This would be where I finally do what I've been meaning to for chapters and tell you we're nearing the end. Just a chapter after this, and then I'm on to other projects. To all of you reading and/or reviewing, thank you. I love knowing you're there, and I love hearing from you.

You may also notice I've done away with a mystery title again. Nan and Jerry never got them, so neither do Shirley and Mara, mostly because there's nothing clever to be done with Five Red Herrings, which is the obvious choice, as you'll appreciate if you know your way through Sayers.

You've never smelt the tangle of the Isles said the song as they had heard it during the war. It was supposed to have been heartening; whether it was or not, Shirley couldn't say. But it wasn't wrong, thought Shirley now as they crested the hill to the house. It was late, and still the sun was high, a deep velveteen blue its concession to the evening. The air shouldn't have been vastly different from the Island, all told, certainly not from the Harbour Light – salted and cold-tasting against the soft palate. This was wilder in spite of the vast flatness of the outstretched road. Something to do with the way the heather ran riot, musky white blooms drooping to kiss the earth and the sweet tang of the gorse – everywhere and determined to ensure all travellers knew it, as protruding branches snared ankles and exposed limbs. Mara had described it as smelling of coconut; she hadn't been wrong.

'Is it so different now?' he asked as they came over the rise of the road, the long grasses, musky heather and the tang of the gorse falling away in the face of the wind coming towards them.

'Not at all,' said Mara. 'It's not even smaller; I thought it would maybe be that at least. Things so often are if you're remembering them from a child.'

Ahead a croft window twitched and a stout person in assorted greys hastened down the track to meet them. She raised a hand in greeting, her exclamation lost over the breaking of the water on the nearby shore and the whistle of the wind as it came across the sea. Without appearing to think to do it, Mara raised her own hand and called out a greeting. Shirley smiled in spite of himself; without appearing to realise it she had slipped back into the habit of Gàidhlig like breathing. He blamed the sameness Bara Island. Whatever the cause, it delighted the approaching personage and increased the rate of the bustling, so that presently a woman drew up before them short of breath and verily beaming. 'They told us,' she said as she clutched her side, 'you were from Away.'

'Well,' said Shirley, lest she be left with the impression she had been misinformed, 'I certainly am. You've known it before.' This with a nod to Mara.

'Years ago,' said Mara. To which their still unnamed host only shook her head and said, 'But you've never lost the sound of it,' evidently delighted.

'No,' said Mara, 'There was never the chance.'

The woman in grey nodded, and then went on nodding like a contented pigeon another minute before the wind began to sting even her and she recalled her errand. Noisily she parted with the keys, swithering between languages as suited her, so that Shirley quite gave up on parsing the conversation, taking away only that she was one Domenica MacDaird. They turned up a wynd half-obscured in a magnificent hedge of gorse, and he just caught 'I'll show you how to go, shall I,' before losing the thread again and bracing himself for the teeth of the gorse. He could see why Mara had missed it though; the smell of it was like a sunburst, rich, buttery and sweet in a way that conjured memories of the coconuts his father had brought home from one of his more extravagant Charlottetown ventures. More than that, he could picture Mara there as she must have been, running glad riot over the countryside, racing the waves at high tide, wild-haired, bright-eyed and flowers in her arms.

The place was small, stone, of sloping roof and impeccably ordered. Someone – Shirley suspected Mrs MacDaird – had taken beeswax to the floors in anticipation of their coming, and crammed a pottery vase with overlong stalks of the omnipresent gorse. There was heather over the hearth and bluebells in a jam jar among the spices, and now, because someone – he had blinked and missed the ensuing wrangle – had seen fit to put the kettle on, the gently hiss of rising steam. There was more bustling as Domenica MacDaird banged open cupboards and exposed their contents in conjunction with Mara's milder inspection of them. Shirley found the tea nested in a gold-plated tin on the heart of the kitchen table and handed it to Mara.

