I did not sleep more than a few minutes at a stretch. When I did, my dreams were vivid and wretched and every one of them ended the same: with the baby floating down the Tweed, wailing for me. Sometimes I dreamed of snakes curling round her little body. I woke up startled, clawing at the bandages, but Matron would not let me take them off. ‘Not yet, girl, and try not to think of the baby or the milk will not stop.’

On the first night, as we lay on our mats under the sunset, one of the women asked me why I was here. It was after Matron had bound me and given me a caudle of wine and egg and honey, which she said would give me my strength back. I drank it as she watched, and then she took the cup away.

The room was silent for a while and I thought everyone was drifting off to sleep. But the woman, the oldest one of us, asked me loudly and I could hear the blanket-rustle of everyone lifting their heads to hear the answer.

‘You’ve had a baby, but where is it?’ she asked.

‘She died,’ I said. ‘She was weak.’

‘And why have they brought you in here?’ she went on. ‘Have you no man to support you?’ Her voice was harsh with shameless curiosity.

Then Matron came back. ‘No talking after bedtime,’ she scolded. Her cane clicked against the floor. I had not seen her hit anyone with it, but had no doubt that she would. She paused at my bed. I could smell her ginger-breath and the soapy scent of her skin. ‘Mistress Dickson is here as her baby was found on the banks of the Tweed,’ she said.

There was a sucking of air, a sitting-up in bed, an outburst of cries at that.

Matron’s voice rose above it, sing-song and sharp. ‘The circumstances are not clear and the matter is being investigated, so I will thank all of you to ask no more questions of Mistress Dickson as she must save her answers for the constables.’

No one spoke to me after that, except things like ‘Pass the porridge pot’ or ‘Move your arse’ as they squeezed past me in the narrow halls. They wanted nothing to do with me. They turned away from me and wouldn’t meet my eye. Now, as I look back on it, I am trying to remember if I even cared.

I think I would have been most upset, had it not been for the fact that all I thought of was the baby. Day and night I would yearn and, most of all, wonder where her poor body was now.