I had learned from Ma a few things about what Looks could do. I wore Kitta down. Finally she gave me one or two details—troubling, sketchy details—about the man from The Queen. He was an auctioneer, and worked at the harbour. She’d met him last season.

Where? I asked. Where would a gutting quine meet an auctioneer?

Kitta crossed her arms. Only thing ye need to know, Meggie mine, is he loves me, so there! He do. An’ Ma an’ Da don’t need to know about him yet.

Well.

It seemed to me that the first was a thing of joy and the second of alarm, and the two did not bind together in any happy way. Why must there be a secret? Why could I not meet this man who said he loved my sister? Why did he not take her walking on a Sunday, the usual way of the gutting girls and their lads? Why and why and why again? But Kitta’s patience ran out before I’d time to close my mouth. She tossed her head. She wouldn’t say.

I resolved I would watch for her again on Saturday night, but every time Magnus Tulloch walked through the yards with a sack of salt across his shoulder, everything else in my head turned to dust and blew away.

~

By the time Saturday night came, I was fit to burst—from anticipation, and from dread. I demanded Kitta tell me: was she going to Lerwick? I actually stamped my foot, lambsie, swear to God. She put on a serious face but couldn’t keep to it, and soon she was laughing fit to burst. I walked off in a huff, puffing the fringe from my eyes, and it was not till I got to the yards that I stopped short. That Kitta—she hadn’t answered, had she?

I sat by the fishermen’s fire with Clementina, mumping away to myself until Kitta sauntered down from the huts in her old shawl, obviously no plans for Lerwick this night. She waved and giggled, and then she pulled a knowing face, gesturing with her chin somewhere to my left. I turned around.

Magnus Tulloch.

~

We spent as much time talking as dancing, though for a while it was Magnus Tulloch doing the talking—and laughing so much that I had to laugh too. He described his friend Stivvy Ratter racing other fishers down the steep lanes of Lerwick, half running, half sliding, and tumbling every which way into the crowds on Commercial Street.

Did ye join in the race with them?

Nah, lass, coopers they be too fond of the seat of their pants for that!

And he jumped to his feet and swept his arms towards the dancing.