Every man who was headed south from the River Inn went off neatly groomed and cleanly shaved by Mr Jackson, the barber, who kept a chair in a room near the scullery. I would watch them go, passing them on my way back, and heading from the kitchen door to the grocery man’s cart, which was piled high with sacks of flour and carrots. The men all smelled high and bright, of Mr Jackson’s scent-bottle, a spiced concoction that sang of foreign shores. Of morning rainfall. Of open roads. Look how well you’ve done, Joan would say, when they came to visit me in London, in that dreamy future I’d concocted. Oh, Maggie. We had our differences, did we not? But you have turned your life around. And Ma would hug me and whisper, I am proud of you, hen.

A few days after the scribe departed, two well-heeled women arrived on their way back to Scotland from London. I trusted no one, of course, and they slept in the twin beds in the other attic room. But I lingered over them for a while after supper, as I liked the company of women as a change from the male patrons, and they were polite but distant. When I asked their whereabouts in London, they said they resided – resided! – in a magnificent street in Mayfair. I believed them too, for their coach had caused a stir when it arrived, with its velvet padded seats and matching curtains, and a man kept a watch on it overnight.

‘I should like to go to London myself one day,’ I told them, keeping it vague and giving no details about any savings, in case they should decide to rob me in the night. ‘Men come and go all the time, but I hear mixed opinions about whether it is a good place for a woman to seek her fortune.’

One of the women paused to consider the question most carefully. She wore no face-paint and her gown, though perfectly tailored, was a dowdy twill, so I presumed she was not a whore. She had the pinched Presbyterian look of a kirk minister’s wife. She glanced at her companion, who was younger but had a similar air.

‘A woman ought not to seek her fortune anywhere,’ she replied. ‘She should leave that to her husband. But there are certainly opportunities. And more so than here,’ she added. ‘So I suppose if you are minded to work all the hours God sends, then London is a better place than Scotland. There are certainly umpteen inns, aren’t there, Mistress Penman?

‘Dozens of inns,’ this Mistress Penman said. ‘You would not be short of inn work.’

‘And apprenticeships, do you suppose?’ I asked. ‘In the ladies’ clothing trade or somesuch?’