‘She was born too early and passed not long after her birth,’ I reply. ‘And I was accused of concealment and hanged, but survived the hanging, and I am here to claim my child. In fact I have heard that after my hanging, great efforts had to be made to stop your lot from bringing my own corpse here, into this very building, to endure God knows what indignities.’

‘You are the half-dead woman!’ he cries, his eyebrows shooting up, and opening his mouth to display a row of good white teeth, so perfect that I wonder for a moment if they are his own or if they have been pulled from one of his cadavers and glued onto his gums.

‘I am not half-dead, sir, I am very much alive,’ I assure the horrible man.

‘My colleagues should like to talk to you,’ he says. ‘Very much indeed, for there was much excitement at the fact you survived.’

‘I am not having any of them touch my neck or ask me of God,’ I answer.

He shakes his head, most vigorously. ‘None of that, but more so the technique by which you escaped strangulation. We pondered over that and concluded that perhaps you had a breathing technique, or a way of easing your fingers beneath the noose? You quite confounded the sheriffs. I hear they are changing the wording of the death-sentence altogether, so that now it reads, You will be hanged by the neck until dead!’

‘I have no recollection of my hanging,’ I lie, ‘so I am afeared I would be of no interest to your colleagues.’

He looks crestfallen at that. ‘Perhaps an error by the hangman,’ he comments.

‘That is your guess, not mine,’ I reply. ‘I am only here to collect my own flesh and blood, which I fear is on one of your shelves.’

He considers the request for a moment or two.

‘You see, Mistress – Dickson, isn’t it? – everything in the collection is recorded, and so I would have to officially release it and might need permissions from my supervisors too. The infant cadaver is our property now. We use specimens like that for teaching purposes.’

The man is awful. The ointment-stink and the waft of warm air that seeps through the building make me feel I might vomit, and I put my face in my hands. It has all been too much. Really it has. To have come this far and not get my Susanna. Mibbie I should have brought Spencer with me. My neck starts to ache again.

‘Oh, well,’ I say, more to myself than to this man, ‘at least I tried my very best.’ There is a chair by the bookshelf and I sit down on it, for if I don’t, I am sure I might collapse.

He watches me all through this, folding his arms across his waistcoat. I look up at him.