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  For Ella, who made me write it, for Angela and Polly, who read it first, and for Marie, whose home inspired it in the first place.

  So, my own selkie lass,

  Did ye like the flowers? The boy chose them himself. I thought something a bit more special than daffs might be in order but he pointed out that yellow is your favourite colour, and we both know he’s right. So no moaning about me being a cheapskate, ye ken?

  Love you.

  PS: Bought more beetroot. It is Mother’s Day, after all. Don’t say I never treat you. It’s in the cupboard.

  One

  The spring sky above the ocean was a bright and brilliant blue, streaked with the occasional wisp of white cloud, as if someone careless had released candyfloss into the North Sea wind. Anna drove to the edge of the cliff, where the road vanished over what seemed to be a blunt edge, and then on past the sign declaring the point beyond which only the cars of residents should pass.

  Around her grassy farmland tipped towards the water, until the slope became an angle that not even the cattle could abide. The road cut down and over the cliffs, sinking quickly between green-covered clefts splashed with the paint of wildflowers nodding in the breeze. Halfway down, a precipitous footpath divided itself from the tarmac, a wooden sign pointing the way on foot. The road continued on, curling back on itself in a bend so sharp that Anna wasn’t sure she’d make it, even in her tiny tin-can excuse for a car. Beyond it the village of Crovie unspooled below her to her right, a string of houses clinging like colourful limpets to the wild lip of the narrow shoreline beneath the cliffs.

  The road opened out slightly as it reached level ground, backed by one or two wooden huts before it turned into a rocky beach that curved away from the village towards a towering promontory of grass-shrouded red rock. Before her the North Sea stretched into the horizon, the edge of the land crashing down to meet it in overlapping folds that reached far into the softening distance. The tide was out, the road squeezed between the cliffs and a sheer drop down onto a jagged field of wet black rocks and smaller tumbled stones. Anna pulled up and switched off her engine, staring out at the dip and swell of the blue-green expanse ahead and trying to gather her thoughts.

  She’d been there less than two minutes before a shadow slanted against her face, swiftly followed by a single, sharp rap on the glass. Through it scowled an old man. Anna wound down the window.

  ‘Hel—’

  ‘You canna park here,’ he said. ‘Tis for residents only.’ He turned briefly to shake his cane at the backside of another sign she’d ignored. ‘Tourists have to park at the top an’ walk.’

  ‘But I am a resident,’ Anna told him. ‘I—’

  ‘B&B and holiday rentals dinnae count,’ he interrupted, still scowling. ‘Tourists park at the top.’

  Anna decided that she was done being at a disadvantage and so unclipped her seat belt and pushed open the door. Once she was on her feet she stood a head over him, yet he remained imposing. His shoulders, hunched now, were still broad and must have once been powerful. Lines traced around his eyes and mouth, deep creases weathered by a life probably lived largely outdoors.

  ‘I’m not a tourist,’ she said. ‘I’m a resident. A permanent one. I’ve bought the Fishergirl’s Luck.’ Anna tried for a smile and put out a hand. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Mr…’

  He recoiled as if she was holding out something offensive, then looked her up and down with clear contempt. ‘You?’ he hissed. ‘You’re the one?’

  ‘I… yes. My name’s Anna. Anna Campbell. I—’

  He shocked her by turning away and spitting violently at the ground. ‘That bloody place,’ he said, ‘Auld Robbie should ha’ let the ruddy sea tek it.’ Then he turned his back and began to hobble away, faster than she would have given him credit for.

  ‘Wait,’ she called, after a moment. ‘Please, I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot. Can’t we talk, just for a minute?’

  He didn’t stop. Anna watched his retreating back with a sense of dread. She leaned against the car, feeling suddenly defeated. She hadn’t even been here five minutes and her worst fears had been realized. This wasn’t going to be a haven. No one was going to want her here. A wave of nausea coiled up through her gut and she took a deep breath, drawing in a lungful of salt air. Overhead the gulls screeched and wheeled and for a moment it seemed to her that they were laughing.

