Gadlehead be no place for quinies, no place at all. Town folk, they be not like decent fisherfolk. An’ sailors from stranger-boats—pah! They come from all round the world, godless places, an’ think to sway a sober quinie’s head with funcy things. Aye, I seen it afore an’ it all lead one way, to trouble. Sooner or later, to trouble, aye. An’ all from strangers with funcy things.

He was out of breath, Granda was, and a little froth of spit was in the corners of his mouth, and I had never before hated him as much as I did right then.

Ye shouldn’t call our Kitta a limmer! My hands clenched as I spoke. Ye shouldn’t say that. Ye don’t know anythin’!

He looked at me, narrowing his small, pale eyes. An’ just what do YE know about it, quinie, eh? Eh?

I checked my words. The truth was, I knew nothing much at all, but I didn’t want to tell Granda that, to give him the smallest thing. I decided to show him my back, the greatest mark of disrespect I could offer, and as I marched out the door I could hear him shouting The very devil! and thumping the table with his fist, and I knew Ma would be angry with me because I had crossed a line.

~

Later, when I sat with Crusoe on the braes, looking out to sea, I realised that everything they had thought to keep from me, everything Kitta had refused to say, Granda had just told in his clumsy, savage way. I could put things together now and make sense of what had happened: his talk of sailors from stranger-boats and Kitta’s brief mention of friends; his insinuations about gifts, and the mystifying finery. It was always in his nature to see a shadow and call it the devil.

Maybe I am being unfair, lambsie. Granda Jeemsie was a man of his time, and most folk then were inclined to see the world as he did, always to imagine the worst. Could be that Kitta’s sins were no more than a bit of innocent flirting with foreign sailors when she went to the pier on her hours off, a few trinkets given to a pretty girl. I don’t know. But word had got back to Rowescroft House. See, it wasn’t only fisherfolk who would believe the worst of a girl.

As I sat up there on the braes, I thought of the purple silk hidden away in the netting shed, and how funny it is, the way things happen. Kitta had taken a gift from a stranger and made it a gift to me, and she had paid a price for the handsome thing. But you know, in a strange, roundabout way, the price she paid had also bought her freedom.

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