My fingers press against the coffin lid and nothing moves; at first I think it might have been nailed down for safety, for I know there were apprentice surgeons in Edinburgh who’d wanted my corpse for dissection and there was a worry they might steal me and take me from Ma and Da altogether. My heart pounds even harder, but no, the lid heaves up and over on its hinge, the sunlight blinding me now. I sit up, which is not as easy as it ought to be. My legs ache at the hips and knees, which must have been the jerking at the noose. Look how she dances! Hang, bitch, hang!

No one shouts or panics, so no one has seen me. I am thankful for that. I don’t know what I am doing yet and I need a moment to suck in fresh air and think. My eyes come to, and I know where I am straight away. I am under the shadow of Arthur’s Seat, in the yard outside an inn. The whiff of boiled mutton hangs like a fug. The horses are nose-deep in their troughs. Ahead of me is a kirk, where the clock has just chimed one. I was hanged at nine. I have been dead four hours.

I have been dead long enough.

I clamber out of the coffin and ease myself slowly off the cart. Looking down at myself, I see that I am in a burial shroud. I am barefoot too, for I had said Joan could have the lot – my gown and boots – but I do regret that now, for a breeze lifts my hem and it billows up. Everything feels different. My legs creak and tremble as though I have aged four decades in these last four hours. Perhaps I have. No one is about, only a crow that eyes me from the roof of the inn with something more than curiosity. Crows know things, don’t they? He has a knowing look about him, this beady fellow, and he has not flinched to see a corpse spring to life, not so much as twitched an oily wing, as if he was waiting for it to happen all along.

It strikes me now, in this moment between the coffin and what I do next, that I have a choice. There’s always a choice to be made, as Spencer would say. Even when you think you’re all out of options, there is always something. That’s Patrick Spencer for you. A schemer to the last. But haven’t I learned the hard way that my judgement is not always the best?