  Of course they are, she thought. What were you thinking? Why didn’t you go abroad, like Cathy suggested? You could have just rented a cottage in Spain, or Italy, somewhere warm. Why here? Why buy the damn place at all? Why?

  After a moment Anna dropped her hand and squared her shoulders, regarding the village. The single row of houses had been built on a narrow curve of sloping ground beneath a rolling bank of green cliffs. Between them and the shore there was no road, just a concrete path that edged the sea wall. On occasion, she had read, a stray wave had dragged the unwary out to sea and in high tide or during storms this route was often impassable. The idea of this had seemed both extraordinary and romantic as she’d read about it, but now, faced with the reality, Anna realized that though the former was true, the latter most definitely wasn’t. Most of the houses had been built with their gables pointing towards the sea. Here, survival against the elements was more important than a view.

  This little line of homes made up the village of Crovie. Anna had bought the smallest one of all. She could see it from where she stood. It looked – it was – little more than a stone shed, standing directly on the sea wall halfway down the village, its back to the North Sea and its face to the other houses and the cliff. The path that had now revealed itself to be terrifying rather than romantic was Anna’s only route to the home she had bought, sight unseen, because it was better than staying another month, another week, another day in Geoff’s pristine Kensington penthouse.

  ‘Idiot,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Anna, you complete and utter idiot.’

  Still, there was nothing for it now but to go and collect the keys. Anna locked her car door and took a deep breath before striking out towards her new home.

  The last building in the village, the one nearest the road, wasn’t a house at all, she realized. The gable end was whitewashed and faded into the grubby paint were large grey letters proclaiming it as the Crovie Inn. There were old menus still taped up in the windows, but it had obviously been shut for some time. Anna wondered where the nearest pub was now and thought it was probably at Gardenstown, another coastal village that was situated across the large natural bay in the Moray Firth on which Crovie had also been built. Anna turned to see it emerging now, across the gently chopping water and beyond the monolith of rock that truncated the far end of the rocky beach. Gardenstown spilled down a wide cleft in the cliffs, zig-zagging in steps until it reached the bay and harbour below, both of which, though not large, dwarfed Crovie’s by comparison. In fact, Crovie’s harbour was really no more than a little pier with moorings for a few boats, though the single one there now was a battered-looking wooden dinghy sitting precariously atop a forest of rocks as it waited for the tide to turn.

  No wonder most of the buildings here were holiday homes, Anna thought. Who in their right mind would live here permanently by choice? Even now, in the brightest sunshine of spring and when the sea was calm, it was a forbid
ding prospect: fascinating, yes, but a place to visit, surely not to stay. She knew, also from her reading, that it had been established in the wake of the Clearances. The first people to live here full time had done so because they’d had nowhere else to go and this was one of the few places the English had no use for. As a result Crovie had seemed to her from a distance to be a symbol of something beyond how cruel the powerful can be. Of what, she wasn’t entirely sure. Ingenuity? Tenacity? Hope? Or was it because she had nowhere to go either?

  Idiot, she thought again. Idiot.

  Then, before her, there it was. The Fishergirl’s Luck. It was the name that had caught her attention as much as the setting. It was painted on a letterbox to the left of the door, below the single square window. The door itself was painted a cornflower blue that matched the sky above the small building’s roof, a cheery colour despite the fact that it was beginning to peel slightly in the strong salt wind.

  Anna stared at her new front door. The For Sale posting had featured photographs of the interior, but right now all she could remember of them was a tiny wooden staircase leading to an attic room scarcely big enough for a single bed, and a sense of compact cosiness that could easily be put down to estate agent trickery with a camera. Looking at the dimensions of the place, it couldn’t be more than one room downstairs. It really was a shed – it must have been converted from something originally built as storage.

