I glanced around, uncertain, but the Gremista quines, all good girls from sober fishing families, were milling, mingling, in high spirits. I allowed myself to be pushed along with them. The Cruden Bay girls were there too—fathers and brothers not in port this night—and even they seemed at ease. I’m with Kitta and Clementina, I told myself, and Isobel, Jeannie and Mary. But it was too much, the pulse and heat of so much laughter, so much music, so many tuneless voices singing different songs all at once, a blur of foreign words. The air thick with a cloying smell, sour and yeasty, dizzying. Someone breathed stranger-words in my ear, and easy enough, it was, to guess what they meant from the way they were spoken. A glass I refused to take was thrust at me again and again, and two sailors bellowed some raucous song in my ear. As red as red as a match’s head and they tried to ruffle my hair with their hands. I pulled at Kitta’s sleeve, wanting to leave, but my sister was flouncing her hair and laughing, forehead to cheek with a man I’d never seen. I let go of her gansey. Inching my way to the wall of The Queen, away from the flow of people. Merging into the stone to watch.

So many men, and every one of them with a tankard or glass in his hand. Hardly any of the girls were drinking, but I could not take my eyes off those few who were. Quiet, serious Jeannie! She downed two tankards, one and then the other, and wiped frothy stuff from around her mouth with the back of her hand. Already she was glassy-eyed, staggering a little, giggling as a Dutch sailor caught her round the waist and landed a smacking kiss on her cheek. So this is the devil’s work, I thought, watching Jeannie’s sheening face. What happy work it seemed to be.

I shouldn’t stare, I shouldn’t, but I canna stop my eyes from flitting back to Kitta. No glass in her hand but she is every bit as intoxicated as Jeannie. I study the man. I do not think him a fisher, nor a sailor, from the shop-bought clothes he wears, his beardless face. His hands look soft—town hands. One resting on my sister’s back.

I shrink against the cold wall. A pain welling in me. It is no accident, this meeting. And I had been so elated when Kitta agreed to the visit to Lerwick and invited the other girls along.

The pain grips, like something tearing from the inside.