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Chapter Twenty-Two

T he Iron Room was a cruel place.

It was a full flight of steps underground, low and damp-ceilinged and devoid of light and hope. They called it the Iron Room on account of the fact prisoners here were once held in shackles before their executions, but conditions were better now and we were simply locked in. It was a room of hushed regime and muffled despair. I was taken to the women’s side, separated from the men’s side by the main corridor. When they pushed me in and closed the gate behind me, the other woman – there was only one – looked up from where she was lying on a bed-mat in the corner and regarded me with mild curiosity, but no great sympathy. She was adrift, in her own world.

A female guard came, who reminded me of the matron at the House of Correction, on account of her gown and cap. She addressed me through the gate, although she might as well have been addressing everyone else, for there was nothing personal about what she said.

‘Mondays are bath-days, Tuesdays fresh meat, donated by the kirk and we thank them in our prayers. On Wednesdays there are morning and afternoon religious instructions, specific to your situation. Thursdays are visiting days and Fridays we tidy our cells and wash the floors with vinegar. Weekends are for quiet contemplation, and we all walk to the kirk on Sundays. We are inspected each morning for signs of fever or disease and quarantined, if necessary. In the seven days ahead of a Hanging Day – which is the period in which we find ourselves now – we do all of these as normal, except that visitors are allowed every day and the minister comes each evening.’

The woman in the corner spoke. Her voice sounded like dried earth.

‘You are lucky, hen. You’ve only got few days of this.’

There was a murmur of agreement from the men’s side, although I could not see their faces very well, as the lamps were dim.

‘So you have missed your bath, as we were all bathed today’ – the guard had a jarring habit of using ‘we’ – ‘but I will see what I can do, as we do not wish to go to Our Lord unclean. And we will need to find you a clean smock too, for your clothes are filthy and likely flea-ridden.’

She tutted then, as though I was an additional burden she had been forced to take on when she was already at some great capacity, before putting her lantern up in front of her and making her way out.

In the silence that followed, which was only a moment or two, a rodent scuttled from one corner to another and there was a far-off shout of some sort that came from above and reminded me that we were only a few feet away from people living quite ordinary lives.

The men started up a conversation again, two of them, in low tones and it appeared to be something about cock-fighting, as though they were pals in an ale bar. The other woman patted the mat next to her, for me to come and lie down.

‘Have you any gin about you, hen?’ she asked, although she must have known as well as I did that you were searched for liquor and knives and poisons before you were taken to the Iron Room.

‘Mibbie your family will bring some, if you ask,’ I said.

She sniffed. ‘They’ve turned their backs on me,’ she replied. ‘The next time I see them, they’ll be watching me hang, to make sure I’m dead. That’s if they bother to turn up at all. And they will leave my body for the anatomists, for they’ve made no plans to bury me.’

I did not ask why, nor why she was condemned, for I did not want to tell anyone my own shameful conviction. For it was shameful.

But I did not know what I did was such a crime. No one had told me.

It’s not as though my ma had taken me to one side as a lass and told me all the things I must never do. I knew it was a crime to steal or forge a coin or call curses in the street, but I had never known it was a crime simply to not tell anyone I was with child. Or to give her my own farewell. And yes, I’d once considered giving her over to the parish, but I would never have harmed her.

I lay on the mat, shattered. It was evening now, and one of the men called over to me and said someone would bring a supper soon. There were more calls like this, and I knew the men were trying to get me into some kind of conversation, but I did not want any of it and I was glad when a turnkey came with trays of food. It was better than the gruel we were given upstairs. I surveyed the plate of chops and peas, which, although dry and tepid, was the only real meal I had been given in days.

‘They want us in good health for the gallows,’ the woman said to me, picking up her chop with her hands. They don’t want us dying of typhus or starvation first. That would disappoint everyone. If you don’t fancy that chop, I’ll take it.’

I was hungry, but with no appetite, which was a ghastly combination. I chewed on the chop, and it reminded me of Ma’s Sunday lunches. Would they come and visit? Would they come and watch me hang? I had not had the chance to say anything to them in the courtroom. I had been dragged out too quick.

Then the woman guard came back down and called me over to the gate.

