‘What was the hanging like?’ she asks. ‘I was not there on Hanging Day, for I stay away from that side of town. If I was caught working up there, I’d be put in the tolbooth for whoring.’ She mouths the word ‘whoring’ as though it were a secret between the two of us, when in fact we are in the midst of the Greyfriars whores right now. ‘We night-blooms are safer down here. But what was it like? What did you think, when you were standing there on the gallows, my dear?’

I have answered this question day after day after day for pennies, and I lost my temper and my sensibilities when the fishwives started. But for Dorothy I give the real answer. She is a woman who will not see old bones, after all.

‘I thought I would shit my drawers in front of all Edinburgh town,’ I tell her.

She roars with laughter. I knew she would.

‘Show me your rope-mark,’ she says. ‘They say it is a belter.’

I loosen my kerchief and she puts her fingers to it. They are warm and gentle. I do not mind it at all.

‘Oh,’ she responds, ‘it is red like garnet. It will slim down soon to a silvery mark, I think. It will not look like a rope-burn for ever. One day it will look like a simple line. A jewel, my dear – a mourning necklace. For your dear departed babe. We all have them, you know, we women who have carried a babe in our womb that has not had the chance to live, or that we could not give the chance of life to. We all wear our own mourning necklaces. Some more apparent than others.’

I bite my lip. I had not thought of it like that. I had not thought my rope-burn was ever about anything but me. But it is not just about me. It is about the baby, and the loss of her. For the flutters and the kicks she gave me, all still now. She is long gone. But we are linked through my rope-mark. It is the only thing of hers I have left. They said I would swing for the crime, and I did. Now I wear the rope-mark like a mourning necklace.

Time passes well enough in an Edinburgh coffee house, but Dorothy is so lustrous, so vivid, and her counsel so wise that she deserves a starrier night than this – we both do – so I take her to a wine shop next door, where candles twinkle on shelves and the glasses are crystal, which I have come to prefer.

‘Let’s share a bottle of French wine,’ I say. ‘Like we did in the River Inn.’