What was the pricker’s name? He’d told her. Ah, that’s right, Mr Bollocks. Nae, that was what she called him every time she saw him to help reduce the terror he inspired. She refused to think of him as The Pricker. It was Bollard. That’s right. How one so young could take so much pleasure from causing an eldren woman pain, she could barely credit. Cast from a devil’s mould he was, and yet she was the one they believed possessed and recruiting others to an evil cause.

Yet they never found the waxen image. She could guess why. God bless her friends. Instead of releasing her, the reverend and bailies chose to inflict additional pain and deprivation upon her — in order to extract what from her? More lies? Lies to confirm their supposed truths? It wasn’t right. None of this was right.

The first day Mr Bollard came to her room, he examined her. He rolled back her sleeves, lifted her skirts, pinched, pulled, poked, prodded, delighting when she yelped, frowning when she made not a murmur. Forcing open her mouth, he’d inserted his fingers, before making them crawl across her scalp. All the time, she was being watched by the council through the holes above. She could hear them, see the moving shadows as the light changed. Cowards. They should be in the room with her, with him. Hear, smell, look in her eyes and know her contempt. She’d shouted at them. ‘If they burn me, then any woman who speaks her mind, contradicts you lot, is equally guilty and must burn also. Tell that to your wives, gentlemen…’

The shuffling above had stopped.

‘Och,’ said Mr Bollard, his mouth close to her ear. ‘I like them defiant.’ He raised his voice and tilted his head so he spoke to the ceiling. ‘Means they take longer to break.’

She shuddered just thinking about it. The tears started then. She’d tried to resist, she really had.

When the constables, those foolish Stuart lads, acting under orders from Mr Bollard, stripped her naked in front of the reverend and two of the bailies, who’d been in the room all this time as if to undermine her accusation of cowardice, she knew she couldn’t last much longer. She was bone-weary, so very sore and, as much as she disdained admitting it, terribly afraid.

When Mr Bollard showed her his special leather satchel with its set of needles designed to ‘encourage’ her to talk — bits of dull iron, inches long, brass tacks and other tools — any courage she had left fled. Pulling them out one by one, he’d run his long fingers up and down the shafts, caressing the metal as if it were a living creature, whispering something to each piece before placing it upon a table brought into the room for the purpose of displaying the instruments that would, she’d no doubt, shatter her.