It wasn’t until she reached the outskirts of town that she stopped again. Already her ankle was throbbing, her head swimming. Wet and uncomfortable, she was thirsty, hungry and the thrashings and sleepless nights were taking their toll. Even with Sorcha’s blankets wrapped around her, it was bitterly cold — worse now she was drookit. Standing on the ridge, a hand against her breast as she fought for breath, she looked across the Forth. The rain had eased until it was just a spittering. Lights from ships’ lanterns were dotted across the black expanse and the lighthouse on the Isle of May swung its huge beam across the waters like a road that, it was said, the spirits of drowned sailors walked along. She thought of her own bonnie lad, Clinton, taken too soon. She thought of Sorcha’s dad, kind Charlie, and his sons, Erik and Robbie. Good God, but they’d all given so much. Had their hearts and souls wrung until there wasn’t any more to squeeze from them. And what of Sorcha’s husband Andy? A dull man, he’d never been right for one such as Sorcha McIntyre, but Janet well understood why the lass had married him. Was she secretly glad when he died? When she no longer had to pretend a contentment it was evident she’d never felt with him? If she had, the guilt that came when the bairn was born dead would have swept that away.

She thought of Sorcha now. She’d heard rumours she’d found happiness with that lad from Skye, bonnie Captain Ross. She prayed it was so. The lass deserved at least some of that in her life. But he was gone now, too, like the ever-changing tides. It would be hard — for her, for poor Nettie too. Women without men to speak for them — control them more like. It was a bleak day when Reverend Cowper arrived in the Weem and began to preach against women of her ilk. He was the kind who saw her and the other fishwives as Eves in a seaside paradise — temptations to lure men away from their wives, as if the men were fish and the lasses bait.

Hopefully, when Janet returned — and return she would — it would be to a different Pittenweem. One where witches were dismissed as the product of fevered imaginations or, more to the truth, the by-product of revenge. Revenge for what? For being a woman. A scold. Independent, headstrong and able to make her way. Well, she prayed to God that Sorcha, Nettie and the others made their way, with whomever and in whatever direction they pleased. For now, hers lay that way — towards St Andrew’s.