The wind tosses words at me. Partial conversation. Conversation that is argument. Argument that gives way to pleading. I string the words together. Leaving. Family. College. No. The Sooth. Alone. That cry again. No!

I want to run to her, cradle her pain. I want to spit at this man hurting my sister. This coward, this liar. Who says he loves and doesn’t know the first thing. I want to shake them till their bones break, these town folk and fishers who don’t mix, throw them into the sea to be pounded as one into food for fish and let the Lord and the Witch war over them. I want to curse Jeemsie Neish for his beliefs, and every last person in Roanhaven for what they condemn and what they let to pass.

I push the shawl to my mouth and weep.

13

The season at Lerwick that year—it was the best on record, and the longest. Nicol & Mair kept us there until it was time to go south to East Anglia; we weren’t sent to Fraserburgh or Gadlehead in between. For myself I didn’t mind, no. I’d every reason to stay on in Gremista, and the further I was from Roanhaven, the happier I would be. But Kitta, now, I wished for her to be in some new place, far from all that had hurt her and was hurting her still.

Something had bled from my sister. Maybe you wouldn’t think it, to look at the way she was. Working hard. Chattering with the girls. Folk from our part of the world were good at doing that, unwilling to parade about with ill fortune pinned to their breast for others to see. Good at knitting a smile to wear. Kitta had not yet told the story enough to herself to be able to tell it to me, and she didn’t know I had blundered upon part of it already. But I fancied I wasn’t the only one who sensed something amiss. Clementina Slater—the last person I would have thought, then, a sensitive soul—was gentle with Kitta, and patient.

I stared open-mouthed as Clementina took out her gipper and silently cleaned up a handful of incomplete guttings from Kitta’s baskets. An’ what ye be lookin’ at, quinie? she demanded.

I hugged her and she pushed me away, disgusted. But from then on, it was unspoken between us, Clementina Slater and me, that we would watch out for Kitta. That we knew there was something, if not the whole shape of what it was.

~

I said my goodbye to Magnus Tulloch on the Knab on a Sunday afternoon. We girls were leaving in the evening by the St Siniver. He would spend the winter in Lerwick making barrels.