Ma bent her face to me and whispered, ‘The Lord will take you, and your poor babe will be waiting for you. Think of them as you go. Don’t worry about us.’

Those were strong, kind words.

But also they probably thought it was best that I hang quietly, so they could try to put the scandal behind them. I let them hug me and cry and weep and I gave Joan the glass ring, and I let their wails rise up above me, out of the Iron Room, up to the street above. I hoped everyone out there would hear them and know what this world and its laws had done to my family.

Joan clasped my hand. ‘Sister,’ she whispered.

I clasped her hand back. We held onto each other, a tightness in our grip, and eventually it was only when Da dragged Joan away that we let each other go.

On Hanging Day, like all the other condemned, I rose from my mat after a night of no sleep. I put on the gown Ma had brought – my navy wedding gown.

But unlike all the other men and women who were with me down in the Iron Room for those wretched days, I went to the gallows with hope.

PART THREE

AFTER THE HANG

Chapter Twenty-Three

Edinburgh
3 September 1724

Our life events change us, of course they do. But there is nothing that will change you like a brush with death.

It is the day after my Hanging Day.

Morning shatters on the Tolbooth Jail like dropped crockery on tiles. The women around me wake furiously and swarm at the gate, begging for clean linens and water and medicines and visits; and then, when they are ignored and ignored, they collapse back into the cell and fight over the pocket mirror. I lie on my mat. I am so exhausted I can hardly move. If anything, my limbs feel even sorer today than they did when I woke up in the parish coffin. I touch my throbbing, agonizing rope-burn and keep my fingers on it, feeling the pulse of me through it.

I am alive.

That promise I made to Dr McTavish seemed all very well and good when I was pleading for my life. But now I owe him. And he is not a man I should displease.

I am safe from him, here in the Tolbooth, but I must wait whilst the sheriffs come back to me with their decision.

The breakfast gruel-pot clatters in and the women are doled out their slops. The pickpocket takes Molly’s gruel, for Molly doesn’t need it. She has ways of getting a bit of bacon and a boiled egg. I have barely eaten in days and I am starving now, and I take mine and the watery mess does not even taste half bad, which goes to show how desperate I have become.