But I was adrift. I could not stop thinking of myself as a gutting girl. I had been proud to be one, for all the mess and muck of it. When the girls came back next season, I went to the yards, the huts, when I could. I hadn’t been to a ceilidh since returning to Gremista, but Magnus Tulloch was always suggesting we go.

Some Sundays Clementina or the Cruden Bay girls would walk with us after kirk. Oftentimes when Magnus, now foreman, was to be late at the yards, I would help Mrs Leask at the Mission for Fisherfolk hut, tending to girls whose hands were in as much trouble as mine had been, winding bandages onto cuts and sores after Mrs Leask had cleaned them up. Aye, I was a gutting girl still, just one who could no more hold a gipper in her hand.

I discovered something at the mission hut, something precious, something saving. Mrs Leask had a library! A small collection, it was, that she kept in a kist and loaned to any who showed interest in what she called Improving Literature. Not too many takers, she told me with a shake of her head.

After we finished with the line of girls, I would pull the books out of the kist. There were prayer books and cautionary tales for young women, a dictionary, an atlas, and a Bible, of course, but it seemed Mrs Leask counted poetry as Improving Literature, and it was these volumes I fell upon. One by one I took them home to read. Tennyson. Keats. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And one that Mrs Leask’s daughter had sent from her new home, far away, in Boston: Emily Dickinson. I copied poems I liked best into the blank pages at the back of my Forget-Me-Not Annual—in tiny letters, using every bit of space. I didn’t always understand the words, but I would make a list of them, mark the pages with scraps of wool, and borrow Mrs Leask’s dictionary to work them out. Reading those poems aloud put music in my head that found a place there, and stayed.

Magnus Tulloch listened as I read bits to him but he wasn’t as much taken with the likes of Emily Dickinson.

There is a word

Which bears a sword

Can pierce an armed man.

It hurls its barbed syllables—

At once is mute again.

Magnus Tulloch looked up at me, expectantly, from cleaning his boots, so I carried on.

But where it fell

The saved will tell

On patriotic day,

Some epauletted brother

Gave his breath away.

Magnus Tulloch was frowning. Does she say what word?

I quickly read the rest of the poem to myself.

No.

No?

I thought about it. Ye’re to make up your own mind on it. That’s what I think.