First Ma, then Kitta, now me. Da and Granda would not be pleased to be losing the last of the family’s female labour. Unty Jinna, already overstretched, would be pulled into the gap we had left. Maybe poor Liza too. And Archie and Jamie would be urged to marry, and soon. I should have felt guilty about Unty Jinna, but I could not forgive her.

Was there any other reason, I wondered, why Da might be sorry I wasn’t coming back? A father was little more than an idea to me, an outline I saw on the Lily Maud, a man-shaped shadow by the fire. I didn’t know what Da thought about anything.

No doubt about what Granda would think. He would be in a rage that I was announcing what I had done, not asking permission to do it, even though the law did not demand permission for me to marry. He would be bitter about my choice to marry outside Roanhaven, outside the fisher community. A stranger! He would curse me as a traitor for the loss of my three months of fisher work and nine of earning. But he would not be sorry to see the accursed reid-heidit quinie disappear, just as he would not have cried for Kitta. He’d called her a limmer, but now she was something even more shameful—a madwoman they’d had to lock away.

~

The wedding was in Great Yarmouth, just before we left. My memories … oh, they are white, but not the white you might expect, lambsie, not wedding white, no.

A clergyman with a kindly heart for fishworkers read the banns at a church that neither of us belonged to, though we had gone there on Sundays during the season. Clementina and Isobel were my maidens. Liza had refused in a tight, frightened voice that made me sad and gave a presence of sorts to Granda Jeemsie’s sour and certain disapproval from all those miles distant. Magnus chose his fisher friend Stivvy Ratter and Old Boy Jackie as gweedmen.

Inside the kirk, while the pastor spoke his solemn words, I looked at my boots and at Magnus Tulloch’s. I looked at the scuffed, waxy floorboards, at drifts of sand caught between them. I looked, unflinching, at a mouseling scurrying at the edge of sight. I did not want to look up at the Lord’s fine house where fine people prayed. It was only when Magnus Tulloch took my hand and bent to kiss the knuckles one by one that I raised my face, and then … oh, then I wished I had set my eyes on his all along and never looked away.