The best way to attract attention is to go on a long walk through town, neck exposed. Aunt Jenever helps me dress, my old shawl soaking in a barrel of soap and water, for I am not to wear that now. Instead I wear one of the eye-catching gowns she used to wear when she was younger. It is her brightest one, in a murky shade of yellow, and she cuts a new neckline into it, so there will be no mistaking the bruise, which clashes horrifically with the dress. She gives me a small, fine shawl in a similar yellow hue and says I am to wear it as loose as I can.

‘I look a sight,’ I cry, when she shows me my reflection.

‘The crowds will certainly part for you,’ she agrees. ‘Someone must tail you, for we do not want you coming to harm. Cornelius will be a few steps behind.’

I agree, relieved to have a chaperone as hefty as Cornelius, who is as bulky as I had hoped, but bows when he meets me, most respectfully. I step out of the shop into the shock of the High Street and make my way up towards Edinburgh Castle.

‘My God, what happened to her?’ a passing caddie cries to the pal he is walking with. ‘Have you been beaten?’

I shake my head, though that smarts when my neck moves, and walk on. But the other caddie knows.

‘It’s the fishwife,’ he says, ‘the woman they couldn’t hang. We saw her likeness in the Courant.’

The pair stop and tip their caps and give low whistles. I stand for a minute or so and let them do this, holding my shawl loose so they can take a good look at me, then continue walking. More men stare. Women stare. Pedlars and children, and mothers with babes-in-arms. At the bottom of Castlehill someone makes their first attempt to touch me. It is a pretty girl in a loose dress, who has the rouge of a whore about her high cheekbones. I step back and grip my shawl close.

‘Let me have a look at it, hen,’ she pleads. ‘There’s chaps who’ve tried to do that to me. How sore is it?’

‘It aches like nothing else,’ I reply.

She bites her lip and stares. She is fragile about the face and neck. I imagine her being strangled by a nasty sort and wonder at the horror of the world.

‘What waits for us, on the other side?’ she asks. ‘You must have seen a glimpse of it?’

‘I saw something of it,’ I tell her. ‘But I do not talk of it in the street, for free.’