‘This is enough for the burial and six months’ rent,’ he tells me. ‘It’s all I have, and after that you would need to come back.’

‘But you might not be here,’ I say. ‘So I shall take some bottles of your perfume, and that will see me for the year.’

‘But my perfume is worth a lot of money,’ he replies.

‘And so is my silence,’ I warn.

He sighs. ‘You are a witch. A wench. You are not the mild fishergirl I married.’ Then he nods at my glass ring. ‘That’s not worth much money.’ He grins. ‘In fact you’ll not believe how I got it. It belonged to a girl in Gothenburg. Lovely girl, she was. Eighteen or so. She was dying of the pox. It gave a mottle to her skin and a hacking cough. Two or three summers ago now. A pox went around the whole port. All the physicians could do was sell bottles of medicine to take the pain away. There were no cures.’

I look down at my hand, seeing the ring differently now. Lovely girl.

‘I paid her enough for the ring to get her a decent bottle of medicine, but I think that ring could have got her two bottles. Maybe three, if she’d had a mind to barter for them. But, Maggie, she was in no state to barter. She was likely a gonner. You could tell by how fast she deteriorated. She wanted hardly anything for the ring. There was no point giving her more than she asked for, was there?’

I wonder whether she died or mibbie even survived, and whether she looks at her hand from time to time and misses the glass ring. I wonder whether a sweetheart gave it to her too, and what became of him.

I should never have taken Patrick Spencer into my heart.

I am quiet as he takes a dozen bottles of perfume from the shelves. ‘I hope this is the end of it,’ he grumbles, ‘and you are not planning to come back to blackmail me for more.’

‘None of this is blackmail,’ I say. ‘The devastation you caused can never be compensated for. But I shall go and fetch our babe now and leave you alone.’

‘Should I come with you,’ he offers, ‘down to the anatomists? Might you need a man to speak on your behalf, to the learned gents?’

I laugh then; it bursts out of me, half-mirth and half of it a release of tension. Spencer’s face is pale, with a sheen of sweat at his upper lip, and I know he is craving a rum already, to take the edge off his terrible morning, even though it’s not yet noon.