I had already paid my London fare, so I could still travel. I had a few pennies and that might see me all right for food. Mibbie the driver would help too, for he seemed a bit sorry for me. But then I would arrive in London with nothing to my name and nowhere to sleep. Oh, curse that awful bitch, Mrs Rose. Rose by name: beautiful, but thorned. Is my life blighted that everyone I come across will betray me? I looked around me at the clothes strewn across the floor, the mess my creel was in, and I could not move a muscle. The only thing I saw fit to do was get back under the bedspread, utterly defeated, and sob my poor heart out. So that is what I did.

A while passed. I felt the sun go behind clouds and come out again. I wept. I caught a whiff of how rancid my armpits had become and cared not a jot about it. Mrs Rose had probably taken my armpit powder too. I heard carts leave and folk creak about the stairs, and I felt so exhausted they would have to carry me out.

Eventually the innkeeper’s wife came to my bedside and put her hand on my shoulder.

‘There’s no trace of Mrs Rose, and your driver must leave soon, for his gents need to be on their way,’ she said. ‘Are you travelling today? He says he can take you now, or else he will owe you the rest of the journey the next time he calls, but that might be in a month or so.’

I did not answer.

Mrs Baxter sighed and I could sense her looking about the room.

‘Listen to me, Mistress Dickson,’ she went on. ‘You have been hard done by on your way to London. Do not go there without a bit of money behind you. It is not a place to arrive penniless. It will swallow you up.’

My eyes flew open at that, but she did not see, for I was buried under the bedspread.

‘Folk think London’s a place where fortunes are made, but some of the tales I hear in this inn are grim ones. You’d need somewhere decent to stay, for starters. And somewhere nice. Many of streets are strewn with filth, and there are barefoot urchins in the bad parts, who will rob you quicker than Mrs Rose did.’

‘But I have nowhere else to go,’ I mumbled.

‘Well, you can stay here a while,’ she replied. ‘Mrs Rose had paid for her bed for a month and she was only here a week. There’s plenty of work in Kelso. What line of work are you in?’

‘I’m a Fisherrow girl,’ I said.

‘A Fisherrow fishwife?’ she cried. ‘All the way down here? Well, never mind that. I don’t ask people’s business, but your folks are well known as hard workers. Famously so.’