'You'll stay?' she said, the teuchter lilt that had been creeping back into her words ever since they left Canada turning this naturally into a question. That won a smile from Domenica MacDaird, wide as a country mile. 'Thank you,' she said, 'but no – not when you're settling and everything's new to you. Come by, and we'll do for you instead.' So saying, she slipped with surprising grace and efficacy out the latticed door and thereafter vanished into the bracken. Shirley took the pottery cup Mara handed him – Mull according to the stamp on the bottom – and said, curious, 'Are they all like that? Only that Christmas we were stranded at yours it wasn't such a different reception.'

'Always,' said Mara.

'Remind me,' said Nan, 'which one's Nottingham Lace?'

She was sitting, with Di and Poppy, in the shelter of the larches that flanked Di's boarding house, these having weathered the summer heat better than the garden. In her hand was a slip of a letter postmarked Scotland, in Mara's precise handwriting. On the other side of the Hudson bay blanket they picnicked on, Poppy grimaced over her teacup and said, 'It's the world's most unforgiving dance, is what it is.'

'Oh, it's all right,' said Di, laughing. 'The set in the middle go round two places to the outside circle's one, then you're all right.'

'You'd know all about it, of course,' said Poppy. She set her teacup down, and tucked her knees under her chin, settling into what Nan recognised as her inquisitorial attitude. 'I do get letters from the others, you know, not just you. Ariel reckons you've seen more of Halifax than she has the last year or so.'

'Ariel makes entirely too much of it,' said Di. 'The Chronicle wanted pictures of rebuilt Richmond. Alastair knew the area.'

'Why?' said Nan. 'It's not even your patch.'

'Neither is the new house,' said Poppy. 'Mara has an idea you know its geography better than she does too. And none of that accounts for the dances, you know.'

Di held up both hands. She said, 'In the days of the Harbour Light, I don't seem to recall anyone called dance attendance news.'

'Oh, they're not,' said Poppy. 'Neither is you knowing them, really. I've danced with you, remember. I know you're good at them, even down to the footwork. It's your going on Alastair's arm to the Redmond ones that she and Faith make news.'

'Naomi Blake too,' said Nan to her teacup, thereby missing the sisterly appeal aimed her direction. This being the case Nan watched as Di sent astray dandelion sailing ineffectually towards Poppy. It landed just short of Poppy's skirt, whence she picked it up with a laugh and began to pull its petals apart.

'No, no,' she said mild as a lamb, 'it's my turn now. I had years of your ribbing.'

'Not from me you didn't!'

This time Nan caught the appeal. She said, 'You've owed me this conversation for months. If I have to take a side it's Mouse's.'

'You've just had a wedding,' said Di with affectionate exasperation, 'isn't that enough for one season?'

'No,' said Poppy. 'Because, as I pointed out to Ariel, I was cheated out of at least two in the process.'

'That,' said Di, 'it not my fault,' and snatched the letter from her sister. 'What else does Mara say?'

'Quite a lot about the neighbours from the look of it,' said Nan. 'They appear to be of the race that knows Joseph. Or their version of it. I don't know about you, but evenings at cards would do my head in. There's also a sizeable amount Mouse is going to have to translate. Unless you've picked up Gaelic along with the dances?'

'I have not. Here, Mouse.'

'You have been going then,' said Poppy, taking the letter. 'Mara, Faith and Naomi aren't all wrong together.'

'I don't know why you're asking; you appear to have pieced it together without my input.'

'We want your version,' said Nan. 'Especially as I don't recall Mouse or I mentioning weddings; that was all you.' Poppy hummed; Nan wasn't sure this was in agreement so much as in response to the sheet of pressed paper between her fingers. Her laughter, Nan couldn't help but notice, had abated.

'Well,' said Di, not unreasonably, 'it was what you were getting at, wasn't it?' and to Poppy, before anyone could answer, 'Something wrong?'

'No-o,' said Poppy.

'Which means yes,' said Di, evidently enjoying the inquisitorial about-face.

