I spent my twenty minutes in the bath – which was scorching hot at first, but quickly cooled – looking at myself. My belly was loose and my nipples browner than they had been before the pregnancy, and there was a dark line running downwards from my navel. The baby had changed me, and I liked that. I liked that she had marked me. I put on the new prison smock. It had such neat and pure stitching that I felt it had likely been stitched by the women parishioners of St Giles’s and I imagined them sitting in a circle, a guild or a commission or somesuch, taking honey cake and praying for the poor condemned women beneath their feet, and going to bed that night in their clean beds feeling they had done such a good deed the Lord would surely notice.

After all of that, with my twice-washed hair plaited tight and smelling of soap, and my white smock, I realized I looked like a woman set to hang.

The doctor received the condemned in a small room at the end of the passageway, nearest the kirk. On Hanging Day that’s where he stored his clothes, for he wore a cape and a hood when he hanged folk, to keep himself anonymous. There was a weighing platform in the corner of the room and a measuring stick.

‘He will inspect you quite fully,’ warned the woman guard. ‘But do not squirm or refuse him, because you do not want him to get it wrong.’

She left me there and I thought I might vomit, and I had to swallow back the sick and wipe my watering mouth and nose on the sleeve of my clean smock and it left a grey stain.

Presently the doctor arrived. He was not dressed like a hangman, but like a well-to-do gentleman, with a black hat and a silver-topped cane and a good cape. But as he bade me a good morning, my heart almost stopped, for I recognized him at once. He was very tall and sharp-shouldered and had a certain presence about him.

Edinburgh’s hangman.

The doctor. It was Dr McTavish, from Kelso.

‘I knew I would surprise you,’ he said, tossing his hat and cape on the stand. ‘But you are not to be afraid. I have hanged one hundred and forty men and women so far in my career, and I consider myself the best in the trade.’

He carried on like this, breezy, as he rolled up his shirt sleeves and examined his pocket watch. ‘I am with the Incorporation of Surgeons and Barbers. And of all the men and women I’ve hanged, I’ve never had a single complaint from any of them about the quality of my work.’

He looked up at me then, a flash in his eyes, mibbie thinking himself artful.

‘Do you try that quip with everyone?’ I enquired.