The once crowded house was finally empty of all but one: Sorcha. It felt wrong; like a sin she couldn’t help committing. Perhaps that was why she married Andrew Watson. She’d been desperate to refill the empty rooms, the vast chamber her heart had become, to replace the bodies and blether she so missed. There was also a part of her anxious not to be excluded, afraid that if she waited too long and remained alone, she’d be regarded as an outcast like her mother. No one could shun her if she wed a Watson, one of the oldest families in the Kingdom of Fife.

She reached for Andrew’s pipe, which still rested upon the mantle, and twirled it in her fingers. Funny, she hadn’t really thought about him for a long time. A fisherman contracted to a Crail merchant’s boat, to her he’d been just another Pittenweem lad, frantic for work, hungry. Set in his ways, a man who bided no deviation from routine, he was like a barnacle that fixed itself to a rock and nothing, not even a gale, could move it. He attached himself to Sorcha whether she wanted him to or not.

Had she ever loved Andy? Not in the way she used to imagine she might love a man, the way a woman would a selkie lover, abandoning kith, kin and her human life for one beneath the waves, a complete and utter sacrifice. Nor was it, she was honest enough to admit, the way he wanted her to love him. Rather, she’d cared about him and loved the way he made her feel. Safe. Not alone. A real part of the Weem. To folk’s way of thinking, if a Watson thought her good enough to wed and bed, then perhaps the bad luck her incomer mor had brought hadn’t been passed on to her.

Perhaps with her mor’s death, they’d whisper, it was over.

They’d been wrong…

As she shook herself out of her reverie, she was surprised to find that morning had broken. Dim light streamed through the windows, illuminating the furniture, the remnants of last night’s festivities. The downpour had all but ceased.

A noise made Sorcha turn around, but not before she’d replaced the pipe and dried her eyes with her sleeve.

‘You let me sleep when you should have been tossing me out of bed, hen!’ exclaimed Nettie, dressed and madly trying to tame her sable hair by tying it under a neepyin. ‘Come on, we promised we’d meet the lasses down by the harbour.’

Isobel appeared, rubbing her eyes. ‘But it’s New Year’s Day. The men wouldn’t have taken the boats out today, would they?’ She yawned and stretched.

‘What sort of mad question is that?’ asked Nettie.