But I do not want plots and wickedness. I don’t want to go back to the gin shop and face the queues of soul-searchers. I don’t even want London or riches, or any of that. I want home comforts and a roaring fire, and good stories and the feel of a warm blanket over me as I get into bed of a night. My feet ache and my neck still troubles me from time to time.

And I don’t know if this is a coincidence or if something is pulling me along the streets like a baited line, but as I am nudging my way through a crowded wynd, pinching my nose against the high stink, I hear a cry that rises like a gull above a tide.

‘Fresh fish!’

I follow the cry, for I am just by Fishmarket Close, and when I turn into the close there is a sight so familiar – of striped aprons and white caps and silvery fish – that I start to weep. Tears prickle at my eyes and flood down my cheeks, tears for lost families and lost fishermen and lost babies, and I stand – what a sight I must look! – and breathe in the tang of it and it feels like home.

By and by, the fishwives notice me standing there, for I am a sorry sight by now, and one shouts out, ‘It’s Maggie’, and they rush to me and I am embraced and held, and fussed over and murmured over.

And all the things I feared – like being shunned and called a baby-murderer, or worse, by my neighbours – well, they simply do not happen.

‘When are you coming back?’ asks one of the women by the name of Betty. ‘You always had fast hands and a good singing voice when we used to all sing together while we were collecting cockles.’

I have not sung for months. Joan was the singer really, in the choir, and I always thought myself a drone, for that was what she said I was. But I liked a sing-song; I don’t even know that I could sing again, for my voice is even huskier now. Mibbie Dr McTavish broke my singing voice.

‘I don’t think you will have me back in Fisherrow,’ I say.

There is a flurry of protest at that, and more stroking of my head and petting of my shoulders, and I feel entirely gathered into a press of striped bosoms.

‘You have had a terrible ordeal,’ says Betty, ‘and your ma misses you something shocking. Your sister too. She is quite at a loss without you.’

‘I am making something of myself here in Edinburgh,’ I reply. ‘I have a room above a shop.’ I do not say ‘gin shop’. I do not say there is a madman waiting for me to bring me his Mrs Rose, to play with until he bores of her.