How I longed to tell Kitta. Owning a dog, well, that was no common thing among fisherfolk. An extravagance, it was, a mystification. The only person thereabouts I knew of was Lady Ferguson, wife of the Laird of Pitfour, and she was gentry with idle time on her hands, and folk thought her an oddness anyway. I saw her once at Mintlaw, while Ma and the Fergusons’ cook were haggling at the kitchen door. I peered through a gap in the hedgerow and watched Lady Ferguson parading on the cool green lawn with three terriers on golden leashes. Ma wouldn’t believe it when I told her later but they were wearing clothes, those dogs! Aye, jaunty tartan jackets that buttoned under their bellies. Imagine! I wouldn’t put clothes on a dog but the leash, now, that seemed a grand idea. I looped a rope over Crusoe’s head but the poor wee thing almost strangled himself trying to pull out of it. It didn’t matter, he didn’t need a leash. Always he was close by my heels, except to chase gulls on the boatie shore. A good wee dog, he was, and a bother to no-one.

Crusoe thrived on whatever scraps Ma didn’t want for soup, and I made sure Granda could have no complaint about the dog, nor me. But I had set something among us on the day I brought Crusoe into our home. Granda felt himself wronged, and his ill-temper had come to stay.

~

There came a time in the autumn of that year when I realised something terrible: I hated Granda Jeemsie. It was shocking to have thought such a thing. To hate, now, that was a sin. Ma had once given me a good hard slap to the side of the head when I said I hated milk pudding. Imagine, just imagine, the punishment for hating a person, and such a person as your own granda. No-one must ever know, I told myself. I will keep it inside my own head and none will know. But that very Sunday, Pastor McNab fixed his eye on me and bellowed at the congregation: Be sure: your sins will find ye out! Words from the Bible. I looked away from his turkey face. Pastor McNab had already decided I was Trouble that day in Sunday school when he heard me telling Liza which Bible stories I loved the best. The Bible is not a set of STORies for your enterTAINment, Meggie Duthie! The Bible is the WORRRD of GOD!