It was Kitta’s plan to go to the fish that had caused her to be taken from school, from home, from me, and put into service in that awful place. Going to the fish was not respectable. A year later, here she was, being granted her wish: arled to Messrs Nicol & Mair, curers of Gadlehead, and bound for the Lerwick season. And all with Ma’s blessing. Was it because the span of a year had given Ma time to get used to the idea? Or because Da and the boys had seen with their own eyes how hard and long the gutting quines worked, the modest, decent lives they led? Or was it simply that the shame of Kitta’s sins, whatever they were, was greater than the shame of her being a gutting girl? No-one would say. Ma was busy with packing Kitta’s kist, the things she must take for a spell in the Shetlands summer of three months—longer if there was work beyond that. And Granda was souring by the fire, disgusted with the whole affair. Let it be on your head, he told Ma. I wash my hands on ye all!

All I knew was that Kitta was leaving again, going to the fish, and that I wanted to go with her.

~

A telegram came. A telegram! It was not the first ever to arrive at Roanhaven: this was the way all the curers notified their quines of the time of departure, and there were several local fisher girls now signed on to the herring. But it was a first for number 8 Tiller Street. It lay on the table, so much folded and unfolded and smoothed to be read that the faint words were in danger of disappearing completely. Granda Jeemsie glowered at it, as though it was the work of the devil come to his door.

SUNDAY 11AM STOP PORT DOUGAL PIER GADLEHEAD STOP ST NINIANS STOP

The season had been under way since March in the Western Isles, but Kitta was just in time to join the next leg, in the Shetlands, replacing a girl, sick, on a team out of Aberdeen. Then the boats would make their way to home waters in autumn, with the curers set up close by in Fraserburgh and the Gadle, until everything moved further south.

I read the words over and over, trying to make myself believe that, come Sunday, Kitta really was going to be sailing across the sea to the wide world we had both dreamed about.

She leaned on the table, her face close to mine. Ye’ll wear those words away, Ginger Meggie. She flicked the long fringe out of my eyes.

St Ninian’s must be a big ship for all those lasses an’ every one of them with a kist. How big d’ye think it will be? How many lasses will be on it, d’ye think?