Page 2

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.

Legally dead, that man was, when they cut him down from the gallows, with no signs of life. No breath nor heartbeat. Sentence had been passed. They said the hangman took a bribe from the man. Sometimes a hangie can be bribed to give you a way out. Cut you down quick when you’re still faintly alive and then you can come to some time later. Things like that.

Finally we reach the ominous city walls and pass through the towering gate of Netherbow Port into the heart of Edinburgh. The gentle royal pastures and the dazzle of the afternoon sunshine give way to the shadows of the tenement-lined street that snakes up the hill, and my heart darkens too. The cart slows, for there are a dozen or more carts around us now, piled with logs and bales and poultry cages. Men shout and swear at each other for taking too long or blocking the way. Water-caddies hunch under barrels strapped to their backs, which look even heavier than fishing creels.

We all stare now: me and Ma, and Da and Joan, and the McIvors. We cannot help it. There are market stalls set with weighing scales, and shops with signs and flags and patrolling high constables – they make me flinch: all of these sights pass us as we ease up to the Tolbooth Jail. I have only ever been on this street as a prisoner, but there are sights you cannot help but be astonished at. Buildings ten storeys tall. Wynds and closes crammed with inns and taverns and roaring drunks. Boys and girls collecting the gardeyloo waste thrown from the tenements, bundling it onto carts for compost. It is not a place for the faint-hearted.

We come to the forecourt of Parliament House. It is a commanding square, where men in sleek black hats mill around, carrying polished silver-handled walking canes that match the silver buttons of their coats. We are the only folk here on a rickety cart. Me, Ma and Joan are the only women. I have come to know the world of men in power these past weeks. It is a world of confidence, even amongst those who lack the good looks or wisdom or godliness to have earned it. It is not a world I am comfortable in, but I have had to find a way through. Theirs is a black-and-white world of certainties: of good and bad, and right and wrong. To them, I am wicked. So they strung me up in front of a baying crowd. But none of them had ever been in my shoes. If they had, I am not sure they would have reached such an easy judgement. For who can say what any of them would have done, if they had been me?

Before I get down from the cart, I turn to my family, who are putting kerchiefs to their noses against the stench of Edinburgh: the chimney smoke and gardeyloo and the rotten fallen fruit and veg. For a moment I think of uttering something profound to them, for again it might be our last conversation, but I don’t. Instead I look at Ma.

‘Have you my death-certificate,’ I ask, ‘for I might need it in there? The sheriffs like official documents.’

Again, they look surprised at me, for I was never one for knowing about certificates or documents or parchments because there is no call for that amongst fishwives.

Ma digs in her creel and brings out a scroll, wrapped in a black ribbon. She holds it aloft, between two fingers, as if it might bite.

I take it from her, my hand clasping the thick parchment and wondering at the absurdity of it all – that I should have the written proof of my own death in my hand whilst my pulse beats next to it. But I can do all my wondering later. Now I must think and be clever. I turn to Joan.

‘I shall take my nice glass ring back now, if you please, my dear,’ I say. ‘It is mine, after all, and you have always been given plenty more nice things from Ma and Da than I ever was.’ They all shift uncomfortably at that, for it’s true, but not something we ever said out loud before.

Joan takes the ring off and hands it to me, inspecting her fingers. She opens her mouth and I think she is about to ask Ma if she might ever be allowed another ring to replace it, but when she looks up, she catches my eye and scrutinizes me up and down in my borrowed clothes, and my bruised neck, and thinks better of it.

But I am still furious with her about what happened in the court that day, and that ring is mine and I might need it. It is almost the only thing of mine that they did not lose under those damned gallows, so I consider it lucky. I have come to learn that everything is currency. A death-certificate. A glass ring. A smuggled package. A terrible secret.