Page 83 of The Midnight Secret

She felt Archie’s hand on her arm. ‘I say, are you feeling all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘This horn,’ she said. ‘Is it...is it capped with a silver rim and stamped with small marks?’

‘Why, yes...’ Archie did a double take as they flew over a humped bridge. ‘Wait, Effie – how the devil did you know that?’

Chapter Twenty-Four

MHAIRI

17 March 1931

Lochaline

The bell rang and the clacking looms came to an abrupt halt. Mhairi pushed back on her chair, glancing around the factory floor as the women stood and began unceremoniously streaming towards the doors, buttoning their coats as they talked.

It was late afternoon but the sky was already the colour of damsons, and bright lights glowed from the shop windows and terraced houses along the street. Figures streamed past in silhouette. It would be several weeks yet before the days grew longer and they could step out into daylight.

She saw her mother and Christina up ahead, heads bent in conversation – as ever – as they began to make their way up the hill, towards home. Effie had called in sick from the telephone box that morning, driving Mrs Buchanan into an apoplectic rage. She’d said a death certificate was the only sick note she would accept and that there would be no job waiting for her on her return this time! But Effie wouldn’t care. Shewas already halfway across Scotland, having set off beside Archie Baird-Hamilton in his blue sports car with a look in her eyes that Mhairi knew only too well. Would she be back?

Mhairi wasn’t sure, but today at least, it suited her to walk alone. Donald’s most recent letter had come yesterday and it had sat in her skirt pocket all day, next to her skin as she worked, his words memorized and playing on a loop in her head as she worked the treadles. He had begged her to come back to him, over and over, in every way it was possible to ask, and she had cried reading it. But nothing had changed; their circumstances remained as impossible as Effie and Sholto’s. The universe was against them.

The path summited the low hill and began to wind left, heading back towards the coast. Mhairi felt the breeze on her face, the growing heaviness in her belly. She was still not showing in her clothes, but when she bathed at night, she could see her body falling more easily into a rounded shape this time, as if her baby girl had laid the path for this child.

‘Mhairi!’

She looked back to find David coming up the track from the Forestry. Behind him, her brothers Angus and Fin were walking too, both of them long-legged and striding out – but she knew they would head left, back into the village, when their path met the road. It had quickly become routine for the men to have a pint after work.

Not David, though. Never him.

She stopped and waited as he jogged over, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his cheeks reddened from another day of exertions.

‘Another day done?’ she asked as he pulled up beside her with a puff.

He took off his cap and ran a hand through his dark hair. ‘Aye, though they all look the same.’

There was complaint in the comment. Back on St Kilda, chores had been decided by the men at their daily parliament outside Old Fin’s and set according to weather, season and need. Here, the jobs were mundane, repetitive and performed for profit. They did the same tasks day in, day out and the future was beginning to look like a very long, straight road.

‘I hear Effie’s taken off again.’

‘Aye,’ Mhairi grinned. ‘This morning. Mrs Buchanan had a fit. She thinks Effie’s the devil herself come to torment her, even though she’s the only person who’s been doing any tormenting. I don’t know how Eff’s put up with it, honestly; I’ve never known her so mild.’

‘Well, she’s not been herself since the break-up.’

‘Aye,’ Mhairi smiled. ‘It made me fair happy to see some of her old spark back in her when she told me her plan last night.’

Mhairi was still intrigued as to what was going on. Effie – supposedly sworn to secrecy – had been discreet, telling her only that she had some information that might be helpful to one of Sholto’s friends.

‘And is any of that “spark” down to the man driving her around in his sports car, do you think?’

Mhairi sighed. ‘I’m not sure. It’s far too early for her to think of anyone else in that way yet. She truly loved Sholto.’ In spite of Effie’s stoic insistence that she was looking to the future, Mhairi still felt guilty using the past tense. After all, she wasn’t with the man she loved either, but her love for Donald was nowhere near ending.

‘Mm,’ David agreed. ‘First love cuts the deepest, that’s what they say. It scars the heart.’

Mhairi glanced at him, hearing something in his tone that she couldn’t quite place.

‘Still, this new fellow seems like a bright prospect too,’ David continued. ‘The toffs really have a soft spot for her, don’t they?’

Mhairi shrugged. ‘I think her spiritedness appeals to them. They like novelty, and let’s face it, there’s no one quite like Eff.’

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