‘I feel a proper gent drinking this,’ he says. He hands a cup to Dorothy. He can hardly keep his eyes off her. ‘We will talk of what happened last night once more – and once more only,’ he goes on, ‘to get our stories straight, as it were. After that we shall talk of that scoundrel Dr McTavish no more. Some things are best buried.’

We talked then and got our stories straight, but here is mine: the real one.

I am not a woman of parchments or books or written words, but as I come to look back on these events – on this time of my life – I wish I was, for I do think the story of Half-Hanged Maggie, the woman who survived her own execution, is only half my story. I admit I feel quite melancholy that my other memories will die with me, on the day of my natural death. For though not quite as macabre or dramatic as the story of my hanging, these events are quite a tale too.

It begins with Dorothy that night, on the walk from Greyfriars, a ten-minute walk at most downhill to the Grassmarket, then uphill to the High Street. Late at night, it is a walk past inns and taverns and shuttered apothecaries, and beggars and vagrants under blankets who might be asleep or dead – you don’t care to check. As we passed the Grassmarket, the gallows spot, I knew without question that I was not going to lead Dorothy to her doom. For had I not been led to my own doom at this very place?

On Hanging Day they had carted us from the Tolbooth Jail down to the Grassmarket Gallows, which is only a short ride, but felt like eternity and a blink of an eye, all in one.

The streets were lined many-deep, for our hanging had been advertised, you see, all over town, as is the custom. The crowd went with us, as we ricocheted over the potholes, our hands bound so that we could not use them to steady ourselves and we had to plant our feet anywhere they could rest.

I even laughed quite hysterically, once or twice, at the nonsense of it all, trying to avoid being battered by stones and vegetables and potholes as I was about to meet a hangman. The others wept and prayed and closed their eyes. The chaos made the carthorses nervous and they lifted their tails and shat, all the way down the street, and I thought of how the dung would lie there and be trodden in, long after I was coffined.

I didn’t know whether I would live or die. Dr McTavish might do anything on those gallows. What if I survived the hanging, only to wake up to find the anatomists cutting into me?