Dr McTavish had said as much. ‘The sentence is hanging and that will have been served,’ he’d murmured from behind his hood as his parting shot, before he’d loosened the rope around my hands and made sure I had wriggle room. ‘The sheriffs have recently been debating whether to change the wording of the statutes to hanged by the neck until dead, but that has not been written in yet. So if they try to hang you again, you must argue that they cannot do it twice. Now, Mistress Dickson, act meek. The sheriffs will be watching you from their vantage point at the first-floor window of the White Hart Inn. By the time you regain your senses they will be drunk and easy to argue your case with. I will see you very soon, and you will help me reunite with Mrs Rose.’

And then he hanged me.

I can’t remember everything about being dead, for there must have been a space in time, a gap of nothingness. But I can piece together bits, as if it were a dream. I remember Dr McTavish, and the rope, and the snake. Sometimes the snake and McTavish are one and the same. His hands coil around my neck and when I look at them, they are made not of skin, but of scales; and then when I look again, they are made of rope. Best hemp. And then I am back at the House of Correction again, beating the hemp for my own noose.

But that is a story about a dream. Usually I find stories about dreams boring. Joan used to tell me her dreams. ‘Oh, last night, Maggie, I dreamed a funny one, and you and I were mermaids and then we turned into sea creatures and I was a dolphin, nimble as anything, but you were a big, ugly whale and you swallowed all of Fisherrow.’

But this was not one of those.

I do remember the moments before. Seeing Ma and Da and Joan near the foot of the scaffold, ready to rescue my corpse from the anatomists and take my good gown. Joan wearing the glass ring.

I remember looking up at the building tops, and down on the crowd, seeing the world as a bird might and praying to God, ‘Don’t take me yet.’

And although there were hundreds of men and women there, children too, with all manner of hats and flags and banners, my eye was drawn to a man standing at the edge of it all, under a tree, for he stared directly at me with a look of sorrow and regret, and I recognized him.

And he had no trace of a sea-beard or weather-tan about him at all, but the clean, pale look of a man who has been hiding away from the world for months.

My husband, Patrick Spencer.

And that was not a dream. It was real. Spencer had returned.

Chapter Twenty-Four