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Chapter One

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

O h, 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.