  Anna tried not to panic. It had water and electricity. It had a shower, for goodness’ sake, it wasn’t a hovel. Just because from the outside it looked like a shack didn’t mean it would be one inside. The peeling paint of the door meant nothing. She’d grown too accustomed to living in show homes, that was all: apartments with space and taste but no character.

  Steeling herself, she rapped on the door, hard. The letter the estate agent had enclosed from the seller had told her he’d meet her here to hand over the key. It wasn’t an arrangement that would have happened in London, but then this wasn’t London and besides, Anna herself had no previous first-hand experience of house buying. That had always been Geoff’s department, in the same way that the places she’d followed him to over the past two decades had always been his choices, steadily growing more opulent as his star had ascended, but never expanding enough to make more room for her than one side of the wardrobe, one side of the bathroom sink.

  The wind caught at her hair as Anna waited. She noticed for the first time that on one side of the Fishergirl’s Luck there was an empty stretch of concrete, wider than the pathway and enclosed from it by a rickety little fence and gate. A garden, of sorts, though one that would surely be drowned by each high tide and therefore not suitable for plants, or indeed anything much at all.

  Two minutes passed; three, and there was no answer. Perhaps Robert MacKenzie was as deaf as a post. What had that old curmudgeon at the harbour called him? ‘Auld Robbie’? If they were contemporaries, it could certainly be true.

  She knocked again and heard a door creak open, though the sound came from behind her. Anna turned to see a woman in her early sixties with short-cropped silver hair and smile lines around her eyes looking out at her from the house directly opposite.

  ‘Are you looking for someone?’ the woman asked, her accent as lacking in the Scots burr as Anna’s own.

  ‘I’m supposed to be meeting someone here,’ Anna told her, raising her voice against another sudden gust of wind. ‘Robert MacKenzie?’

  The woman looked doubtful. ‘He doesn’t live in Crovie,’ she said, pronouncing it as ‘Crivvie’. ‘He definitely said to meet him here?’

  ‘I – yes,’ Anna said, the general weariness imparted by the past few weeks catching up with her all at once. ‘I – this is my house. I’m supposed to be moving in today, he needs to give me the key…’

  ‘Oh!’ The woman exclaimed. ‘Of course! You’re Anna Campbell.’

  ‘Yes,’ Anna said, a little taken aback.

  ‘Old Robbie said you’d be coming,’ she said, ‘but I’d thought it wasn’t until next week. It’s not like him to be late, perhaps the boat’s been called out.’

  Anna had no idea what the woman was talking about.

  ‘He’s on the lifeboat roster out of Macduff,’ her neighbour clarified, with a smile at Anna’s blank look. ‘If they got a call he may not have had a chance to make alternative arrangements for you. I can call Barbara, she’ll know. Why don’t you come in and I’ll put the kettle on? You look as if you could use a cup of tea.’

  For one brief, unbalanced moment Anna thought she might actually burst into tears.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes. Yes, please. Thank you.’

  ‘I’m Pat, by the way,’ the woman said, as she stood back to usher Anna in. ‘Pat Thorpe.’

  Two

  Pat Thorpe’s home bore the name of the Weaver’s Nook. It was spread over three levels that reached back against the cliff, the original builder tapping a well of ingenuity to make a comfortably spacious home in this unforgiving place. The front door was up a short flight of stone steps to one side, where a small patio housed a rattan table and chairs.

  ‘We take guests in through there,’ Pat told Anna, ‘but you and I will use what my husband calls the “tradesmen’s entrance”.’

  This was the door that Pat had opened in order to speak to Anna. Inside it was a narrow passageway, which on one side housed a door through which Anna could see a tiny WC. Ahead was another door, which Pat pushed open and walked through to reveal a large, warm kitchen. The floor was laid with grey flags, the walls had been taken back to their original stone and then rendered and painted white. In one wall a well-sized hearth housed a wood-burning stove. The rest of the room was taken up with beautiful units painted a sunny yellow and a big oak table surrounded by sturdy chairs. Pat filled the kettle and flicked it on, telling Anna to take a seat before going up a flight of steep wooden stairs to use the telephone. Anna listened to the murmur of her voice filtering down from above as she looked around. Against one wall was a dresser full of what looked like hand-thrown pottery, each piece glazed with a wash of glorious colour.

