Unty Jinna, Liza and Kitta were unshouldering the loaded murlins and preparing to float them out to the Lily. I could almost feel the cold numbing their toes, freezing their ankles, as they pulled off boots, unrolled their stockings. The retreat of blood from the veins in shock, the cramping in their legs, while they ferried murlins from shore to boat. But there are worse things. How could I bear to watch the worse that came next?

Kitta looked up, in my direction, knowing I’d be there on the stone wall. All that had gone before—the disgrace of losing her position at Rowescroft House, the return to the village, the scandalous lies that were told of her, the secrets she’d not talk about—all these things were as nought compared to that moment when Weelim’s Kitta Neish Duthie crouched in the freezing shallows to take Granda Jeemsie on her back.

December 1972

December 1972

A few weeks later, the next thing happened. I …

I will have to tell it like a story, lambsie.

14

The red-haired girl is up on the braes, looking over the boatie shore. A skirly wind comes in from the sea, jerking the sails of the fishing boats and whisking away anything loose as it barrels through. An empty murlin and a brace of buoys, tied together with rope, tumble over the side of the Lily Maud. They skim the shallows. They helter-skelter across the shingle.

The girl runs down to gather them up, to drag them home behind her because she wouldn’t dare return them to the Lily Maud. Oh no, not her, not the accursed quinie.

The buoys, ugh, they are disgusting things. She hates the sight of them, the feel of them even more. Inflated bladders, skins of small animals, cured and sealed with tar and corks. Skin and fur and gut. When she is nearly at Tiller Street, one of them breaks free of the rope and skitters off towards the braes again. She pulls the rest to the netting shed, shoving them roughly inside, and runs after the runaway float. It won’t do to be the one to lose it.

She finds it up near the sheddie, its rope snagged on a jagged plank of timber. As she releases it, she sees it is a bloated torso, sewn up and sealed with tar where limbs had once been.

The girl swallows air. She slumps to her knees.

The fur of the leathery skin, stiffened by salt, is gingerish, with a white blaze on one side the shape of a wing.

December 1972

December 1972

And then the world shifted again, for a third time, in a way that could never be undone, never be made right.