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Chapter Eighteen

I stumbled back to the inn and up to my room, the creel knocking at my legs. When I got there, I gathered the bloodied sheets and put them into the creel and put it under my bed. The straw mat underneath me was ruined, but I could replace that. I opened the window to get air in. I was going through the motions in a state of shock and disbelief. I got back into bed. I lay on my side, imagining myself floating down the river with my baby.

Joan came upstairs, with tea and some bread and cheese, and I sent her away for fresh linens. When she came back, I sat up.

‘You must go home and tell Ma you have tried your best, but I am not for returning,’ I said.

At first Joan protested, but not with much vigour. What she had witnessed had terrified her. ‘And you will just carry on as normal, will you? Pretend nothing happened and save up your pennies for London?’

‘Things will never be normal,’ I told her. ‘But I have not come this far, and endured this and lost my own babe, simply to come home again.’

Joan made slow work of putting the cheese on the bread and pouring the tea, for she was in shock too. Finally she said, ‘What is it, Maggie, that makes you so determined to keep running, even after this? Tell me.’

I looked down at my hands. They were rough and raw, from washing and laundering and all those chores. But they looked better than they had looked before, when they spent their days in brine, cut to shreds with fish-hooks and gutting knives.

‘If I come back home, I don’t think I will ever leave,’ I replied. ‘I will get caught up in our family’s ways, and I will be so distraught at what has happened to me I will be too afraid to try again. And truth be told, Joan, I do not like how Ma and Da favour you. I will have made that even worse by running away.’

‘Then I will not ask you again,’ she said. ‘But I will go back. The world past Fisherrow is a frightening place, with its Houses of Correction and highwaymen, and all sorts. And Ma needs me, and we need to show the tea men that we are trustworthy in some ways.’

‘You must never speak of what happened with the babe to anyone,’ I warned her. I did not ask if she had her eyes on a sweetheart mill owner or somesuch, for I truly did not care.

‘I never want to think of last night again,’ she said. ‘It was worse than anything Ma spoke of when she talked of losing her children, but I know I will never get the sight of the poor babe out of my mind.’

On that, we were agreed.

I walked Joan down to the stables the next morning and made sure she got on the right coach. Then she drifted off, huddled in her best shawl, her face paler and more worried than it had even been when she arrived.

‘She was not for staying long, was she, hen?’ Mrs Baxter joined me in the yard. She smelled of pastry and apples and spice, and I had a terrible urge of longing for the baby, to smell her damp head again. ‘My dear, you are quite ashen. Did the pair of you fight?’

‘We always fight,’ I replied sadly.

‘Just as well she’s gone then,’ mused Mrs Baxter. ‘For she was no use covering your shift. Thank goodness you’re back on your feet. Now, come inside and get these pies before they burn.’

And that was the way it went, for a day or so, a sense of normality closing in on me despite the fact that my world had collapsed. For how could there be joy in the taste of an apple pie, when my baby had gone? How could the patrons hoot and screech and talk of saucy girls, when the world was so cruel? How could they drink ale? How could anyone do anything?

That was the way it went.

And then someone found the baby. I knew by the shriek in the kitchen.

It was Cook’s shriek, and Cook was not a woman prone to shrillness or outbursts, but a fisherman had come in, around mid-morning, and said he had been at the river when he had noticed something downstream that did not look right, not right at all, amongst a crop of rocks, and he had gone to have a look. ‘I thought it was a drowned animal,’ he kept saying, shaking his head and sounding quite bemused. He’d not known what to do with the baby. ‘If I laid it out on the riverbank, a fox might’ve got it.’ He was talking and talking. ‘Wouldn’t ’ve been right to leave it.’

And so he had put the baby in his creel and brought it to the first place he could think of – the nearest place really – which was here, and had come in the kitchen door, not wanting to disturb the patrons, and had lifted the lid of his creel, and that was what made Cook scream. The baby in the creel on the table in the kitchen, beside her good knives.

His creel wasn’t like mine; it was much smaller than mine. I remember thinking, He mustn’t be much of a fisherman if he only needs a small creel , but I suppose it was big enough. Big enough for a tiny baby.

The hullabaloo carried into the parlour and everyone cleared a space and, when I realized what all the shrieking was about and that my dead baby was in the basket on the table, I screamed too – screamed at everyone to leave her alone.

I dropped the bag of washing I had been carrying, and I went over to the basket and I would not let anyone near her.

And that was how they knew it was my baby.

They put my story together, piece by piece, like bait strung on a line, as the fisherman’s nerves were calmed with a large whisky. The constable came, then the parish officials.

A runaway, a glass ring, a pallor. A sister who came and went, saying little. A fishwife who’d abandoned the trade. They’d had high hopes I’d be as hard-working as my reputation, but on second thoughts mibbie they’d also thought there was something strange about me.

Had I killed the baby? Had I left it there to die, or smothered it? Well, if it had been born dead, why not alert the Baxters? Why had I not employed a midwife? Where was my sister now?

Then an urgent letter was written to the sheriffs in Edinburgh and the rider told to leave immediately. The constables took the baby away and I shrieked again, and one of the parish men slapped me and his ring caught my skin and it bled. My face bled and my womb bled.

‘What will you do with her?’ Mrs Baxter asked the constable. By then it was the middle of the afternoon and there had been no lunch served, as the parlour was now taken up with important men and their scribes. The chicken will spoil, for it is on its last day , I thought. Then someone went upstairs and dug in my creel and found the bloodied linens and there were more shrieks. Mrs Baxter said nothing about the patrons milling at the parlour door, nor the fact that Cook was not fit to work for the rest of her shift. Shame had been brought on the River Inn.

‘Mistress Dickson will need to be kept securely,’ a constable said.

‘She cannot remain here,’ said a parish man. ‘She would escape. This is already a house of immorality. Did you not suspect she was with child?’

‘She told me she was a maiden,’ replied Mrs Baxter.

The parish man turned to me and spoke very slowly, as though he thought me a simpleton. ‘Mistress Dickson,’ he declared, ‘the deliberate concealment of a pregnancy is a grave matter indeed.’

Well, I had not known that. I thought it was my own private business, the things that were happening inside my womb. But this man appeared to have an authority over my body, even its most secret parts.

‘I was saving to go to London and have the baby there,’ I told him.

No one liked that. Mrs Baxter shook her head.

‘Maggie, girl, why did you not just tell me?’

‘Indeed, Mistress Dickson, why did you not ask the parish for help?’

They made it sound so simple, as though me telling them would have made everything all right. But that was all pretence and lies, to stop any blame being laid at their own door.

They took me to the House of Correction. They carried me on an open cart and by the time they had got that together, the main street was lined with folk, all come to see the girl who left her baby on the riverbank. They did not shout or throw cabbages or stones, or any of that kind of mob hysteria, but they did pull their bonnets and caps and shawls tight about themselves and stare. Man, woman, child. The tea merchant, who looked at me like a puzzle that now made sense. The boy I’d seen peeing in the market. I wanted to stand up and tell them what had happened, that the baby had died and I had given it my own farewell, that’s all, but two of the parish officers sat with me and I knew that if I moved, they would pull me back down. I was not bound or put in chains or called names or anything like that, not yet, but they looked at me like they thought I was the worst mother that ever lived.

Mibbie I was.