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Chapter Nineteen

I was taken to a vast high-ceilinged dormitory that had three tall windows on each side and no curtains. Thin bed-mats lay in neat rows, occupied by a dozen girls and women of all ages, whom I came to learn had been incarcerated after being caught on the roads and villages between Scotland and England in various displays of immoral behaviour, such as vagrancy and prostitution and idleness.

Some of them wore fine clothes with laces and trimmings, and I was reminded of Mrs Rose and even wondered if she might have spent time here, but there was no sign of her. I wondered if the last maid was still here, the one who got pregnant and was kicked out of the Baxters’ inn, but mibbie she was long gone now that her babe had been born. We were overseen by wardens and watchmen, and by a matron who was a stout spinster in a pristine cap, who sucked comfits and smelled of ginger. They all carried canes.

We slept in that room upstairs and spent our days in a workshop downstairs, beating hemp with mallets. I did not know the purpose of the job, merely assumed it had something to do with rope-making. There were three men, rough-looking sorts, but we were not allowed to talk to them at all and they slept in another part of the house altogether, with night-watchmen and locked gates keeping us apart. I would not have wanted to talk to those men even if we had been allowed. They looked menacing and brought an air of edginess to the workshop. I knew without a doubt that were it not for the watchmen guarding their every move, canes at the ready, those men would do something.

I had begged for a rest, but was told I must go to the workshop for two hours every morning.

‘This is a House of Correction, not a lying-in chamber,’ Matron clipped. ‘I will attend to you as required, but you must earn your keep. The other women are in the workshop eight hours a day.’

I was to remain here until an agreement had been reached about what to do with me next.

No one came and interrogated me or came to support me, so I was left with my fears and the awful words uttered by the officials ringing in my head.

I thought no more of Joan, or Ma or Da or Spencer, only of the soul who had lived inside me and died a few hours after her birth. I did not know grief could hurt like this. My breasts swelled wickedly red and tight. Matron brought bandages and bound me, saying I was to tell her if I felt feverish, but it did not come to that. I wished for the fever, though. I wished for death.

I did not sleep more than a few minutes at a stretch. When I did, my dreams were vivid and wretched and every one of them ended the same: with the baby floating down the Tweed, wailing for me. Sometimes I dreamed of snakes curling round her little body. I woke up startled, clawing at the bandages, but Matron would not let me take them off. ‘Not yet, girl, and try not to think of the baby or the milk will not stop.’

On the first night, as we lay on our mats under the sunset, one of the women asked me why I was here. It was after Matron had bound me and given me a caudle of wine and egg and honey, which she said would give me my strength back. I drank it as she watched, and then she took the cup away.

The room was silent for a while and I thought everyone was drifting off to sleep. But the woman, the oldest one of us, asked me loudly and I could hear the blanket-rustle of everyone lifting their heads to hear the answer.

‘You’ve had a baby, but where is it?’ she asked.

‘She died,’ I said. ‘She was weak.’

‘And why have they brought you in here?’ she went on. ‘Have you no man to support you?’ Her voice was harsh with shameless curiosity.

Then Matron came back. ‘No talking after bedtime,’ she scolded. Her cane clicked against the floor. I had not seen her hit anyone with it, but had no doubt that she would. She paused at my bed. I could smell her ginger-breath and the soapy scent of her skin. ‘Mistress Dickson is here as her baby was found on the banks of the Tweed,’ she said.

There was a sucking of air, a sitting-up in bed, an outburst of cries at that.

Matron’s voice rose above it, sing-song and sharp. ‘The circumstances are not clear and the matter is being investigated, so I will thank all of you to ask no more questions of Mistress Dickson as she must save her answers for the constables.’

No one spoke to me after that, except things like ‘Pass the porridge pot’ or ‘Move your arse’ as they squeezed past me in the narrow halls. They wanted nothing to do with me. They turned away from me and wouldn’t meet my eye. Now, as I look back on it, I am trying to remember if I even cared.

