Kists were being hauled off the ship and loaded onto carts and I hoped mine, brand-new with my name cut into the top, would arrive safe and sound and not fall into the harbour, as I saw happen to one. Inside it were three things so precious to me that my heart jumped about in my chest when the kist was collected from Tiller Street by the curers’ cart. Kitta’s purple scarf tightly rolled and stowed in the bottom of the shottle. The Forget-Me-Not Annual, wrapped up in my spare pair of drawers. And the third thing, a gift Miss Birnie had sent to me in a box when she heard I would not be coming back to school: another book. Dark brown, it was, old, and covered in waxy cloth, the edges of the pages the colour of tea. On the front and on the spine were curly letters of imperfect gold: Underwoods by Robert Louis Stevenson. Inside a square on the first page, the name Mildred Birnie had been crossed out and Margaret Neish Duthie written in its place. A message, too, in Miss Birnie’s handwriting. My very own book of poems. Please God, I prayed, keep my kist safe and dry and I won’t bother Ye for a good long while.

There were no carts for us girls. We’d to walk to a place called Gremista, where the Nicol & Mair gutting stations were. Most of the girls were pale and weak from retching the last two hours from the Roost, and many of them had suffered all the way from Gadlehead. I thought myself lucky—the luckiest ginger head ever to go to sea. However would the rest manage the walk? It was only a couple of miles along the shore, Clementina said, but some of them looked so poorly.

Ah, that’s nothin’, Kitta assured me. If the cold doesn’t set our bellies to rights, the smell of salt will do it.

But the further we tramped along the road like a straggling trail of geese, it was not the clean, sharp tang of salt I could smell. Stronger and stronger, more overpowering with each step, a familiar smell blew into our faces. Fish guts. I held the back of my hand to my nose, and Clementina, beside me, rolled her eyes. To experienced gutting quines, this was nothing, either.

Ach, that first sight of Gremista! Already there were gutting teams at work in neighbouring yards. It was getting late, but the thrum of work was steady. I asked Kitta what hours we would work and she laughed. While there’s fish, there’s work! We work till the cooper says stop. An’ if ye need to piss, too bad, Meggie mine. Ye hang on, ye just hang on!

Kitta’s crude words shocked me.