Wait! I said, interrupting. Just listen, will ye. I’ll not be going to the mission hut while there’s work to do. I’ll go between boats while the rest of ye are knittin’. Or next time we get a load of torn bellies an’ have to wait. Ye’ll not even know I’ve been an’ gone. I’ll not see us out of pocket ’cause of me.

Clementina patted me on the arm. Kitta looked dark at her and none too happy with me, but I set a hard face upon her and she backed down. She was not in any position to take me on, see, not when I was keeping her secrets.

The mission ladies were kindly enough, and I think their ointments and poultices helped a little, but the truth was that I’d just to put up with the sores and the pain until the end of the season, the end of the year. And I’d to keep the terrible state of my hands well hidden from the curers in case they took it into their heads to send me home. Kitta said no, they wouldn’t do that, they were too desperate for girls this season. But Clementina had heard of it happening. I would not be taking chances.

I would not be going home.

~

The other thing that ran a hook through the everyday was a good thing, aye, it was. But good things can be unsettling. So much heat and light coursing up and down and through you that you canna keep your heels on the ground. So much you don’t understand nor think you ever will.

Magnus Tulloch was the other thing.

Every Saturday night I sat with him by the fire for the supper and singalong. And every Saturday night we danced. Oh, lambsie, you canna imagine what it was to dance back then. Apart from the pleasure of motion, the rhythm of music alive in your veins, dancing was an excuse—sanctioned, see?—for the twining of arms, for bodies to lean in to each other. For the touch of a face, for inhaling laughter. And a fine excuse for prolonged, shameless looking. I found I liked to look at Magnus Tulloch. Whenever Clementina Slater could be persuaded to sing, the fishers would beg her for a song she knew about Shetland mannies—something raucous about Vikings, I canna remember the words, only that her mother would not have liked them. I fancied I could see a touch of the Viking in Magnus Tulloch, with his long hair, his tall frame, and it turned my face the shade of my hair just to think of it.