Da said that was off, and how did we believe anything Spencer told us if we didn’t meet his folks? But as we were not about to travel to England to meet them, and the Spencers had no notion of what was happening in Musselburgh, that was the end of it.

I wore a new dress that Spencer had a seamstress make for me, and it was a glorious navy and grey striped silk. It was the same dress they hanged me in. Lost now, of course, for as I learned when they cut me down and put me in my burial shroud under the scaffold, there was all manner of a kerfuffle, and my body near snatched altogether. The anatomists were scurrying around me like rats.

But let’s away from the gallows for now, though my hanging haunts me day and night, and back to the lodgings on Musselburgh High Street.

We had a large parlour with an adjoining kitchen at the front and one large bedroom at the back, although I must admit, grudgingly, that Joan was correct and there were mornings when I woke up thinking that room was a bit damp. The privy was in the back close, and there was a water well not too far from the gate. Spencer kept his stash of perfume parcels and money in a secure cabinet in the bedroom. Unsurprisingly, he was obsessed with the safekeeping of his stash and had a smith come and fit new locks to the doors and windows. He had the place like a little vault. I don’t suppose I really knew, at first, how much he had stashed away, but we never went without meat, and Spencer never went without rum.

The cottage was of solid-feeling stone that was grey and cold in the morning and would warm up gently to become golden in the afternoons and, as I was soon to learn, that was just like Spencer himself.

First, those golden afternoons. Oh, he was never more glorious than when he sat in the parlour, nestling a cup in the palm of his hand, swirling his rum as tales flitted from his lips. He talked little of his early life, steering his stories away from his own childhood, but his thoughts meandered off to the foreign ports that he visited and to London Town, where we were eventually headed.

Gothenburg was the place he sailed to, a port in the Swedish empire. I knew it from the tea men. Sweden had been at war for years, but there was hope it would become a new centre of global trade. Merchants were trying to set up deals there, to import spices and silk and furniture from the East.

‘One day Gothenburg will be magnificent. But now it’s no place for a lady,’ he declared. ‘Destroyed by sieges and pirates and rogues. You’ve got to have your wits about you over there.’