It didn’t seem possible that any of them could be right, but the village couldn’t believe that all could be wrong.

The most shameful story came from Isobel Ross, who put it about that Kitta was in a certain way, causing a rift between the Duthies and the Rosses that would never be mended. I huffed all the way home to tell Kitta.

I’m not pregnant, Ginger Meggie! Kitta said, but was disinclined still to confide in me.

I wouldn’t be put off this time. Then why are they sayin’ that?

I don’t know, do I? she said wearily. I’ll tell ye this, Ginger Meggie: takes more than keepin’ friends to get pregnant. Anybody what doesn’t know that doesn’t know anythin’.

I frowned as she turned away. I remembered what the tinkie lasses had told Liza and Liza had told us. I knew more than Kitta thought I did about what getting pregnant involved. But what did Kitta mean? What friends?

I hugged to myself nagging fears about Kitta’s disgrace. That it had something to do with the silk she had given me, the lace beneath her dull blue skirt, the look on her face that had made her a stranger to me. When the truth came out later, I learned a thing about myself: that my instincts for sensing the spine of trouble are as fine as the point on a gullie knife.

I didn’t know what Kitta did in the hours when I was at school. She probably didn’t want to leave the house at all, not alone, for there was none who would talk to her, not a quinie who would dare be seen to pass the time, not a loon who’d give her the eye of respect. But after school, the two of us were together, reddin’ Granda’s lines, collecting bait, splitting whiting to dry—and if it were not for the cloud of not knowing hanging over me, I would have felt complete. Like our lives had been wrung free and clean of their worrisome changes and put back to the place they were before Kitta left.

Come with me, I begged one morning. Miss Birnie won’t mind to have ye back in class. And we are reading Rob Roy. Oh, it’s grand.

But Kitta shook her head and Ma bid me to go, and I didn’t like the grimness on her face as she said it.

When I came home, Kitta’s kist was on the hearthrug again.

~

Although I thought I knew proper from not, it was a puzzle to me then, a mystification, why some things were thought proper and some things were not. And how it could be that a thing once thought not-proper could miraculously become otherwise.