Magnus begged me to wait. We are new together, he said, we should get ourselves settled in Lerwick. Prepare ourselves, find out what is the right way, proper.

But the thought of putting off any longer what I must do crazed me. I could not wait, I just couldn’t.

Magnus turned to his friend Stivvy Ratter, asking for passage for me on Stivvy’s drifter, the Ann Rose. Sorrowful, Stivvy bowed his head. He couldn’t take a ginger on board, not even his mate’s girl. But he knew crew on the passenger ship St Siniver, and I could work my passage, two passages, from the Broch to Lerwick.

I knew what working on the St Siniver would mean, cleaning the mess of three hundred seasick girls on their way back from the fish, but I was grateful to Stivvy.

Ee, just get back ta your man soon, Meggie Tulloch, he said, doffing his cap to me and nudging Magnus lewdly in the ribs, as men are like to do when one is newly wed.

So I took the train with the other girls from Great Yarmouth to Gadlehead and then I’d just to find my way to the Broch and along the coast. I was the daughter of a fishwife and had tramped the countryside with a creel on my back many a time. Fraserburgh was only twenty miles away. I walked.

I had to pass Roanhaven on the road above the scaur. I kept my eyes ahead of me. Wouldn’t give it the turn of my head.

~

It takes my breath to think of it now. How foolish I was. Naive.

Hindsight tells the story—that’s what people say, isn’t it, lambsie? I had been shocked, and then angry. Then, desperate. I hadn’t listened properly to all Will said. So she could not hurt herself. I’d not even listened when Magnus Tulloch gently ventured there might be another way of looking at what had been done. Oh no, not me. All I could see was a promise sealed with an albatross feather.

Had I patched up, remade, the picture of Kitta as she was when I left Roanhaven? And all those months before, the guise she’d worn, the things she had not said?

Aye, all I could see was my fearless sister who would throw back her head and laugh.

~

The red-haired girl shivers at the top of the steps, listening for the noise of weeping, blood-curdling cries. Listening for madness. But it is quiet in this grey stone building by the sea where her sister has been brought against her will.

A woman in a nurse’s cape hurrying by directs the girl to a corridor on the left of a big arched door. Footsteps, heavy in seaboots, echo around the girl, bouncing off walls and from the ceiling high above. It is airless and dark, hard to see.