I was a wee bairn when I tottered into the winter sea. Straight in, clothes and all. Folk said later I was blessed to be alive, that my heart didn’t stop, nor my blood turn white. Jockel Buchan, an old fisherman, strode through the shallows to reach me. Waded in, he did, almost to the knees of his great seaboots. I remember this, aye, but I don’t remember feeling frightened, or cold, though how could I not have been? Nor the sound of Kitta and Liza squealing like piglets all the while he was hauling me ashore. Nor Unty Jinna shaking my shoulders and calling me a raickless bairn. These things they told me later. What I remember—aye, even now, I remember—is struggling to be free of the arms holding me safe, twisting round to the water again, searching the sea for another glimpse of the huge white wings that had lifted from the waveslick and flown far away into the sky. The most beautiful thing, lambsie! Ma used to say my pretty birdie was a kittiwake or a solan goose that had strayed too close to the shore, and what a foolish bairnikie who would droon herself for that! But I knew it was something miraculous, and I cried to fly away with it.

Granda Jeemsie took on a rage about my little rush into the sea. He muttered for weeks and shook his head. He spat on the ground and marked a cross on the sand with the blade of his gullie knife. He gave a sixpence to the widow of Jockel Buchan when the old man and his yawl were taken by a storm that same winter. Jeemsie Neish giving away a sixpence! Now, that was a thing to remark on.

~

My people would have recognised you, lambsie, you and your mother both. You have the look of Ma’s side of the family—the Neishes—on your brow and in your eyes. Aye, and in the set of your frame, too. Wifie’s bones, Ma used to say, her proud claim to generous hips and a strength in the spine fit for fetching and carrying. I canna expect you’ll think on it as any sort of blessing, but you’d have been given the nod back then, lambsie, the nod and the closed-lipped smile of those parts that was grim and smug both.

Me, now, I always had the Neish build, too, but there was not a soul who would smile upon on a reid-heidit throwback from some ancient Pictish kin. The Neishes would lay no claim to red hair, and nor would Da’s side, the Duthies. Be thankful this curse passed you by, lambsie. Aye, I know you’re smirking, thinking your grunnie fanciful with talk of curses, but it was not a thing to smile about then, no.

Imagine this: