As we walked from the kirk, the congregation of gutting girls and coopers and fishers showered us with small pieces of oatcake, a blessing they called the bride’s bonn. Other wedding traditions—the bewedding giving of father to groom, the procession, fiddlers, the ale, the guizers—I was pleased enough to miss, but I was glad for this simple rain of plenty on my head. Those who were not so close to us whispered to each other curiously of the strangeness of the day, stripped of family and village blessings. But those few who knew what it was I had set my mind to do closed themselves around us with quiet and sombre joy.

I turned my face to the grainy white sky and thought of albatross feathers. And snow.

~

They contrived to give us space that night. Privacy. Clementina, the Cruden Bay girls, they arranged it among themselves to smuggle the two of us into the lodgings shared by Jeannie, Isobel and Mary—a wee sheddie at the back of a cottage in the same street as Mrs Booth’s.

And then, giggling, they left us there, Magnus Tulloch and me, in a room hung about with sheets of brown paper. A jug of ale from Stivvy Ratter on an upturned box. A small bread pudding from my quinies.

Clementina had settled a wreath of holly in my wiry hair, and as I tried to disentangle it I watched Magnus Tulloch in the cold tallow light. Shrugging out of his shirt. Arms bare. Wrestling to pull off his boots.

Owwww!

He flung away the boot in his hand and scrambled across the bed to examine the puncture of a thorn on the palm of my hand.

Ee, what have ye done ta yeself now, Meggie Tulloch?

Meggie Tulloch. Me.

The perfect red pearl burst, and I held my breath as he smudged the blood away with his thumb.

And then I laughed.

A slow grin. What?

I didn’t know what. It was like something had burst on the inside too. I kept laughing. I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t stop, and then Magnus Tulloch started too, both of us laughing, laughing till we ached, till we fell onto the bed, Magnus Tulloch with his hand clamped over his mouth to muffle the noise, me hiccuping and holding on to his shoulders. I collapsed against him—another wave of laughing, laughing fierce as crying, me still in my layers of wool, my crown of thorns, pressed to a naked chest.

When we had breath, I took his hand from his mouth. Can ye help me get this thing off my head?

The ale, the bread pudding, those rare gifts … wasted.

~