  Robert MacKenzie had, in fact, been called out with the lifeboat, to aid a struggling pleasure boat that had set out from Lossiemouth and had run into trouble in the busy shipping lanes of the Firth.

  ‘It shouldn’t be too hard a call to set right,’ Pat said, as she busied herself making tea. The kitchen smelled of the fresh shortbread that was cooling on the rack beside the huge range cooker. ‘With any luck he’ll be here soon enough. Although I can imagine that the last thing you want is to be watching your P’s and Q’s with a new neighbour on moving day. You must be tired.’

  ‘A bit,’ Anna admitted, with a smile. ‘And as it happens, I’ve already failed on that front.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I met an old man as I came in,’ Anna explained. ‘Didn’t want me to park in the residents’ area.’

  ‘Ahh,’ Pat said. ‘Carried a cane? Looked as if he could have gone ten rounds with Tyson back in the day?’

  ‘That sounds about right.’

  ‘Douglas McKean,’ Pat said, with a sigh. ‘Oh dear. Don’t take it personally. It’s not about you, it’s about the Fishergirl’s Luck. Some dispute over ownership that goes back literally decades. He hated Bren because of it too. Although to be honest, I don’t think there’s a soul on this earth that man actually likes. Except Old Robbie, perhaps. Douglas is the last of the Crovie born and bred and he’s got a chip on his shoulder about us incomers. I should sympathize, I suppose, but I don’t, really. He works hard at being unpleasant.’

  Anna smiled, obscurely relieved to hear she wasn’t the sole focus of the old man’s anger. ‘How long have you lived here?’

  ‘Frank and I bought the business about fifteen years ago. It was our retirement plan. Perhaps not the best idea we’ve ever had, but I can’t imagine living anywhere else now.’

  ‘Business?’

  Pat offered Anna the plate of shortbread. ‘We run this place as
a B&B in season and we’ve also got another one of the houses further along as a self-catering rental. That’s where Frank is now, doing a bit of fixing up. Both get quieter every year, but then again, we’re not as young as we were so that’s perhaps for the best. We love it here, though. But you, Anna – what brings you to Crovie?’

  ‘Oh,’ Anna said, looking down into her mug. ‘It’s a long story. Actually, no – it’s not long at all. It’s just not a particularly interesting or unique one. My father died and left me some money at about the same time that a long – very long – relationship finally fizzled out. I realized I was about to hit forty with nothing to my name but what would fit in my dad’s old car. I was looking through my parents’ photo albums as I packed up their house. They’d done a driving tour of Scotland for their honeymoon and there was a picture of them in Crovie. It seemed such an amazing place that I looked it up online, and that’s how I found the Fishergirl’s Luck. I bought it on impulse, because after selling Mum and Dad’s place I could afford it without a mortgage and I needed somewhere to live. I vaguely thought it would be a fresh start…’ She looked up at Pat with a lopsided smile. ‘Not the best idea I’ve ever had, either.’

  ‘Ach, don’t say that,’ Pat said. ‘You’ve not even been inside yet. Bren loved that place and I for one will be glad to see it occupied again.’

  ‘Bren,’ Anna said. ‘Was she the previous owner?’

  ‘Oh yes. No one else has ever lived in the Fishergirl’s Luck, until now. Converted it herself decades ago – bought the building from her father out of the money she saved as a herring lassie in her younger days. Well, that’s how she told it, although if you were inclined to listen to Douglas McKean he’d tell you that she cheated him out of it somehow. She was a remarkable woman. Lived there alone all her life. Died – oh, it’d be five years ago now. Ninety-five, she was, and looking after herself perfectly well right until she went to sleep and didn’t wake up. The place has been empty since then. I don’t think Old Robbie could face letting go of it really, to tell you the truth. They were close.’