'Well you've read it,' said Poppy to Nan. 'I suppose you could shake the idea we aren't getting her back?'

'Don't say things like that, Mouse. I find it very hard to unthink them.'

Poppy waved the letter at them with a vengeance and said, 'I can't help it. You don't write in a language unless you're thinking in it, do you?'

A breeze, cool and seductive swept through the larches, setting the leaves rustling. Under different circumstances they would have welcomed the reprieve it occasioned from the weather. As it was, Nan couldn't shake the uncomfortable feeling it was a wind of change. Evidently Di noticed, because she swept a stray russet curl of hair out of her eyes and said, 'Don't look like that, Catkin; you're the one who started this pattern of moving away to unreachable places.'

'We'll be in Ontario by autumn,' said Nan, 'that's not unreachable. We'll even be close to Mouse. You'll notice at no point have Jerry and I left the country.'

'No,' said Di, 'though I suppose you might, if there was a place for you that unaccountably meant home. Wouldn't you?'

Overhead the leaves rustled, a thrush burst into song and a chorus of cicadas started humming in the summer heat. The breeze, such as it was, wafted the scent of fading lilacs and narcissi towards them. Here and there a ladybird crawled lazily across the Hudson Bay blanket. It should have been idyllic. Nan shivered. 'I've never thought about it. I hadn't realised you had.'

'Only tangentially,' said Di, so that Poppy's eyes rounded owlishly, even as Nan's narrowed, her eyebrows drawing close together in a fashion that bore striking resemblance to a pair of chestnut knitting needles mid-stitch. 'How tangentially?'

Di shrugged. She said, 'It just came up, once we knew Mara and Shirley meant to visit Scotland. I think I asked if it was something Alastair especially wanted to do.'

That clarified the we and curtailed Nan's next question, which had probably been redundant in any case.

'And?' said Poppy, when no further explanation appeared forthcoming.

'It wouldn't be the same thing at all,' said Di. 'Mara's the last of the McNeilly siblings that can remember anything about it at all. Alec could, of course, and the older children, but then there was the war and the flu...' Di shrugged, not finishing the sentence. Somehow that was enough. Poppy grimaced again, and Nan joined her. Di said, 'So it wouldn't really be like homecoming at all.'

'But it has actually come up,' said Poppy, eyes wider and more owlish than ever.

'Lots of things have come up,' said Di. 'You never did parse the rest of that letter.'

Poppy shook her head. 'Catkin's right; it's all this-and-that news. Neighbours and dances, how Keppoch's Rant never leaves anyone enough time to turn a full circle – she's right on that, before you try to argue the point – and the MacDaird sheep getting into next door's clover. You know the stuff of Ariel's letters.'

'No,' said Di, 'I wouldn't. We're too usually in the same place to write.'

Poppy ignored this. She said, 'What else has come up? Besides visits to Scotland.'

Di shook her head. 'You're incorrigible, the pair of you.'

'Well,' said Nan, we're short Faith and Mara to play at matchmaking, and have to keep the end up. We have letters to write too, you know. And you still haven't answered.'

'I know. It's none of it very interesting. Mostly things like what kind of work Alastair wants now graduation has been and gone, what engagements in peacetime look like – none of you gave me much of a working idea – whether or not I'd stay with The Chronicle afterward. This-and-that news,' with a nod to Poppy.

Unsure which of these to tackle first, Nan said of the paper, 'Would you?'

Simultaneously Poppy dropped the letter into her tea and said as she salvaged it, 'Normal people start with news of engagements, you know.'

'Only when they have them to announce,' said Di. 'This is still all very much discussion. There's time for that now, you know. Besides, I didn't like to tread on anyone's toes after all the wrangling it took to arrive at the latest of our weddings.'

'That translates roughly as you not liking fuss a bit more than Mara does,' said Nan, laughingly. Then, triumphant, 'I told you so, back at Rilla's wedding, didn't I?'

Di declined to answer. She said, 'What has become of your children? Won't they be missing their mother?'

