Cover

Kate Foster

THE MOURNING NECKLACE

Dedication page

For Ruby

Public Notice

Public Notice

Notice is hereby given that, on 2nd September 1724, at the Grassmarket Gallows, Edinburgh, at eleven o’clock in the morning, there will be an Execution by Hanging of sundry criminals, for miscellaneous offences, including Murder, Coining, Robbery and Concealment of a Pregnancy.

Public Order will be kept, and rioters arrested.

Any of the Hanged criminals whose bodies are unclaimed by next of kin will be taken by the Anatomists of Edinburgh for dissection at the Incorporation of Surgeons and Barbers.

PART ONE

HANGING DAY

Chapter One

The Sheep Heid Inn,
Duddingston, near Edinburgh
2nd September 1724

Oh, I am supposed to be dead!

My breath catches in my throat, the way it does when I’m jolted from a deep sleep. I try to cry out, but my mouth burns. My tongue is fat and dry. My hands are laid upon my chest as if in prayer. I unclasp them. Prayer was never that much of a comfort to me.

I’ve just had a dream so vivid I could have sworn it was real. I dreamed a snake had coiled itself tight around my neck and was squeezing the life out of me, pressing my veins and making my eyes bulge. A snake with a taut shiny skin, scales the colour of good hemp rope. It hissed my name. You will die, Mistress Maggie Dickson. It tried with all its might to strangle me. But at the last moment I grasped the creature and managed to drag it off me and toss it away.

I am supposed to be dead, so where am I? I am lying on my back, and everything is dark. Is this heaven? Hell? Purgatory? Will they come at me with flights of angels or with fire and brimstone?

My chest rises and falls. I am breathing. I lay my hand on my heart to feel the pulse of me. It gallops under my fingers faster and harder than it has ever done. I am alive, it says, I am alive. There are no angels or demons or serpents or snakes. Just one living, breathing woman.

My hands are stiff with pins and needles and my gown feels wrong: too loose and too thin and stiffly ruffled at the neck, like a child’s dress. I squeeze and unsqueeze my fingers, searching for the familiar ridge of the glass ring Spencer gave me. The ring isn’t on my finger, but of course I knew it wouldn’t be. For did I not hand that ring over to Joan yesterday? As she bawled and howled, but took it anyway and pushed it onto her pinkie, blinking away her tears and pretending not to admire how the glass beads twinkled. She had always had her eye on that ring.

There is something else I must do now. Put my hand to my throat and touch the place where it throbs. The fabric of my collar is gauzy. This is definitely not mine, not the good dress I was wearing earlier, but – oh, above the ruffles is the raw welt of my skin! A swollen wound. A bruise that curves from ear to ear. Slashed with rope-burn. The mark of a thick hemp noose. It must look awful. If Joan could see it, she would shriek and shriek.

The hanging hasn’t worked. But dear God, I am marked for life.

And according to the Courant, I should be meeting His Judgement right now, followed by an eternity down below with the Devil himself. But this is not heaven, nor hell, for – hear that? – the muffled snorts of horses chewing hay, and I could swear it was the chime of a kirk bell that roused me and sent the dream-snake slithering away. I’ve survived! I am supposed to be at my rest, but I have never been more awake.

They said I would swing for the crime, and I did. I stood on the gallows convulsing with fear, and the floor gave way and I dropped, and I tried to scream, but the scream caught in my chest as my neck tightened and everything went black.

The scream bursts out of me now. I gasp like a fish on a riverbank – like a baby on a riverbank, but I’m trying to forget what that looks like. I would scream again, but my throat has seized up.

Still your heart. Think. The sun creeps through the cracks in the wooden planks that cover me. I am in a coffin! The parish coffin of St Michael’s. They had argued whether it was even proper to cart me home in the common coffin, but in the end decided it was cheaper, and less of a fuss than buying one. But sunlight through gaps means they haven’t buried me yet. I was due to go back to Musselburgh and be buried beside all the other dead Dicksons, all the fishermen and fishwives who went before me, to save me being laid to rest with the Edinburgh criminals, for who could ever rest in peace in an Edinburgh graveyard? But we are not in Musselburgh. Not yet. I can’t hear the gulls.

