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Chapter One

Anna opened her eyes and saw a pair of hands, streaked and shiny with blood. No face. In her ears a piercing squeal. At first she thought she was at Utra and Ronald was helping Joseph to kill another pig. That would explain the blood, the red hands and the terrible high-pitched sound. Then she realized the noise was her own voice screaming.

Someone rested a dry hand on her forehead and murmured words she didn’t understand. She spat out an obscenity at him.

More pain.

This is what it is to die.

The drug must be wearing off because she had a sudden burst of clarity as she opened her eyes again to bright, artificial light.

No, this is what it is to give birth.

‘Where’s my baby?’ She could hear the words slightly blurred by the pethidine.

‘He was having problems breathing on his own. We’ve just given him some oxygen. He’s fine. ’ A woman’s voice. A Shetlander, slightly patronizing, but convincing, and that mattered most.

Further away a man with blood to his elbow grinned awkwardly.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Retained placenta. Better to get it out here than take you to theatre. I thought you wouldn’t want that after a forceps delivery, but it can’t have been very comfortable. ’

She thought of Joseph again, the hill ewes lambing, the ravens flying off with placenta in their beaks and on their claws. This hadn’t been what she’d been expecting. She hadn’t thought childbirth would be so violent or so raw.

‘I’m sorry I swore at you,’ Anna said.

She saw he’d been weeping. ‘I was so scared,’ he said. ‘I thought you were dying. ’

Chapter Two

‘Anna Clouston had her baby last night,’ Mima said. ‘A difficult birth apparently. She was in labour for twenty hours. They’re going to keep her in for a few days to keep an eye on her. It was a boy. Another man to take on the Cassandra. ’ She shot a conspiratorial look at Hattie. It seemed to amuse Mima that Anna had had a difficult labour. Mima liked chaos, disorder, other people’s misfortune. It gave her something to gossip about and kept her alive. That was what she said, at least, when she sat in her kitchen cackling into her tea or whisky, filling Hattie in on island events.

Hattie didn’t know what to say about Anna Clouston’s child – she’d never seen the appeal of babies and didn’t understand them. A baby would just be another complication. They were standing at Setter, in the field at the back of the house. A wash of spring sunshine lit the makeshift windbreak of blue plastic, the wheelbarrows, the trenches marked with tape. Seeing it as if for the first time, Hattie thought what a mess they’d made of this end of the croft. Before her team from the university had turned up, Mima had looked out over sloping low meadow to the loch. Now, even at the beginning of the season the place was muddy as a building site and Mima’s view was interrupted by the spoil heap. The wheelbarrow run had scored ruts in the grass.