'With Mums doting on them?' asked Nan, eyes sparkling. 'Not at all. I left her telling them the story of Paul Irving's Nora and the rock people. I am clean forgot or something.' And jubilantly, over the others laughter, as she pulled Di into a hug, 'I told you so, I told you so, I told you so.'

It had started with a rambling exploration of the island, Shirley curious to put pictures to the places he had heard Mara remember. There was the wild stretch of the shore where the waves washed up everything from pottery shards and rocks to disassembled boats, the wind of the road as it rounded the curves of the landscape, how to navigate the weave of bracken and heather, and the corners that hugged the blue-misted mountains. Somewhere along the way there had been a spring lamb caught in the mesh of a fence; it had been a matter of course to disentangle it. After that they had fallen in almost unthinking with the pattern of the island round. It had never, after all, been a holiday in the sense well-intentioned Mrs MacDaird meant, or if it had, then neither he nor Mara was good at adhering to a policy of doing nothing. So evenings with the MacDairds had become mornings in which Mara sat with the older woman and saw to the task of the hour, while Shirley in his turn inquired of lamed calves or sick piglets, coming to know the animals of Bara as he had Kingsport.

'Come by here' people had taken to saying on seeing them, and they had done. It was good, almost like coming home, to exchange news of an afternoon or over a meal, to take an evening excursion to pieces after the fact. Be sure, Mother had written, to lay down a memory or two to cherish, as well as habits. But how to tell her it wasn't so much habit they were laying down,as it was a rhythm older than the sun that fitted even to the bone and laid claim to them? It was almost as if there had never been a time prior to their being married, and yet, somehow, that did not seem the kind of thing to write in a letter to Mother. Certainly, Shirley thought, returning to the house, it wasn't a thing they had slipped into purposefully. All the same, it would certainly placate Mother to know they shifted like a shuttle from work to pleasure like breathing.

Now, with the wind blowing sharp off the water, Shirley broke the surface of the gorse and reentered the house, full of a story about the mismothered lamb over the way. He forgot it as he took in the sight of Mara enisled at the kitchen table, preoccupied with the slicing of cress.

'I shall never get used to this,' he said, sitting down at the table.

'Anything especially?'

Shirley touched a finger to the gold of her wedding band, warm with wear, and tracing the shape of it against her hand, the encircled base of her knuckle. 'All of it,' he said, oblivious to the check this placed on her work. 'I meant it, you know, that afternoon I told you I never expected my parents' brand of always-love.'

Mara let go the paring knife, lacing her hand through his where it still lay calloused and warm atop her hand. She rested her head against his chest, the smell of her, jasmine, sunlight, cress and perfume enfolding him as a cloud. He bent to kiss her head and said, 'You taste sweet. Like the gorse or your heather or something.'

'In Scotland?' said Mara, eyes starred with laughter. 'I can't imagine why.' Then, subsiding, 'It's a reciprocal sentiment, you know. The unbelief of all this.' She nodded in the direction of the kitchen, the diced vegetables and neglected paring knife, the table with its sprays of white heather and gingham check of the curtains. Shirley had the distinct impression she meant none of these things, and it made his stomach lurch in startlement.

'Is it?'

Mara hummed faintly, the sound of it prickly and ticklish against his neck. 'I hadn't counted on you and your cherishing of quickness. No one was supposed to care for it in girls.'

Shirley could only look at her in wonderment, his thumb tracing absent-minded circles on the back of her hand. 'How on earth,' he asked, unable to stem the tide of his incredulity, 'could you ever have thought that?'

Gently Mara pressed the hand that held hers. She said, 'It's your family that set store on learning, not mine; daughters weren't a luxury we could run to. You must have noticed.'

'If you mean that Christmas visit,' said Shirley, his disengaged hand tracing the shell of her ear, the coil of her hair, 'I noticed you. And the insurmountable snow – and,' with laughter, 'Alec, but only because he was hell-bent on putting the fear of God into me lest I do anything to hurt his favourite sister.'

