After my morning’s customers have been served with tales of the afterlife and peeks at my neck, I slip up the close, hiding under a large shawl, for I want a bit of solitude and a walk. The stalls and shops of Edinburgh never cease to be a wonder to me, but I am not tempted to splash my pennies, despite the wares. They have lost their gloss. Painted pots and fur shawls and silk gloves sit side by side with stands selling pies and live chickens and blood sausage. The air is eye-watering from chimney-smoke and old piss, and worse things, and everyone all in a rush to be somewhere. I pull my shawl further up my face, covering my mouth and nose, and breathe the scent of soap-soaked wool instead of the reek from the street. Perhaps some rosewater might help. I look for a shop that might sell it. I finally chance upon one, seeing bottles stacked in a window. But just as I am about to go in the door, the lettering above it catches me.

I am not a learned woman. I had to get a scribe to write a message to my own family. But I have grasped the meanings of some letters over the years, as we all must do, to get by. And there are four words etched above the shop door, four words I recognize, for I have seen all of them written down in one form or another, in what seems another world entirely.

Patrick Spencer’s Perfume Emporium.

I am dithering about whether to go in or whether to flee back to Aunt Jenever when someone grabs my arm and pulls me towards the wall. I have no good vision to the side of me, for my shawl is up about my head, and I have to fight to see who has grabbed me. I think it will be Spencer of course, as I am right outside what seems to be his new shop.

But it is not my husband.

It is Dr McTavish.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Dr McTavish’s arm coils around mine and he drags me through wynds and stairways until we reach a building at the top of the hill. He does not let go of my arm, even as he opens the front door and drives me up two flights of spiral steps. All the while he is muttering, ‘I will not harm you, if you come quietly’ and although we must look a suspect pair and we attract many looks, no one intervenes, which says it all about this town.

Finally he shoves me into his rooms and stands wiping the sweat from his hands and brow, with his backside firmly against the door.

‘If I come to any harm, there are folk who will come looking for me,’ I tell him. My voice is shaking.