After an age of organizing the horses and untying the coffin from the cart, and a fraught argument about what to do with it for the time being, and finding me a pair of borrowed shoes and a gown, cloak and bonnet from Mistress Prat, which are too big, we all get onto the cart. Our sorry party consists of the men, who are both called Mr McIvor on account of being brothers, on my side of the cart and my family on the other. I should have taken the road out to the port instead. I should have fled when I had the chance.

Mr Prat takes the reins. My da had apparently driven the cart out of Edinburgh. ‘But I am in no fit state to drive a cart now,’ he complains, downing the last of his ale. ‘No fit state to do anything.’

‘It will be all right,’ says Joan, patting my knee and reading my thoughts. ‘They hanged a man at the Grassmarket for murder last year and he survived his hanging too, and he lives in Newhaven now.’

‘How would you know something like that?’ I retort.

The cart begins its journey: past my coffin, which lies open like a gaping mouth, and past the crow that has not moved from his spot, and past the kirk, then onto Royal Park where dozens of sheep graze, ready to be slaughtered for the tables of the Edinburgh gentry, their offal and heads sold cheap to the poor. It is an hour or so back under a blazing September sky, and Edinburgh looms larger and more horrible with every squeak of the cart’s wheels. Joan, who has recovered her dignity, fusses at her stained skirts, and by and by Ma leans in to help her with a kerchief wetted with spit, and Da sighs and helps too, until my parents are so busy with Joan’s damned skirts that they utterly forget all about me heading back to my doom.

Or mibbie they just don’t know what to say to their daughter. ‘Did you want rid of the baby, Maggie? Why did you not come and ask us for help?’

My stomach grumbles and heaves at the same time. Hunger and fear. They might take me straight back to the gallows. The scaffold is likely still up.

‘Are they always like that?’ mutters the McIvor on my right, nodding at my oblivious kin.

‘Aye, sir,’ I tell him.

‘It’s no wonder you turned out the way you did, hen.’

I decide to save my raw throat for my pleas to the sheriff rather than talk to anyone on this godforsaken journey. ’Tis true, though, what Joan said. True as anything, for I knew that story of the half-hanged man and had remembered it as soon as they sentenced me. The story of it came from the Newhaven fishwives some time back and spread to us in Musselburgh. Fishwives gossip. We are famed for it.