But she is pleased, I can tell, for the woman I first encountered with a greyish visage and sombre eyes now has a lightness about her, now that she has a new project to run. And run me she does. The pennies pour in, and she takes her rent and sends me to a dressmaker in the Luckenbooths for nice gowns – ‘Nothing gaudy, you are not a trollop’ – then to the milliner for a decent bonnet, and so on.

‘You look quite respectable,’ Aunt Jenever tells me, as I come downstairs one morning, ready for my customers. ‘You must feel back to your old self again?’

‘I will never be back to my old self again,’ I say. The rope-burn has left a weal, calmer now and more like the lash of a whip. Cornelius picks up the Courant. I do not think he can read, but he muses over it for a while, looking at the sketches, before putting it down.

‘I suppose you are branded, of sorts, aren’t you, Mistress Dickson?’ he says. ‘Like what they do to some of the criminals – vagrants and the like – who don’t have the funds to pay fines. They brand them with irons on the cheek and banish them out of town, so they can’t get back in at the turnpikes. Happened to a pal of mine, not seen him since.’

I put my hand to my cheek in horror.

‘Now, now, Cornelius,’ murmurs Aunt Jenever. ‘Maggie’s situation is nothing like that.’

But Cornelius is right. My situation is exactly like that. Only worse, for I am forced by circumstance to live a life that Ma and Da – petty criminals though they are – would look down on. Letting strangers touch my neck. Telling them half-stories to please them.

I think of my pile of coins that grows slowly. My piles of coins always seem to grow slowly and shrink again, and never quite come to anything much.

I think of London. The city paved with gold and bodice-makers’ apprentices and cheap theatre seats.

Mibbie I should try to get there again. I could be anonymous there.