Instead I say, ‘I am in need of a drink’, and the woman’s eyes, faded though they are, light up, as I have given her all the excuse she needs to pour two drops of gin into two grubby glasses. ‘I can’t pay you today, but I will pay you back,’ I go on, and she shrugs.

‘That’s what they all say, but you need a tot of medicine.’

Well, gin is not a medicine. Ma would not have gin in the house, and even Da avoided it. Whisky, yes. A glass of Spanish sherry after kirk on Sundays. Smuggled tea galore. Even rum. But gin is an unregulated liquor, not like whisky or rum, and anyone can set up their own shop and distil it; and it is cheap too, which means only the poorest of the poor drink it. Gin is nasty and potent and it will rot your guts. Gin is the road to hell.

Today, though, I am the poorest of the poor, and yesterday I avoided hell, and so I drink it.

We get through three glasses before Aunt Jenever – as that is what she says everyone calls her – pulls my story from me. It unravels, although somewhat back-to-front and with the looping repetition, in some parts, of a liquor-laced tongue. I tell her almost everything except the part about my pact with the hangman, for that is a dangerous secret I would not trust a stranger with.

‘You are a sorry soul,’ she says, over and over. ‘And the poor babe.’

I weep then, heaving and ugly, and feel I will never stop. The emptiness of it, and the shame of my bleeding in the carriage ride from Kelso, and the way my milk bloomed at my breasts, and how the men talked of Jacobites to distract themselves. And, finally, the guilt. Not the guilt that the law men put upon me, but my own guilt about failing to bear a healthy babe and failing to save her. And my own guilt is a monster that eats me.

‘I should have done more to try to save the babe,’ I tell her. ‘To try and stop the labour happening, or to revive her. I should have told Mrs Baxter.’

‘Babies succumb,’ she replies tightly. ‘We mothers know the grief. But she is in heaven now.’

‘She is in a jar,’ I say. ‘At the surgeon’s college. She does not even have a name. She was not even christened.’

‘Well, name her,’ Aunt Jenever says, ‘the pour nameless soul. You are her mother.’

I blink at that, for I had been desperate to name her, but was embarrassed at the thought. The baby had become such a thing, so dehumanized by all who were caught up in my own scandal – myself included – that I had held off naming her.