His laughter was contagious. 'Alec would do,' said Mara, catching it off of him. 'Knowing full well I'd have killed him for it, had I ever found out.'

'I have no trouble believing that,' Shirley said. 'What I can't picture is what else would you have done. I can't see you at all without your work.'

'If you mean what was I meant to do,' said Mara, 'three guesses as to that. What do girls usually do that don't go on to universities?'

Shirley clicked his tongue softly in incomprehension. He must have looked it too, because Mara said laughingly, 'You might look to your Rilla for a hint.'

That brought understanding like a jolt of lightening; Shirley felt it somewhere in his midsection as it badly singed some vital organ or other. Abruptly he turned to face her properly, dislodging her in the process from the nest she had made of his shoulder.

'But,' said Shirley, incredulous, 'Rilla wanted her wedding from the first. She'd had ideas of how it would look long before there was a war or even a Ken Ford to fit in with the scheme. It's not the same at all. What would you have done, married straight out of school?'

'If that's all,' said Mara, 'it's not so uncommon as all that.' There was a smile, or something like it, tugging at her mouth. 'I could have done.'

The jolting came back for a second onslaught. Obliquely Shirley was aware of the upward cast of Mara's eyes as two blue stars in the gingham-stamped sunlight. 'Could you?' he said, voice dry.

'Mm,' said Mara. 'Had I wanted it.'

'And you didn't?'

Mara laughed, not ungently. She said, 'I was sixteen. I had no idea what it was I wanted, save that it was more, somehow.'

'Of course it was.' He tried, for what seemed an endless moment, to fit her neatly into the lace-and-antimacassars existence that seemed to be Rilla's Toronto life, but couldn't do it. He kept coming stubbornly up against the everlasting scripts with her marginalia, and the stock of poetry folded into the corner of her mouth, whispered between kisses. To take it away – no, that was someone else entirely.

Mara's hands found the curve of his jaw and traced it lightly. She said, 'It's nothing you didn't know. I mean, you knew there had been other people.'

'Not like that,' said Shirley. 'I hadn't realised any of them counted.'

'Had they counted, mo cridhe I'd not be here.' She spared a kiss for his mouth and said, 'Besides, you'll have had your share of sweethearts, surely.'

'No,' said Shirley. 'I meant that too, when I told you. There was only ever you.'

At the spindly-legged table, Jem looked up from a letter had been perusing, and said, 'They're never coming back,' in desultory fashion. He considered a piece of cooling toast, rejected it, and instead refolded the letter. 'I can't see what Shirley wants with bloated sheep and lamed cattle on holiday, but they're definitely never coming back.'

'Do you think so?' asked Faith, absorbed in a letter of her own.

'Don't you?'

Before Faith could answer, Kitty leaned across her elbow, retrieved the butter dish from its perilous position near Tuesday's eager jaws, and said, 'They're not allowed to stay there forever.'

'Quite,' said Jem. Faith, handing over her own letter said 'Here's Mara's account. See if it reassures you at all.'

'I find it hard to believe they write markedly different letters' saidJem, swapping with her gladly.

'They probably don't. Though you might find Mara's light on the health of the MacDaird sheep.'

It was not a letter designed to be read by other people. Less the details, more the improbable way Mara tacked between topics confident in the assumption the reader would keep pace. Jem managed half a page before looking up and saying, 'You're going to have to parse this. Of all you girls who pin hopes, the only one to write a halfway intelligible letter is my sister.'

Faith laughed. She said, 'Nan would,' and went on placidly in her perusal of the letter from Shirley letter while Christopher vented his latest grievance; namely the insufficiency of the attention being paid him. Teddy leaned over, scooped him out of his basket and peace returned. Jem passed Mara's letter back across the table and said to Faith, 'How can you keep up with all that?'

More laughter as Faith took Christopher from Teddy. She settled him against her chest and said, 'We lived together for three years. Ariel's way of thinking isn't exactly alien to me.'

