‘It cannot be true,’ says Ma.

‘Is it you, Maggie? Is it really you?’ Da asks. The men stand up and walk towards me, moving carefully and, when they get to me, take me by the arms.

‘Living and breathing,’ one of them says. ‘Living and breathing,’ he repeats, louder, to all in the room, laughing like a lunatic. He smells of ale and onions.

‘Careful,’ shouts Ma, ‘that’s my daughter you are touching.’

‘You said she was hanged,’ cries the innkeeper. ‘Well, she has defied the Grim Reaper today.’

‘It was a botch job,’ declares another of the men. ‘They must have cut her down too quick.’

I try to pull away from him, but he grabs me even more tightly.

‘Hey,’ shouts Ma. ‘She has had an ungodly ordeal and needs a sit-down and a tonic, not more rough handling.’

‘She needs sent back to Edinburgh,’ says the innkeeper, whose name I learn later is Mr Prat, which suits him to a tee. He has blanched deathly pale and has spilled the drink he’s holding. ‘They say the hangman at the Grassmarket has become a drunkard not fit for the job, and she is living proof, God save us all.’

‘There’ll be a reward for taking her back,’ puffs the man gripping my arm too tightly. ‘Good coin in this catch. See the bruising. A beauty. A shocker.’

They pause to admire my neck, which I cannot see, nor wish to. I want to speak, but my tongue is swollen big as an ox’s on a butcher’s stall.

‘Do you remember it?’ Joan has risen from her chair too, an explosion of soup across her lap, but for once she cares not for her appearance. ‘The hanging, Maggie. Do you remember being hanged? And being dead? What was it like? Did you see God Almighty himself? Or did you reach the Pearly Gates and get turned away? Did you see Granny Dickson? Or any of the dead Dicksons?’ The kerfuffle stops, as they all wonder the same thing.

Truth is, I saw no dead people. I was only looking for one – my poor babe – searching for her with a rising panic that I would never find her, and the most awful guilt about what I’d done. But I did not see her at all. I must have seemed dead, good and proper, or they would never have released my body to my family. And come to think of it, I do feel there’s something different about me now, although I can’t quite place it. Not just the throb at my neck. It’s not a physical change. I feel that something of the essence of me is different. As though my soul has left and come back wiser.

‘We’d best get their cart ready,’ says another of the men. ‘Back up to the courthouse.’