She gave me money for cloth, to sew into a work smock more suitable than my own clothes. I was grateful for that, for I felt I would burst out of my own gown soon enough. I bought a thick bolt in a charcoal grey that reminded me of the dull cloth they make at Eskmills. Dull enough to hide behind. I stuffed my fantasies of the London life behind the sack-like smock: the fashionable stocks of goods piled high in the haberdasher’s, the goldsmiths, the fortune-tellers and theatrical plays. How would I ever manage any of that with a babe wailing at my breast? I could hardly leave it alone and go out on the town. I would not be able to afford nice things if I was paying for its keep.

Kelso’s Friday market was the busiest, just like home. It had the same feel of wildness about it, of coming to the end of the working week. The flesher’s stall would be a flurry of blood amidst the petrified shrieks of animals, as the wealthier families would often bring him a fattened pig to butcher. At the other end of the market, hides and fleeces were strung out on lines. A fiddler played for thrown pennies, dogs barked incessantly, and pedlars sold everything from buttons to bottles of cough cure. The place was thick with dung, and the muck would cling to your boots so that, even after the market, you stank of it.

That morning I was out with a list of three things in my head. A nice fresh trout, of course, the biggest one I could get, although Cook bulked out the trout pies with so much milk and flour that the patrons were lucky to get a piece of real fish in a slice at all. A length of fine black lace for Mrs Baxter’s best cape, for she had seen her neighbour with a lace trim on hers and decided she could not be upstaged at kirk. I was not to tell Mr Baxter of this, for he would likely not notice, and I was to sew it for her myself, if that was all right. And, finally, a packet of tea. The Baxters loved their tea and there was a small emporium off the market square that stocked it, alongside other luxuries like snuff, rum and chocolate. The tea that the grocer sold was cheap and was bulked out, like Cook’s trout pie, I thought, with sawdust or dried dung or somesuch, but the Baxters were not tea experts and swallowed it down, oblivious.

The tea-seller knew me by name and always greeted me well, as I had been a couple of times now and inspected his tea leaves with more scrutiny than most of his customers.