‘What will you do with her?’ Mrs Baxter asked the constable. By then it was the middle of the afternoon and there had been no lunch served, as the parlour was now taken up with important men and their scribes. The chicken will spoil, for it is on its last day, I thought. Then someone went upstairs and dug in my creel and found the bloodied linens and there were more shrieks. Mrs Baxter said nothing about the patrons milling at the parlour door, nor the fact that Cook was not fit to work for the rest of her shift. Shame had been brought on the River Inn.

‘Mistress Dickson will need to be kept securely,’ a constable said.

‘She cannot remain here,’ said a parish man. ‘She would escape. This is already a house of immorality. Did you not suspect she was with child?’

‘She told me she was a maiden,’ replied Mrs Baxter.

The parish man turned to me and spoke very slowly, as though he thought me a simpleton. ‘Mistress Dickson,’ he declared, ‘the deliberate concealment of a pregnancy is a grave matter indeed.’

Well, I had not known that. I thought it was my own private business, the things that were happening inside my womb. But this man appeared to have an authority over my body, even its most secret parts.

‘I was saving to go to London and have the baby there,’ I told him.

No one liked that. Mrs Baxter shook her head.

‘Maggie, girl, why did you not just tell me?’

‘Indeed, Mistress Dickson, why did you not ask the parish for help?’

They made it sound so simple, as though me telling them would have made everything all right. But that was all pretence and lies, to stop any blame being laid at their own door.

They took me to the House of Correction. They carried me on an open cart and by the time they had got that together, the main street was lined with folk, all come to see the girl who left her baby on the riverbank. They did not shout or throw cabbages or stones, or any of that kind of mob hysteria, but they did pull their bonnets and caps and shawls tight about themselves and stare. Man, woman, child. The tea merchant, who looked at me like a puzzle that now made sense. The boy I’d seen peeing in the market. I wanted to stand up and tell them what had happened, that the baby had died and I had given it my own farewell, that’s all, but two of the parish officers sat with me and I knew that if I moved, they would pull me back down. I was not bound or put in chains or called names or anything like that, not yet, but they looked at me like they thought I was the worst mother that ever lived.

Mibbie I was.

Chapter Nineteen