I sat and listened to them chitter and chatter about this, as my blood and milk finally tapered off and I felt myself drying up; my last connection with my daughter withering to nothing. Somewhere not too far away, over the spires and tenements, her little body was stored with the anatomists, and I retched when I thought of that. But I had barely eaten, so it was an empty retch, and I had become so used to grieving silently that none of the women noticed.

I thought of the hangman’s noose in a detached way, as though it lay at the end of a corridor and that corridor was a long and arduous one, filled with so many obstacles – such as standing up in a courtroom and seeing Ma and Da again, and listening to Joan on the witness stand – that I could not even worry yet about the destination. Denial, I suppose. And mibbie I even welcomed the notion, for I was in the depths of some despair that I had never even known. Not even after what had happened between Joan and Spencer.

The grief for my child was a world of despair. I had spent my pregnancy fearing her birth. But when I had held her in my arms, I had fallen in love with her.

There were no condemned prisoners in the women’s room; these unfortunate souls, once sentence was pronounced, were taken to another part of the jail and put in a holding cell called the Iron Room, in a passage that went between the prison and St Giles’s Kirk, where they were taken to pray on Sundays. Every time these folks shuffled from their death-cell to the kirk or the gibbet, they did so as one pitiful group, surrounded by guards with pikes, so the chatter went. There were always far more condemned men than women. And whilst the women were generally coiners or thieves or the occasional murderess, many of the men were hanged for crimes against the Government or the Crown.

Most of the women in my cell were not headed for the gallows, though. Most, once their case was called, expected to be whipped or fined or transported or simply dismissed. I suppose that’s why their talk often turned to the gruesome aspect of our jail, which appeared to me to be more of a factory of death and misery than anything else, where oat pottage was slopped out from a cauldron onto battered tin plates twice a day, and those who had the funds supplemented the gruel with baskets of bread and meat sent from home, and we all fought over the tepid water in the washpail every day.