‘Well, it looks like we are both in a bit of trouble and might be able to help one another out,’ I said. ‘Mibbie I might talk to your Mrs Rose and persuade her to see you.’

I feared then that he would laugh at my proposal, and even that he might put his hands to my throat and strangle me there and then. But there was a turnkey in the passageway and he would not have got away with it.

Instead he put his lips very close to my ears and said, ‘I will hold you to that promise, Mistress Maggie Dickson.’

Later Ma, Da and Joan came, and we were put in a little visiting room where bluebottles rattled at the walls. They brought a creel with clothes and fresh bread and apples.

‘We brought rum as well, but they confiscated it,’ said Da. ‘A rum would have helped you, too.’

‘Do you want us there, when they do it?’ asked Ma.

‘We will have to be there,’ said Da, ‘or the anatomists will take her.’

Ma turns to me. ‘And we’ve been promised the use of the parish coffin, so you’ll have dignity on your final journey home.’

‘I spoke to Kirk Session at St Michael’s myself and it took some persuasion,’ admits Da. ‘Because of the circumstances. But coffins are expensive and we did not want to cart you all the way back home in a shroud.’

I shivered and they thought I was shivering for myself, and the thought of being dead on a cart in a shroud or a coffin. But I was not. I was thinking that the anatomists still had my baby.

I wanted to tell my family, to give them a sign that I was going to try to survive the hang, because the sight of their faces was so horrific to watch. But the guards stalked the corridors, and the silence that fell over the Iron Room in the final hours leading up to Hanging Day was so still that overheard words could be plucked from the thick, sweltering air like fruit.

‘I need you all to be there,’ I replied. ‘Get as close as you can to the gallows and then claim my body quick. Do not let the anatomists take me away for dissection. And then get us out of Edinburgh as fast as you can.’

They thought it was to get away from the body-snatchers. To get away from the shame and the boos, and the cruelty of being associated with me.

I could not tell them my plan.

I had seen the utter humiliation on their faces in that courtroom. Seen them look up at the jeering folk in the balcony and curl themselves as small as they could. Ma and Da were petty criminals, tea-hoarders. But they had always got away with it. Mibbie they thought my crime and punishment were a retribution of sorts for what they had always done.