1907 was the first year of my married life, the first year of making a home far from the home that was not mine any more. A beginning. But a beginning that had to weave itself through an ending and find its way.

Magnus Tulloch gave me a wedding gift the night he brought me to the tiny fisherman’s cottage, one of a cluster on the Gremista road, that would be our home together now.

I sat on the hearthrug by a peat fire, arms around my long grey skirt, hugging my knees. Would ever I feel warm again, would ever I thaw?

Magnus knelt down beside me. Wordless, he placed something on the floor between us. I forced myself to look.

A small package, the size of a hand, loosely wrapped.

My eyes went back to the fire, and I sank my chin further into the folds of my skirt.

He pushed it towards me. I felt it there, the edge of something.

Please? His voice soft.

I turned a little, touched the wrapping with my fingers, looked at this man, my beloved. He had made his vows to another me, the one I was, the one before … I did not know if or when I would be that girl again.

He nodded slightly, encouraging.

I picked it up, and the paper slid easily away. Inside, a small hairbrush, the wooden back dark and rich like honey, gleaming in firelight. The bristles felt soft against my palm.

I looked at him, a half smile.

Magnus Tulloch untied the ribbon at the base of my head, pulled the pins from the sides, unwound the taming twist of hair. Taking the brush from me, he began to pull it through thickly from crown to the ends, the long wiry sheets of hair heavy in his hands.

And then he kneeled forward to face me.

Is not just a hairbrush, not just that.

Then what?

A promise, my Meggie, a promise for every day. Every day an’ always, Meggie, every day, this.

And I felt the weight of my hair in his hands, his hands gathering to him its burden, each stroke pulling me closer to him, away and to him again.

Magnus Tulloch was my heart, breath, blood, when I had none of my own. So much I do not want in my memory of those times, but that … I am grateful to remember that.

~

The season began in March. The comfort, the distraction, of work. Aye, I kept working. It never occurred to me not to, though Magnus Tulloch’s sister Gracie gasped and fussed and glared at Magnus as if he was giving the nod to a great mistake. She delivered her pronouncement that what I needed to help me through my grief was rest and being looked after—what I needed, in fact, was her good self.

I liked Gracie straight away when Magnus Tulloch took me to Sandwick that Sunday to meet his kin. I took as a kindness when she invited me to stay awhile, Safe an’ sound in a nice wee village away from that city, but the last thing I wanted was village eyes on me. Work, Clementina’s bright, round, frowning face, the girls, familiar patterns—these things laid down a way to follow, a map for us, Magnus Tulloch and me. A constant in a blur of the new.

Being on the farlins was no easy thing, mind. I would let my eyes shift to the sea and think: She is just over there, just water hours, water miles, away. And Clementina would watch carefully, giving me a minute before prodding my elbow with a gruff Hash, hash, quinie! They’d buried her at the Broch, my Kitta, beyond the sacred churchyard, but she wouldn’t care, she would snap her fingers to that, a nothing. The ground had been hard with snow, but an old man shovelling a path to the church door told me kindly there would be bluebells come spring. Kitta would like that, aye. Better than sacred.

The hardest thing would have been having to see Liza again, having to stand beside her at the farlins and listen to her small mind, her blethering on about Roanhaven and the people on whom I had closed my heart. But Clementina turned up that first season with Muckle Lally in tow, a girl from Fitdee. Word was that Liza was not to be allowed to the fish any more.

If ever I’d counted my blessings back then, I would have counted that.

~

I was a gutting girl for just one season more. And then, true to the lady deputy’s prediction, the Lord above made a decision for me. The top half of my left middle finger, down to the second joint, had to be taken after the salty hole poisoning got into the bone. Mrs Leask gave me a note and it was done at Gilbert Bain as part of mission charity. No anaesthetic, just a swig of something hot that took the skin off my throat, and a cup of tea after to calm me down. I did not look while he did it, the doctor, but I remember he wore a white apron, like a butcher I saw in Great Yarmouth once. In that place of screaming, my pain curdled the air, loud and clotted thick and nothing to do with the butcher’s busy work.

Once my finger healed, I got work at the factory where guts from the yards were mixed with seaweed and turned into fertiliser. Guts again, aye, but no salt. The work was not so tough as gutting, I could manage it with my awkward hands, and the hours not so long because fertiliser is just fertiliser, it hasn’t to be kept fresh, no. But the smell—oh, it was worse, you canna imagine.

Gracie wrote me one of her letters, venturing the view that I was lucky. Lucky to be working in the factory now. Best you be off farlins, Meggie Tulloch, before it be more than just one finger what’s taken!

But I was adrift. I could not stop thinking of myself as a gutting girl. I had been proud to be one, for all the mess and muck of it. When the girls came back next season, I went to the yards, the huts, when I could. I hadn’t been to a ceilidh since returning to Gremista, but Magnus Tulloch was always suggesting we go.

Some Sundays Clementina or the Cruden Bay girls would walk with us after kirk. Oftentimes when Magnus, now foreman, was to be late at the yards, I would help Mrs Leask at the Mission for Fisherfolk hut, tending to girls whose hands were in as much trouble as mine had been, winding bandages onto cuts and sores after Mrs Leask had cleaned them up. Aye, I was a gutting girl still, just one who could no more hold a gipper in her hand.

I discovered something at the mission hut, something precious, something saving. Mrs Leask had a library! A small collection, it was, that she kept in a kist and loaned to any who showed interest in what she called Improving Literature. Not too many takers, she told me with a shake of her head.

