Page 4 of The Midnight Secret

‘He reckons he’ll need it at last, so he tried to send Wee Murran up the chimney looking for it.’ David rolled his eyes. ‘Suffice it to say, Rachel was not pleased.’

‘I thought I heard a racket,’ Jayne nodded, smiling. It would mean another round of scrubbing shirts in the burn before they got on the boat. ‘Did you see Norman anywhere?’ Her husband had scarce been home the last two nights.

‘Aye, down at the factor’s house. Thick as thieves, they were. I think he’ll be the only person not to be glad to see the back of Frank Mathieson.’

‘Aye. I can’t understand it myself,’ she murmured, although she thought perhaps she did. To the rest of the village, the landlord’s rent collector and ‘man on the ground’ was a bully. He lorded it over them all and, some of the men were convinced, pocketed the hefty difference between the rates at which he bought from them and sold on to others. But her husband was an ambitious man; he had proved as much when he’d denied his sister her heart’s wish to marry David.News of the evacuation had excited him. With Molly gone, he had become ever more dissatisfied with life here – with her – and he now saw a chance for themoreandbetterLorna had promised.

Unlike everyone else, Norman viewed Mathieson as his equal; he saw himself as a man of the world, not of the soil. He knew the factor had seen things and been places, and although her husband was too proud to ask for advice, he absorbed Mathieson’s vainglorious boasts and stories like a sponge. He was learning from him; he wanted to know as much as possible.

‘There’s Mhairi,’ David murmured, his eyes fixed up the slopes of Oiseval. Jayne followed his gaze towards the distant, flame-haired figure heading for the fanks on the An Lag plateau. A flock of sheep trotted before her, herded by two dogs, one of which was Poppit. Jayne’s eyes automatically scanned for Effie too, for she and Poppit were never parted. Sure enough, she was up ahead, arms wide as she channelled the animals into the correct enclosure. There was vivacity in her movements and Jayne could tell, even from here, that Effie was glad to be with her friend again. Mhairi and Flora had trialled summering on the distant pastures, and if Jayne herself had felt the loss of their company, poor Effie had been as lonesome as a ghost.

She watched as the flock grouped in nervous clusters against the stone walls. They were moving easily and breathing freely now, but it had been very different on the day of the snowstorm back in November. How could something so innocuous have turned so deadly? At first, it had been Mhairi who was almost lost; but there she was now, standing in the sun, while Molly lay in the ground here beside them. The reversal of fortune had come as a shock to all but Jayne.

She looked away sharply, David doing the same, and she knew they were sharing the same thought. It happened a lot.

‘What will we do on the other side, when we can’t come here?’ David murmured.

Her chest tightened at the question. It was something she had been asking herself in the quiet hours, but her voice was calm and level when she spoke. ‘We’ll still talk, you and I, just in a new place. We’ll find somewhere special Molly would have loved.’

She smiled with encouragement, but a small frown puckered his brow. ‘But what if they don’t keep us all together?’

‘They have said they will try, and I...I choose to take them at their word,’ she replied after a moment, unable to bear the alternative. She knew that like her, he had no one else to talk to about Molly. The villagers, their friends, had already moved on; Molly was still beloved, but her name was already infrequently mentioned as the seasons began to run one into another, and she would be left even further behind once they sailed from these shores. There was no time to dwell on death on St Kilda when they had to work so hard at staying alive.

‘But what if they don’t, Jayne?’ he persisted.

She swallowed. ‘Then I hope we can write to one another and continue to talk that way.’

He looked over at her, and she saw it was an inadequate solution. So much of what they shared went unsaid, sitting together in silences crowded with thoughts and memories. How would that translate on a page? For the first time, she realized that it was not just Molly she might lose, but David too. Life could part them with the same ease as death. Their new friendship was like a glass bubble, strong and fragile all at once: it floated here, but would it shatter on the mainland?

He was still staring, as if reading her thoughts, before he looked away abruptly and tightened his grip around his knees. Neither of them spoke for several moments. ‘Jayne, I came up here because...well, there’s something I wanted to put to you.’

‘Oh?’

‘I wondered if we might stay with her here together, on the last night? I...I don’t want her to be alone.’

‘You mean tosleephere?’

‘Under the stars, aye. Molly’s never going to have our company again. I can’t bear to think of her alone for all the nights to come, when this place is silent.’

Jayne felt a sob come to her throat and pulse there at the thought of it too. Complete abandonment. There would be no human life treading the grass any more, only bones in the earth.

‘So?’ he prompted.

Still she hesitated. How would she explain to her husband that her last night on St Kilda would be spent here and not in their bed? She knew he would not take it well, but she saw the plea in David’s eyes and nodded. For his sake, for Molly’s, she would make it happen. Norman could join them if he so chose – Molly was his sister, after all – but she knew only too well that he was not sentimental. ‘I think that would be a lovely way to say goodbye,’ she murmured.

‘Good. I’m glad you agree,’ he said, getting to his feet and brushing the grass from his trousers. ‘I’d best get on. Pa wants me to help him with bringing down the loom.’

The looms, cumbersome items that took up half a room, were stored in the rafters through the summer months and their removal to the ground was a sign they were in the lee of the move. Tomorrow, SSDunara Castlewould drop anchor in the bay and they would begin the process of moving theirhousehold belongings and animals aboard. The day after that, the HMSHarebellwould come for the villagers themselves, and the evacuation would be under way.

Jayne couldn’t bear to think of the island falling silent. After two thousand years of human settlement, their ancient rock was being left to the wind and the waves, the birds and the sheep. There would be no more evening news along the street; the chimneys would no longer puff with peat smoke. Sailors harbouring from a storm would find no friendly welcome on the beach.

She watched David walk away, past the many other rudimentary crosses stuck in the ground. He was fully grown now, tall and rangy with an easy lope that was clearly discernible even at a distance – at least, it was to her. His almost-black hair had a curl at the collar and his hazel-green eyes were always kind. It occurred to Jayne that his future was far brighter than he could see from this spot; his heart was still tied to Molly, in part because there was nothing more here for him, but there would be plenty of girls on the mainland who’d like the look of such a fine young man. He had prospects even if he couldn’t see them yet, and Jayne felt her own heart ache for Molly. She was going to lose him for good on the other side.

They both would.

‘You’re back,’ she said, looking up from the stool as Norman walked through. He was sunburnt from the long and relentless days outside recently, his linen shirt tucked inside the waistband of his trousers like a rag. He looked especially handsome, but if her heart still skipped a beat at the sight of him, her body withdrew.

She watched as he bent to wash himself in the bucket, musclesrippling with careless grace. Their marriage had come to balance on an uneasy point, a strange tension formed between distrust and lust, despair and resignation. Over the years, she had come to understand why he had proposed to her, plain Jayne: she was little more than a shadow in the room, pale warmth in the bed. He had married her precisely because she was the bare minimum, taking up no room in his life.

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