One night I crept in and found him nursing his hand, his face pained.

The tide is flowin’, quinie. Fetch me some sea water.

I took the lantern and a bucket and trudged to the boatie shore, but I wasn’t gracious about it, no. I was grumping and mumping all the way. Why hadn’t I pulled on an extra gansey or wrapped a shawl around me? I barrelled my head to the sea wind, pulled off my boots, and waded in to dip the bucket into the icy sea.

When I returned, Granda sprinkled water on his palm and rubbed it into his hand, his arm, as though it were one of Unty Jinna’s unguents and not just water from the sea. He had no time for Unty Jinna and her herbs and roots.

Ah, he sighed. And then he waved a finger at me. Mind ye never draw the water but from a flowin’ tide.

I put the kettle on the fire to boil, shivering, shivering. I didn’t want to sit there with Granda, so I pulled on another gansey, an old one of Will’s. When I took Granda his tea, I could see, by the fire’s light, that the gansey was on inside out. Ach! I went to pull it over my head, put it to rights, but Granda clamped a hand on my arm.

Stop it, ye foolish quinie! D’ye want to be takin’ the devil to the inside?

I stared at his great lumpish paw, and pulled away. I should have held my tongue. I should have.

That’s just superstition, that is. Miss Birnie says superstition is the friend of an ignorant mind.

A hush. A hush like I had never heard, ever. And then the rushing of blood into Granda’s pasty face. He seethed and he boiled.

Iggernant! Iggernant! It’s iggernant stranger-women with not an ounce of sense about them what will bring us all to ruin. The old ways is what keeps the devil from your red-heidit self, quinie. Isn’t your Miss Birnie! Pah!

A spray of disgust hit my face.

Miss Bir-nie, Miss Bir-nie. His girly mimicking voice. Wait till your da come back. We’ll see about your Miss Birnie then.

Bluster threats. Da wouldn’t be back till Christmas. But I took care to open my Forget-Me-Not Annual only when Granda was gone from the house, and not to let him see the other books Miss Birnie was lending me to read. Books of her own, they were, from home.

He’d already taken on a rage when he found me reading with a lantern in the netting shed with Crusoe one night. He grabbed the book off me and held it up, swinging between his finger and his yellow thumb.

An’ what kind of blether this be?

Oliver Twist, I told him. By Mister Charles Dickens.

Oo-hoo. An’ what kind of story has Mis-ter Charles Dickens to learn ye?