Chapter 91

They call it Braehead.

Nell suggests it, in the way that fourteen-year-olds suggest things, which is by saying it once, flatly, in the middle of a conversation about something else, and then refusing to elaborate.

"That's the name of the place she died," Veira says.

"I know. That's why."

"Nell"

"You told me the whole thing about Morna. About nobody sitting with her and nobody telling her what she was and her brother going eleven times to an Assembly that wouldn't see him." Nell shrugs, a fourteen-year-old shrug, defensive and absolute. "So call it that. Then nobody gets to forget why we're doing it."

Croft, when he is told, goes out of the room for four minutes.

The school opens on the eleventh of May in a shooting lodge on the west coast of Sutherland with eleven pupils, four staff, a doctor, and a compact charter that runs to sixty pages, forty of which are consent protocol.

It is not a school. It is a farmhouse with too many bedrooms and a wing of bad plumbing, and the first three weeks are chaos, and Veira is not there for any of them.

That is the part nobody anticipates.

"You can't be on site," Croft says, on the second day, in the tone of a man who has been dreading the conversation. "Proximity. If you're in the building the overflow starts before any of them have been taught anything, which is precisely the 1889 failure."

"I know."

"I'm not sure you do. It isn't a fortnight. It is the entire two years." He looks at her. "You have designed a school you cannot enter."

So she teaches by video link, from a farmhouse eleven miles down the coast, four hours a day, six days a week, to a room full of children she is not permitted to be in the room with.

It is, she thinks, the single most absurd and most appropriate arrangement of her life.

The children are: two siblings from Manchester, eight and eleven, who have been in care since 2021 and who are the only two who have ever met another hybrid before this. A nineteen-year-old from Cork who arrives furious and stays furious for five weeks. A twelve-year-old from Kraków who does not speak for eleven days and then asks, in careful English, whether this means she is not going to die like her mother did. A boy of six from Valencia with a grandmother who will not leave the grounds. Four more between nine and sixteen. Nell.

And on the fourth day, unannounced, the boy from Bergen and the girl from Tallinn, delivered from Skye by a seventy-three-year-old Kin Elder who does not come inside.

"I am not staying," Aldara says, at the gate. "I am on the register of persons the compact intends to prosecute and I have no intention of contesting it."

"You could contest it."

"I hid a hundred and ninety-two children from each other over fifty-one years. Four of them died in placements I chose." Aldara does not look away. "Contest it, Ms Ashcroft. Please. Somebody should."

She leaves before Veira can answer.