There is no question of, If I don’t? Or, What happens if Mrs Rose doesn’t come? Dr McTavish had decided it all.

‘And after this,’ I venture, ‘are we settled, you and I?’

He looks me straight in the eye. ‘After this, we are settled. My reputation as a hangman is caught up with the sensational story of your revival but I expect that to ease in time. There are plenty more condemned criminals for me to hang good and proper. And it will all be worth it for my Mrs Rose. So once you have helped me capture her, put the front-door key under the mat and walk away, and think no more of me or her.’

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Dr McTavish says I am to do the deed tomorrow evening, and he will be waiting. He lets me out of his apartment and I run down the stairs.

When I get out onto the street again, I could kiss the foul ground with relief, for I thought he might tie me to that bed and do all manner of horrors. Then I remember my dreadful task – the task that will free me from him, but will put Mrs Rose in her own hell.

I wander like this for an hour or more, my thoughts spinning too wildly to go back to Aunt Jenever’s. There are dark things that a person can be driven to. You never know, until you are faced with such choices. What price, my own survival? I suppose some folks who came to see me hang would not be surprised if a woman like me goes off down to Greyfriars the next day hiding a secret plot, as one might cover a baby in a creel.

I thought Dr McTavish might keep me in that chamber of delights. Fasten me by the wrists and have his wicked way. Probably strangle me afterwards too and enjoy it, in private this time. Human life is cheap. They die on street corners, in rags, an empty bottle rolling around beside them. They die of poxes and plagues and starvation and hangings. They die in childbirth. Or shortly thereafter. Whispers of the afterlife are sometimes the only hope we have.

Mrs Rose will be caught in a trap of her own making. Were it not for her selfish, self-serving act of theft, of taking everything I had, I would have been off to London, and I am quite certain that I would not have been left dangling on a rope.