My fingers press against the coffin lid and nothing moves; at first I think it might have been nailed down for safety, for I know there were apprentice surgeons in Edinburgh who’d wanted my corpse for dissection and there was a worry they might steal me and take me from Ma and Da altogether. My heart pounds even harder, but no, the lid heaves up and over on its hinge, the sunlight blinding me now. I sit up, which is not as easy as it ought to be. My legs ache at the hips and knees, which must have been the jerking at the noose. Look how she dances! Hang, bitch, hang!

No one shouts or panics, so no one has seen me. I am thankful for that. I don’t know what I am doing yet and I need a moment to suck in fresh air and think. My eyes come to, and I know where I am straight away. I am under the shadow of Arthur’s Seat, in the yard outside an inn. The whiff of boiled mutton hangs like a fug. The horses are nose-deep in their troughs. Ahead of me is a kirk, where the clock has just chimed one. I was hanged at nine. I have been dead four hours.

I have been dead long enough.

I clamber out of the coffin and ease myself slowly off the cart. Looking down at myself, I see that I am in a burial shroud. I am barefoot too, for I had said Joan could have the lot – my gown and boots – but I do regret that now, for a breeze lifts my hem and it billows up. Everything feels different. My legs creak and tremble as though I have aged four decades in these last four hours. Perhaps I have. No one is about, only a crow that eyes me from the roof of the inn with something more than curiosity. Crows know things, don’t they? He has a knowing look about him, this beady fellow, and he has not flinched to see a corpse spring to life, not so much as twitched an oily wing, as if he was waiting for it to happen all along.

It strikes me now, in this moment between the coffin and what I do next, that I have a choice. There’s always a choice to be made, as Spencer would say. Even when you think you’re all out of options, there is always something. That’s Patrick Spencer for you. A schemer to the last. But haven’t I learned the hard way that my judgement is not always the best?

Arguably, as Spencer might say, chewing on his pipe, I have already paid the price for the crime, and God has decided to give me a second chance. I could put back that coffin lid and make a run for it. To Leith Port and get on the next ship out. Find a smuggler and go wherever he is going. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve made a run for it. But here I am, stood in horse-shit in nothing more than a thin smock, with not a penny to my name, and I can’t risk being caught like this. Imagine what would happen to me if a band of rogues came along. Worse if they realized, from my rope-mark, where I had come from. And there are plenty of rogues on the roads into Edinburgh. So I walk, my neck throbbing, with stones piercing the soles of my feet, into the inn.

Later, in the weeks that follow, they will talk of this day same as they talk of ghosts and highwaymen and grave-robbers and murderers. They will say how I leapt from my coffin and appeared at my own wake, and how everyone nearly died of fright themselves. Ma sobbed and took me into her arms, and Da choked on his mouthful of ale, and Joan shrieked and shrieked and dropped her bowl of sheep’s-head soup on her lap and ruined her brand-new mourning-dress, and some men took me straight back to Edinburgh to be hanged again. They will say that, at first, my family took me for my own ghost until Joan said, ‘We can all see your privies through that smock, Maggie. Will someone cover her up?’

But that is all to come. For now, on Hanging Day, in the courtyard of the Sheep Heid, there is only this: my name is Margaret Dickson, though everyone calls me Maggie. I am two-and-twenty years of age, a fishergirl who never became the fishwife I was supposed to. I did not want that harsh sort of a life. I wanted better. I was supposed to be executed, but I am still alive.

I was hanged for the death of my baby.

Chapter Two

I open the door slowly and stand at the entrance, wondering how long it will take for someone to notice me. My legs tremble. A ram’s skull is mounted onto a plaque next to my head and I wonder, briefly, what the anatomists might have done with my skull if they’d had the chance. Ma is the first to see me. She screams, a piercing scream that could shatter glass, and clutches her chest. Da sees me next and his mouth falls open and he shakes his head over and over again. Some men I don’t know, who are sitting in a corner at the back of the inn, slowly put down their ales.

‘God save us all, she has risen,’ cries Da.

‘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.’

‘Wait,’ says Ma. ‘She needs a physician first. Look at the terrible state of her. She is dazed and confused. Sit down on that stool, Maggie, before you faint. Is there a physician in Duddingston? Or mibbie we should take her to a medical man in Edinburgh. Get her examined there.’