Tuesday scrabbled up into Teddy's now vacant lap. For good measure Kitty said again, 'They're not allowed to stay.'

'In that case,' said Faith, 'you had better find a good reason to persuade them otherwise.'

It was August, and summer only by a Scottish measure. The haar had burnt off the shore, but it had left behind that marked meteorological fickleness so peculiar to the Islands that brought weather that changed by the quarter hour. The last hour alone had witnessed a whirlwind parade of all four seasons. Not half an hour ago it had been deep November, as the chill of the wind across the water chased the haar away. April mizzle had followed on its heels, and summer had skimmed briefly across the sky, a puff of white cloud and sunburst that bespoke June. Now it was autumnal October, less only the vivid colours of a Canadian autumn – or it was but for the date on the letter that had arrived from Larkrise.

In the imperfect shelter of the gorse hedge and a stray rowan, Shirley read it aloud as Mara worked the garden, here eradicating brambles, uprooting spearheaded thistles and creeping nettles, there harvesting cress and mint, while wind blew the smell of the gorse, coconut-sweet and so incongruous in the clear, chill air, towards them. To date Christopher and Tuesday had allied out of a mutual need for attention and familial kisses, a circumstance which thoroughly nonplussed the Carlisle gremlins and Teddy scrabbling to make up the difference to them with ever more inventive games. Kitty had landed a front page story and was in raptures about it, 'And Jem writes that the Rydels are leaving Fox Corner,' said Shirley.

'Oh? Are they thinking of moving, then?'

Shirley laughed. He said, 'Jem will tear down and rebuild the Larkrise foundation, and never mind the deposit before he thinks of moving. No, I rather think he means it as a hint to us.'

'I see.' Mara sat back on her heels. Shirley couldn't decide if she'd written off the brambles were a wasted endeavour, acquired a sufficiency of mint and cress, or only temporarily given over her attention. The mint, deeply aromatic, and the richness of the gorse perfumed the air like incense, tempered by the coolness of the cress. 'Do you mean to take it, then?'

'We could do,' said Shirley. He snared her ankle in one hand and gently tugged her closer. 'It certainly has advantages. Not far from the others, very near the Carlisles, as I recall, near enough the coach house I wouldn't worry over you walking home after an evening spent touring with work.'

'There's a but in there somewhere,' said Mara, relaxing against his side. Somehow, in spite of the perpetual breeze that seemed to play across the water she was sun-warm with work, and of course the mint, the cress and the soil had got into her skin, the smell and the taste of it as Shirley pressed a kiss to her fingers.

'More an or,' he said.

'And that would be?'

With effort he refocused his attention on the conversation at hand. The freshness of the mint and the gorse-sweetness of her notwithstanding. 'We could stay,' said Shirley, not elaborating. There was no need to.

'We could that,' Mara said. The air was crisp and cool, summery only by an island standard. She folded her hands into the shelter of his collar and acquiesced to the impulse to take refuge in him. 'It would be easy to stay – very easy.'

'Do you think so?'

Mara hummed ascension, and Shirley, in the seclusion of the garden, brushed aside the interference of skirt-hem and stocking, mapping the fine bones of her ankle and shin with his fingers. A flurry of midges rose up through the grass, disturbed by the gesture, and Mara swatted them away. A lark launched itself out of the rowan and launched itself heavenward, its body a lone brown arrow in the crisp cool air. Mara was right; it would indeed be easy to stay here, among the sweetness of the gorse, the bluster of the wind, the pummelling of the sea against the vastness of the shore. There was indeed, nothing like the tangle of the isles. At some point, contrapuntally to the lark, Mara had begun to hum, Ho ro Mairi Dhu, Shirley thought, as she had sometimes during the war. He registered this only when the buzzing of the notes against his chest subsided and Mara turned to look at him, eyes like clear blue stars.

'Let me think on it?' said Mara, her voice muffled and lilting against the hollow of his chest.

'By all means.'