After we finished with the line of girls, I would pull the books out of the kist. There were prayer books and cautionary tales for young women, a dictionary, an atlas, and a Bible, of course, but it seemed Mrs Leask counted poetry as Improving Literature, and it was these volumes I fell upon. One by one I took them home to read. Tennyson. Keats. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And one that Mrs Leask’s daughter had sent from her new home, far away, in Boston: Emily Dickinson. I copied poems I liked best into the blank pages at the back of my Forget-Me-Not Annual—in tiny letters, using every bit of space. I didn’t always understand the words, but I would make a list of them, mark the pages with scraps of wool, and borrow Mrs Leask’s dictionary to work them out. Reading those poems aloud put music in my head that found a place there, and stayed.

Magnus Tulloch listened as I read bits to him but he wasn’t as much taken with the likes of Emily Dickinson.

There is a word

Which bears a sword

Can pierce an armed man.

It hurls its barbed syllables—

At once is mute again.

Magnus Tulloch looked up at me, expectantly, from cleaning his boots, so I carried on.

But where it fell

The saved will tell

On patriotic day,

Some epauletted brother

Gave his breath away.

Magnus Tulloch was frowning. Does she say what word?

I quickly read the rest of the poem to myself.

No.

No?

I thought about it. Ye’re to make up your own mind on it. That’s what I think.

Magnus Tulloch put a finger to his ear and shook his head, as though clearing away a clutter of noise, and then went back to scraping the mud from his boots. He was keeping his own mind to himself.

When I think of it now, I wonder what I would have done without Mrs Leask’s books. Once again words poured into me, into all those yawning spaces. Wasn’t that they could take the place of what was lost, but to feel them there was something, a comfort.

~

Magnus Tulloch and I were content. I wonder—is that the right word? Content sounds so small, so passionless and niggardly, for the way it was between us, everything we were. But words like happy—no, they are wrong, too. Because of the way our marriage had begun, there was a strand of sadness forever coiled into the skein of us. To say Oh aye, we were happy, well, that would be to unravel the whole to remove a part, and the thing left in its place would be shinier but lesser for that.

And I am finding it hard to think how to write about the way it was between us, everything we were. It’s as if it was enough, of itself, and there is no need to record it. A strange contented restlessness, an easeful sadness.

Sorry, my lambsie, I am thinking on paper again, forgetting who I am writing to. Forgetting why.

~

One evening, Magnus Tulloch came home with light in his smile and hugged the breath out of me.

What’s with all of this? I demanded, pretend-serious. Have ye been pouring whiskey instead of pickle this day?

Meggie … He stopped. A second thought, a worry, a cloud across the sun.

Well? I urged. Go on. Tell me!

His eyes darted about, his fingers splayed, closed, splayed again. He was a man plucking words like limpets from a jetty.

Just say!

Well … what would ye think of leaving this place?

A small pause and I jumped in firm with both of my feet. I’m not goin’ back to Roanhaven.

No, no, lass, I’m not talkin’ of Roanhaven. Nor anywhere nearby. Meggie … He leaned forward, his eyes were the glitter of a herring’s back. Meggie, I’m talkin’ about Australia!

~

The islands were not like Roanhaven, where things stayed the same until there was no choice but to suffer change. The Shetlands had always been a place of immigrants, Norse, Viking, Scots, and ever since the last century had become a place of emigrants, too. Islanders left for far-off places to find work and opportunity, new lives in the new world—Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand.

Magnus Tulloch confessed he had been thinking on it—even saving—for a long time, but had put it from his mind that first day we’d met. But now …

An’ will there be work for coopers in Australia? I wondered.

Aye, he had heard so from the families of others who had gone. But I am thinking, Meggie … in time … There is land in Australia, all that space, millions of acres of new land, an’ if a man works hard, well. He pushed back his hair. That shine again in his eyes. We could have a different life, Meggie. Better.

Going on the land was a something to me, not the Something I could see it was to Magnus Tulloch. But I hugged him, listened as he dreamed aloud.

The idea of Magnus Tulloch and I leaving for the other end of the world should have thrown into array the beat of a staid Roanhaven heart. But no. Straightaway it seemed right. I liked living in Lerwick well enough, and Gracie had firmly thrown the net of family over her stranger-sister. But this place did not have the stamp of home for me and I feared it ever would be so. I looked down at my hands, with their pits and scars, the deformed stump, and tried to imagine myself somewhere warm, somewhere young and clean. I thought: Of course, aye, that is what we are meant to do.

And the notion I could leave behind the darkness …

Magnus Tulloch began to make plans, then arrangements, and the biggest thing to qualm me was the prospect of leaving Clementina—Clementina, who was my family now. She was not saying much.

And there was Gracie. Magnus Tulloch’s sister wrote me wailing letters, begging me to make him see sense, change his mind.

The other side of the world, Meggie Tulloch! We will never see ye again, never see your wee bairns when they come!

Gracie and Karl had three little ones of their own already and she was ever hopeful for me, ever kind, always saying, It will be your turn soon, our Meggie, don’t ye fret on that. She would never have understood, never, that we were taking measures, as it was called in those days, something I’d learned at the farlins. Because I did not want a bairn.

Back then, I could not explain myself, words stuttered to nought. My reason was a picture only I could see: waves tossing a wee creature back and forth in the shallows. It froze my heart, it was everything I wanted to forget, everything I could not bear, did not want.

Even now, when I have the words, they turn into questions. Was it that I couldn’t allow myself to have what Kitta had lost? Or that what Kitta had lost had killed her? Maybe it was both. But maybe, too, I was frightened of loving someone so much again. The idea of having to keep a wee life safe, of never failing them, ever. A burden just too great.

On this, Magnus Tulloch was quiet. He would push the hair back from his forehead and his towering body would hunch down, shrink a little. I learned to douse the questions in his sighs with silence.

Maybe when we are somewhere else, he said. A warm place, new.

Maybe.

Such a small, mean word. It was all I had to give him.