The dream came to me again.

The one that often wakes me in the grey, pearl light before dawn.

In that quiet time, when only the earliest rising birds shyly begin their songs, I lie, eyes wide, alongside my sleeping sisters in the cramped box bed, my father and brother snoring and snuffling in the small room next door. And always I feel as comforted by my mind’s nightly wanderings as if Mother’s cool hand had stroked my brow.

But sweet as it is, I have no time to laze and think on my dreamings this morning. Something quite wondrous is happening on the island today and the sudden remembrance of it makes me turn and shake both Ishbel and Effie from their slumbers.

“Wake up! Wake up!” I call out, scrambling and wriggling from between the stirring bodies on either side of me, as if I am some skittish small child instead of a grown girl of twelve.

And with much haste and high spirits, we are all soon dressed and fed and about our usual early morning chores. Apart, that is, from Ishbel, who is already gone to the Big House, quite primped and preened, to help with the preparations for the Laird’s visitors.

Oh, I cannot wait to see old Mr Menzies’ relations! What a thing it is to have fancy folk from a great southern city like London come to our plain little island.

They are taking a Highland tour of course, which is quite the fashion for rich English and Lowland Scots these days, Father says, ever since Queen Victoria herself sang the praises of this northerly part of Scotland. But there must be finer islands for the tourists to see, for none have graced Tornish until now.

So, this day I shall surely always remember, since it is to be unlike all the other endless days here that are filled with nothing but chores and school and the same faces whichever way I look, whether they belong to family, neighbours, chickens or cows…

“Again, please!” I hear my younger brother’s cries from inside the cottage as Father rattles off a quick trill on his new tin whistle, bought from an Irish pedlar on the mainland this spring.

For a moment, I glance up from the stool I am squatting on here in the dry dirt yard and look at Lachlan and Father through the open front door. They are both infected by the coming day’s excitement, Lachlan jumping around – which risks the fabric of his too-small good jacket splitting, I fear – while Father laughs as he lowers the long whistle from his lips. He is very smart himself in his tweed jacket, waistcoat and trousers. He even had Effie trim his wiry dark-red hair and beard last night. But then we are all to look smart today, all in our Sunday best though it is the middle of the week.

“Ist, now!” says Father, using the short, sharp Gaelic hiss of a word to try to quieten and steady my brother. “You’ll hear enough music when Mr Menzies’ guests arrive.”

Turning back to the wooden bucket wedged between my knees, I find it hard to keep my mind on either the Laird’s never-before-sighted relatives or the dishes that need finishing before I change from my work clothes into my good things too.

Instead I idly gaze up at the towering mound of the Glas Crags, which the sun practically perches upon. A yearning to clamber and climb to the very top of the Crags grips me hard; for surely there, at the very summit, so close to the sky and the clouds and the sun itself, I can look out for a distant sighting of the ship! It must be setting off from the mainland soon, and I might see the faintest dot of it, as it begins its slow journey towards our humble harbour.

And with that thought, I am away, as quick and quiet as I am able. For the short while I am gone, I will not be missed, I tell myself, as the hard, stamped earth of the yard turns to the stubbly long grass that surrounds our cottage and those of the neighbours in our township. Father, Effie and Lachlan; they will perhaps suppose me off at the burn, fetching more water, I persuade myself, as the harsh grass turns to the softer green grazing of the slope, where some cattle idly watch me hurrying by, skirts held high, dirty knees on show.

Now the swoop of soft grass melds into hard, craggy stone dotted with scratchy heather and gorse, and I am breathlessly, happily scampering barefoot from rock to rock, with the sun seeping warm through my unravelling knitted shawl and the rough cloth of my work shirt.

I smile to myself as I gaze up towards the summit of the Crags, the final jags of glinting stone set against the blue summer sky and the white clouds that jostle and tumble over one another.

This far up, the herring gulls caw-caw and whirl around me. It seems the sight of a scrawny girl trying to join them is fine entertainment indeed.

“Little Bird!”

I hesitate for a second at the sound of my name and then turn, neatly, in the narrow path between prickly bundles of gorse bushes, with their strange mix of sun-yellow blossom, fierce thorns and whispers of wool they have stolen from the sheep that have passed this way.

“Am I too fast for you, Will Beaton?” I call down to the boy who has suddenly appeared and now struggles to keep up with me.

“Only here, Bridie MacKerrie,” he baits me.

Will is right, of course. On this rocky outcrop of a hill I am like every other person that might come this way. No one can see a limp when every surface is off-kilter and uneven and needs thought. But I have climbed the Crags so often it needs no thought at all.

Just to show Will how sure and fleet I can be, I turn and bound up the last few boulders, to the Glas Crags’ highest point; the flat place of stone, with a patched blanket of heather and moss tucked in its crevices.

And ever and always what I see takes my breath away.

Slowly I spin, arms out, and there … there is the endless circlet of sea that sways and ebbs around our island, the colour of iron for the most part, merging with an eye-dazzling turquoise on the far shore.

If I let my arms drop and my gaze settle due east, the looming mass of the mainland of Scotland greets me, a ragged jumble of rocks and headlands closest to us, while in the far distance snow-tipped mountains rise towering and immense.

Now I turn around and stare westwards, where the sea has the grand name of the Atlantic Ocean. Its vastness stretches to the horizon … and on and on and on it goes till it crashes up against the shores of America. Can you imagine?

It’s not just the sea and the far-off land that fill me with wonder. From up here there’s the weather to watch too, and the birds swirling and soaring in praise of it or in spite of it.

“I let you beat me,” says Will, as he finally joins me.

Between gasps, his broad grin shows off the space where a tooth was lost to him years ago, the time he fell on the Crags as we searched about us for gull eggs. I remember that Will and I worried wildly at all the blood. But after we scrambled down from the hill and I washed his face clean at the burn with the corner of my shawl, Will caught sight of himself in the water and could not stop laughing.

And always he is laughing, and always I laugh with him – unless he is taunting me, as he is now.

I am not bothered by Will’s teasing. I tease him all the more. For the way his light hair stands up, I am always calling him a thistle-head. And if not that, I tell him often that he is as handsome as the goat his mother keeps, or that even a potato grown on his croft is more bonny than him. Oh yes, Will Beaton might be able to outrun me down on the flat moors, but he can never catch up with my tongue when I let it loose…

“Are you quite well, William?” I ask my friend as his chest heaves from the climb. “The last time I heard a noise like that was when the cow was calving.”

Laughter bursts from Will’s chest, but I try to keep my countenance and gaze into the newly quiet sky. The gulls are gone – a sea eagle must be about, a winged giant on the hunt for its dinner.

At that thought a shadow passes over me … the sea eagle itself? I spot the flash of fanned white tail and the arc of brown wings as it swoops out across the choppy waters – and I remember I am here to catch a glimpse of the steamship that will bring the Laird’s guests.

But alas, the dancing, shifting carpet of silvery waves is still empty.

“So what are you doing up here?” I ask my friend.

“I called by for you, just as your father and Effie and Lachlan were setting off,” he tells me. “Your father saw you heading up here. He said he would be grateful if I found you and told you to hurry up!”

“I’ll have time enough,” I say, smiling at the thought of Father watching me go, and probably rolling his eyes in fond exasperation.

But I don’t think Will is listening.

“Ah, see now; John Mackay’s boat is at the harbour,” I hear him say. “I hope my brother George took his bagpipes with him, for he cannot walk home and back in time to play at the welcome.”

“Ha! Well, I suppose the Laird’s folk will have to hold their noses while they listen to your brother’s reels,” I...