“Now,” said Lennox. “I need you to get four legs together that all belong to the same animal. Do you understand?”

Nina nodded. She could feel them now, all mixed up like a jigsaw puzzle, as Ruaridh had said, and quickly and carefully she set about unfolding the legs from under each lamb, until triumphantly, she had four hooves in one hand. It felt oddly like changing a duvet.

“I’ve got one!” she said.

“That’s great,” said Lennox. “Now, pull it a little. Gently. Not too much.”

The little animal moved forward, then stopped.

“It’s stuck,” said Nina, as the sheep gave another great wail of distress. “It’s stuck! I can’t get him out any more!”

“Don’t worry,” said Lennox, pulling out a piece of rope. “Here. Get your hand out and then loop this around the hooves.”

Nina stared at him. “You’re going to pull out a lamb with a rope?”

“Unless you’d rather perform a Caesarean section?” grunted Lennox, speedily tying a slip knot and passing her the rope.

Her hands were absolutely disgusting now, and although it was horribly warm inside the sheep, it was still completely freezing in the lean-to, and she’d had to take her jacket off and roll her sleeves up, which she wasn’t enjoying in the slightest. She was trembling slightly as she took the rope and put her hand back inside the ewe, but after a few false starts she managed somehow to get it around the hooves.

“Okay,” said Lennox. “Are you ready? Because I’m going to pull, but if it’s not ready, we’ll have to start all over again.”

“Farming is very different from how I thought it was,” said Nina, looking anxiously at the coiled rope in Lennox’s hands.

“There are things you can’t read about in books, you know,” grunted Lennox. “Are we ready or not?”

“Please do it now,” said Nina. “I’m freezing to death.”

“Okay,” said Lennox. “One . . . two . . . three . . .”

Nina removed her hand, then, gently, without straining or tugging, Lennox pulled on the rope just so—slowly at first, then faster—and suddenly out plopped a blinking, brand-new, soaking-wet little lamb.

“OH!” said Nina. “OH my goodness!”

Lennox looked at her with narrowed eyes. “What on earth did you think was going to come out?” he said. “Something shrink-wrapped at the co-op?”

And then, with a happy surge, the sheep heaved strongly and the second little lamb came rushing out onto the hay and looked up and around with a blind-eyed, confused stare, and Nina gasped.

“Oh, WOW!”

Nina scrubbed her hands clean as Lennox rubbed the new lambs down with fresh hay, checking their mouths and nostrils, and the mother delivered the afterbirth. Then, astonishingly, as if they hadn’t been through a great traumatic entrance to the world, the tiny creatures found their wobbly feet and stumbled up blindly, making little bleating noises. They were utterly and hopelessly enchanting, and Nina couldn’t take her eyes off them.

“Oh my goodness,” she said. “Look at them! That’s amazing! That’s AMAZING!”

She gazed, fascinated, as the newborn lambs somehow, instinctively, made their way to their mother, who was now lying exhausted on her side, and found exactly the place to go to start sucking milk. She found to her amazement that she was rather tearful. The ewe, who had been in such awful pain, then utterly exhausted, somehow recovered herself enough to sit up in a rather ungainly fashion and start licking clean her new babies.

“Well done, you,” said Nina. “Well done, Mum.”

Lennox smiled.

“I don’t care if you’re laughing at me,” said Nina. “This is totally awesome, actually.”

“I’m not laughing at you,” said Lennox. “I’m agreeing with you. Just because I see a lot of lambs being born doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s pretty incredible. Every time. Lovely little buggers they are, too.”

He petted them roughly.

“Come on,” he said. “Tea.”

When Nina stood up she realized she was still frozen to the bone. Outside, she was amazed to see the first rays of dawn in the corner of the sky.

“We weren’t in there for that long,” she said. “Were we?”

Lennox nodded “Aye, it was a pretty gnarly one. It’s after three.”

“It’s just after three and getting light?” said Nina. “This is ridiculous. You basically live above the Arctic Circle. It’s the land of the midnight sun.”

Down at the farmhouse, the log burner had been banked and was smoldering happily; the room was cozy, and Lennox stoked the fire and went to boil the kettle for tea. Nina took the opportunity to wash up more thoroughly, even though she was resigning herself to the fact that she would obviously smell of sheep forever.

She was intrigued by the farmhouse bathroom; it was absolutely cutting-edge brand new, all polished marble and walk-in showers and Jacuzzi baths. It was like a really, really posh hotel, with thick white towels hanging everywhere.

“Nice bathroom,” she said as she came out. Lennox nodded briefly, and it occurred to Nina—and would have occurred to her earlier, except she was so very tired—that of course Kate must have done it. Of course she must.

The main room too didn’t look in the slightest like a farmhouse; it was all plain minimalist Scandinavian wood and floors. It didn’t really suit Lennox, Nina thought, whose clothes, while clean, were so old and faded they looked as if he’d inherited them. He looked too big, too sharply cut for this decor—it was austere, yes, but so carefully designed to look austere, with its piles of artistic twigs and ironic antlers, that it actually ended up looking overdone.

She looked for a bookshelf, but she didn’t see one. Instead there was a magazine basket—in white, of course—overflowing with copies of Farmers Weekly and, deep underneath all of those, a few old issues of Interiors magazine. She wondered if Lennox had kept them by mistake, or if he really didn’t notice.

She moved closer to the fire. Parsley was already ensconced in front of it, cozy and stretched out. Nina budged him up and sat next to him, staring into the flames. Lennox handed her a cup of tea with, she soon discovered, coughing, whiskey in it.

“What’s this?” she said.