I think I would have been most upset, had it not been for the fact that all I thought of was the baby. Day and night I would yearn and, most of all, wonder where her poor body was now.

I think I had a couple of weeks of this before I was called to the office with news. A parish official sat behind the desk and the constable stood next to him. Matron stood beside me and, though there was a chair and I was exhausted, I was not invited to sit in it.

‘You will be removed to Edinburgh,’ the parish official said. ‘A coach is being readied as we speak.’ There was a parchment in front of him, lying on the desk, and he kept pointing to it with his gloved fingers. It was crammed full of looped writing.

‘What does that note say?’ I asked. ‘Who’s it from?’

He looked surprised, as if he did not expect me to be so curious about my own fate.

‘It is from the clerk of the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh,’ he said. ‘In response to the letter sent by the constables of Kelso. It requires that you are brought to the court to have your case heard there. It says,’ here he frowned as though reading something distasteful, ‘that the accusation of concealment of pregnancy is a grievous one and must heard in the capital, not the shires , so that it can be given due scrutiny by learned judges.’

‘The child’s body is already in Edinburgh,’ added the constable. ‘At the Incorporation of Surgeons and Barbers. They are conducting post-mortem tests on it, to try to determine its cause of death.’

Bile rose in my throat, and I thought I might vomit. I staggered. Matron put her hand on my back. They all stared.

‘Someone ought to inform your kin,’ said the parish official. ‘If you give details, we will have a letter drawn up. The constable will take it; he is accompanying you. Your family will have to make preparations for you to be admitted to the jail next to the courthouse. You’ll need suitable clothing and blankets, and food sent.’

I was hot, too hot, as though a fever was coming. My armpits and the back of my neck erupted in sweat. ‘But my ma and da can’t read,’ I gasped, ‘and it will come as a terrible shock to them. They will need the letter read out to them, and my sister too, although Joan knows full well the baby was born alive. She was there. You will need to find Joan.’ Everything felt like it was galloping at me, and I had to grip onto the chair to steady myself.

‘Careful with what you say to her,’ admonished the constable to the parish official. ‘She is nervous and agitated. But I’ll keep a note of this Joan and will make sure she is questioned.’

‘We will send her up to Edinburgh with blankets and an extra shawl,’ said Matron, ‘or she will perish on the journey and that will be the fault of us in the shires.’

Everyone agreed to that, with a round of reluctant grunts.

‘And she will need bandages and linens – plenty of them,’ added Matron tightly. ‘For the lactation and the lochia. She still leaks.’

The parish man winced, as though he had been smacked with Matron’s cane, and scowled at me as though I were cattle.

The carriage was large and severe-looking with black curtains at the windows. As well as the driver, there was the constable and two other men hired as guards, in case of highwaymen. They tied me to the constable with a piece of rope.

When I look back on that journey, I do not think of it as a singular line, the kind of line you see on a map. I think of it in jolts. Of the stories the men told to pass the time: of the Jacobites and their wars, and whether they would ever put the Stuarts on the throne, which they all hoped would happen, but you had to be careful who you said that to. Or whether it might be better to emigrate on one of the ships going out to the Americas or Canada and go fortune-hunting.

But mostly I remember how that journey unfolded in my own self. Of seeing my creel packed neat with the rest of the luggage and thinking Mrs Baxter would have done that, and realizing that my savings would likely still be in the locked drawer. Of a cheese pie they gave me, which I tried to eat before I saw mould on the pastry shell. Of travel sickness and vomiting on the constable’s lap, and the way they all stood up to wipe him down and left me heaving. Of the linens growing warm and wet between my legs and the smell of my own lochia and stale vomit, and the men catching the scent of me and putting their kerchiefs to their noses. Sometimes I would think I could hear the sea, but it was just the wind and rain. Often I had questions that I dared not ask and they died on my dried lips.

Would they bury the baby in an Edinburgh kirkyard or put it in a jar on a mortuary shelf? What would the surgeons find when they cut it apart? Would they say I tried to kill it?

What was the punishment for concealment of a pregnancy?