Molly watches me eat. When I catch her eye, she looks away, fiddling with her stockings. She is not a whore like Mrs Rose. She is not even a whore like the girls who loll around the Mussel Inn for sailors and fishermen. She is an Edinburgh whore. Her eyes swivel, surveying the room for dangers and opportunities. Before, I even heard her speak filthy words to the turnkey as she did her business with him – some words I recognized and some I did not, and others she put on in a foreign accent, and he seemed to like that.

Finally she approaches me.

‘How did you do it?’ she asks, her voice low, for of course the women are silent, listening intently.

‘It was an Act of God,’ I tell her, rasping, as my voice still croaks. She laughs at that, the rich laugh that turns into a hacking cough.

‘I heard the other woman who hanged yesterday morning jerked like a marionette,’ she says. ‘And one of the men even fainted on the gallows and they had to revive him and manhandle him to the noose.’

‘You know a lot, for someone who wasn’t there,’ I tell her.

‘The turnkeys always talk of hangings,’ she replies. ‘You went calm and docile. At peace with your maker – that’s what they said about you. Yet here you are. Was it a trick?’

‘It was no trick. I am not the first and I will not be the last person to survive the gallows.’ Dr McTavish had told me what to say to anyone who asked awkward questions. He saved his instructions for the last minute, as I’d stood on the gallows. Said this kind of event had happened before, from time to time, and even though a hanged convict might seem dead, they could revive some hours later.

Molly scrutinizes me, looking for untruths. I carry on, repeating his words. ‘Hanging is a craft, but they can’t always get it right with the measurements and weighings and the drop, and so on. My hangman was supposed to be one of the better ones, but here I am. Mibbie it’s an Act of God, like I said. Or mibbie it was just that he got it wrong.’

I think that satisfies Molly, for now. She turns on her heel and goes back to her mat. The rest of the morning is long and is filled with bluebottles swarming around chamber pots. The rest of the women continue to avoid me, but I catch them all looking at my neck. It throbs, and I wait. But a long wait is a good thing, for the sheriffs are likely debating whether or not they can hang me again; and the longer it takes them, the more likely they will concede that I have served my sentence.