettles. It would be a hot night again too, lying in the vee-shaped loft just under the thatch with Biddy on one side, Aileen on the other and the straw sticking into her and the blanket rough and itchy.

She put down her teacup and, saying nothing, went outside. She did not take the lantern. Later, she would accompany her mother to the calf park to inspect the beasts that had been dropped that summer. Then Mam and she would return arm-in-arm by the back of the byre to see if they could spot where the hens were roosting and where, in the morning, the eggs might be found. There had been a time when Ronan and Vassie had made this l