It was Cook’s shriek, and Cook was not a woman prone to shrillness or outbursts, but a fisherman had come in, around mid-morning, and said he had been at the river when he had noticed something downstream that did not look right, not right at all, amongst a crop of rocks, and he had gone to have a look. ‘I thought it was a drowned animal,’ he kept saying, shaking his head and sounding quite bemused. He’d not known what to do with the baby. ‘If I laid it out on the riverbank, a fox might’ve got it.’ He was talking and talking. ‘Wouldn’t ’ve been right to leave it.’

And so he had put the baby in his creel and brought it to the first place he could think of – the nearest place really – which was here, and had come in the kitchen door, not wanting to disturb the patrons, and had lifted the lid of his creel, and that was what made Cook scream. The baby in the creel on the table in the kitchen, beside her good knives.

His creel wasn’t like mine; it was much smaller than mine. I remember thinking, He mustn’t be much of a fisherman if he only needs a small creel, but I suppose it was big enough. Big enough for a tiny baby.

The hullabaloo carried into the parlour and everyone cleared a space and, when I realized what all the shrieking was about and that my dead baby was in the basket on the table, I screamed too – screamed at everyone to leave her alone.

I dropped the bag of washing I had been carrying, and I went over to the basket and I would not let anyone near her.

And that was how they knew it was my baby.

They put my story together, piece by piece, like bait strung on a line, as the fisherman’s nerves were calmed with a large whisky. The constable came, then the parish officials.

A runaway, a glass ring, a pallor. A sister who came and went, saying little. A fishwife who’d abandoned the trade. They’d had high hopes I’d be as hard-working as my reputation, but on second thoughts mibbie they’d also thought there was something strange about me.

Had I killed the baby? Had I left it there to die, or smothered it? Well, if it had been born dead, why not alert the Baxters? Why had I not employed a midwife? Where was my sister now?

Then an urgent letter was written to the sheriffs in Edinburgh and the rider told to leave immediately. The constables took the baby away and I shrieked again, and one of the parish men slapped me and his ring caught my skin and it bled. My face bled and my womb bled.