I sit, feeling suddenly in desperate need of a chair, as though my legs can no longer carry me. As though I have been walking for miles and could not take another step. Someone puts a shawl over my knees and another shawl over my shoulders, yet still I shiver.

‘An Edinburgh physician, are you mad?’ cries Da. ‘We don’t have that kind of money.’

‘Well then,’ says Ma, ‘she should come back to Musselburgh to get seen there. The constables can come and find her, if they want to arrest her.’

Joan speaks again. In truth, our eyes have hardly left each other all the while. She avoids lowering her gaze to my neck. ‘What do you think we should do, Maggie?’ It is the first time my sister has ever asked my thoughts on anything. She has never sought my counsel, only told me what to do or bickered and fussed all the way through our years together.

The thought of going back to jail terrifies me. Days I sat in that shithole, waiting to be hanged with all the other criminals. I try to say something, but the words are stuck in my throat. I grip the shawl to my breast. The snake flashes before my eyes again and I shake it away.

‘Say something, Maggie,’ says Ma. ‘Let us know you are all right.’

But I cannot. I shake my head.

‘She is struck dumb,’ says Da. ‘And disobedient too. She was never like this before.’

‘Perhaps being struck dumb is her punishment,’ innkeeper Prat replies. ‘And branded too – look at the gash on her throat. That will leave a scar.’

‘It will,’ says Joan. ‘It looks rotten, Maggie. You’ll have to wear a kerchief over that for the rest of your days.’

‘It should fade in time,’ murmurs Ma. ‘Bruises do, even the worst ones. Now will someone pour the poor soul a drink: a whisky or a rum, if you have it. That might help her to talk.’

The innkeeper does as he is told.

‘She will be hanged again,’ says one of the men. I can’t tell how many there are, nor who is who, for they buzz like bluebottles around me. He says it slow. I think I hear a bit of pleasure in his voice too.

‘We can’t take her back to Musselburgh,’ says Da. ‘It will cause a riot. The house will be mobbed. We’d better go back into town.’

Da looks at Ma, and Ma nods. She always does what he says. She’s had too many slaps from him. Too many of her own bruises.

‘Perhaps for the best, Maggie,’ she says.

I see it now in both my parents. Joan too. The same look on their faces they’ve all had since the first day they came to visit me in jail. The lowered eyes and the bowed heads. The shame of it. When I walked into the inn and stood there, unnoticed at the door for a moment or two, their faces had been different. Lighter. Ma had been supping her soup heartily and Da had been sitting pondering his ale solemnly, but with no great look of sorrow. They looked relieved it was over. They looked relieved I was gone.

I can hardly blame them, either.

I am handed a nip of rum. It slides like liquid fire down my throat. I hold out my cup for another drink, but the innkeeper shakes his head nervously. He wants me gone before I attract a crowd.

The men hoist me up and start to walk me out. Da fumbles in his pocket to pay for the unfinished meal and I wonder whether he will resent spending the money.

Finally my words come, thick and bruised-sounding.

‘I will go,’ I say. ‘You’ve no need to drag me. But I want a physician. The best they can find. When we get to Edinburgh I want to go straight to the courthouse and I want to speak to the sheriffs directly. We must make good time, before it shuts for the day. I don’t want to be accused of avoiding the law. And I want my gown and boots back. Joan, where are they?’

My family looks at me with renewed surprise. They have never seen me make such demands before. I always did what they wanted, until I met Spencer.

‘Your gown and boots were stolen clean away, Maggie,’ Joan says. ‘As we were tending you under the scaffold – taken away from under our noses.’

‘My Sunday gown, the one I was married in? Surely you could not be so careless?’ Suddenly I start to cry at this, of all things. The tears prickle at my eyes and I think, Do not lose your grip now, Maggie. ‘My Sunday gown gone, and me left in this ghoulish shroud?’

‘Ah, but there’s money in rag and leather, and even more money in anything taken from the gallows,’ Mr Prat comments, with the air of an expert. ‘Your good clothes will be fetching top bids, as we speak. Some folk collect things like that. Gentlemen of a certain persuasion. Particularly a hanged lady’s dress.’

We all shudder, and Joan looks fit to vomit. ‘This has been a truly dreadful day,’ she whimpers.

Ma puts an arm about her shoulders and whispers, ‘There, there, hen.’

No one puts their arm about me.

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.

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