‘And she will need bandages and linens – plenty of them,’ added Matron tightly. ‘For the lactation and the lochia. She still leaks.’

The parish man winced, as though he had been smacked with Matron’s cane, and scowled at me as though I were cattle.

The carriage was large and severe-looking with black curtains at the windows. As well as the driver, there was the constable and two other men hired as guards, in case of highwaymen. They tied me to the constable with a piece of rope.

When I look back on that journey, I do not think of it as a singular line, the kind of line you see on a map. I think of it in jolts. Of the stories the men told to pass the time: of the Jacobites and their wars, and whether they would ever put the Stuarts on the throne, which they all hoped would happen, but you had to be careful who you said that to. Or whether it might be better to emigrate on one of the ships going out to the Americas or Canada and go fortune-hunting.

But mostly I remember how that journey unfolded in my own self. Of seeing my creel packed neat with the rest of the luggage and thinking Mrs Baxter would have done that, and realizing that my savings would likely still be in the locked drawer. Of a cheese pie they gave me, which I tried to eat before I saw mould on the pastry shell. Of travel sickness and vomiting on the constable’s lap, and the way they all stood up to wipe him down and left me heaving. Of the linens growing warm and wet between my legs and the smell of my own lochia and stale vomit, and the men catching the scent of me and putting their kerchiefs to their noses. Sometimes I would think I could hear the sea, but it was just the wind and rain. Often I had questions that I dared not ask and they died on my dried lips.

Would they bury the baby in an Edinburgh kirkyard or put it in a jar on a mortuary shelf? What would the surgeons find when they cut it apart? Would they say I tried to kill it?

What was the punishment for concealment of a pregnancy?

Chapter Twenty

Edinburgh
August 1724