‘I shall not keep you long from your meal,’ she said, ‘but I’ve organized for you to get a bath tomorrow morning.’

I could not have cared whether I was bathed or not and she looked disappointed that I didn’t seem grateful. But she ploughed on regardless.

‘You’ll have a nice bit of soap, and you ought to wash your hair twice too – two soapings to get the grease out properly. I’ll make sure the water’s hot for you. Afterwards you’ll have your appointment with the doctor.’

‘And what is that for? Am I to be given medicine?’ I asked.

‘Oh no, he is not that kind of a doctor,’ she said. ‘The prison physicians can take care of all of that, and we receive them in the mornings as and when required. No, the doctor is the man who will hang you, my dear. He needs to weigh and measure you, to make sure you hang nice and quick.’

I spent my twenty minutes in the bath – which was scorching hot at first, but quickly cooled – looking at myself. My belly was loose and my nipples browner than they had been before the pregnancy, and there was a dark line running downwards from my navel. The baby had changed me, and I liked that. I liked that she had marked me. I put on the new prison smock. It had such neat and pure stitching that I felt it had likely been stitched by the women parishioners of St Giles’s and I imagined them sitting in a circle, a guild or a commission or somesuch, taking honey cake and praying for the poor condemned women beneath their feet, and going to bed that night in their clean beds feeling they had done such a good deed the Lord would surely notice.

After all of that, with my twice-washed hair plaited tight and smelling of soap, and my white smock, I realized I looked like a woman set to hang.

The doctor received the condemned in a small room at the end of the passageway, nearest the kirk. On Hanging Day that’s where he stored his clothes, for he wore a cape and a hood when he hanged folk, to keep himself anonymous. There was a weighing platform in the corner of the room and a measuring stick.

‘He will inspect you quite fully,’ warned the woman guard. ‘But do not squirm or refuse him, because you do not want him to get it wrong.’

She left me there and I thought I might vomit, and I had to swallow back the sick and wipe my watering mouth and nose on the sleeve of my clean smock and it left a grey stain.

Presently the doctor arrived. He was not dressed like a hangman, but like a well-to-do gentleman, with a black hat and a silver-topped cane and a good cape. But as he bade me a good morning, my heart almost stopped, for I recognized him at once. He was very tall and sharp-shouldered and had a certain presence about him.

Edinburgh’s hangman.

The doctor. It was Dr McTavish, from Kelso.

‘I knew I would surprise you,’ he said, tossing his hat and cape on the stand. ‘But you are not to be afraid. I have hanged one hundred and forty men and women so far in my career, and I consider myself the best in the trade.’

He carried on like this, breezy, as he rolled up his shirt sleeves and examined his pocket watch. ‘I am with the Incorporation of Surgeons and Barbers. And of all the men and women I’ve hanged, I’ve never had a single complaint from any of them about the quality of my work.’

He looked up at me then, a flash in his eyes, mibbie thinking himself artful.

‘Do you try that quip with everyone?’ I enquired.

‘I try to lighten the mood,’ he said. ‘This is not the most pleasant job, but it pays the bills on my houses in Edinburgh and Kelso.’

‘Do the people in Kelso know what you do?’ I asked, for no one had mentioned it, and the River Inn had been a gossiping place.

‘Oh no, they would treat me differently if they knew,’ he said. ‘A hangman wears a hood for a reason. And the folks of Kelso are of a low intelligence and would not understand that hanging is a craft.’

He was truly the most despicable of men. As he took up his measuring stick and proceeded to ask me to stand straight, I imagined he was well capable of poisoning his wife. Poor Kitty.

And that was when it came to me.

‘Dr McTavish,’ I said, keeping my voice low so that he had to lean in towards me to catch my words, ‘have you seen our mutual friend, the dear Mrs Rose, since she absconded?’

‘Alas, no,’ he replied in a whisper, his lips almost flickering at my neck. ‘But if I did see her, I do not know what I would do first: kiss her or hang her for the way she treated me, by running off like that.’

‘Mrs Rose did talk quite boldly of you,’ I said.

He hesitated, just for a moment, before carrying on in his morbid task.

‘Step on the weighing platform,’ he instructed.

I did. Now I was taller than him and I stood in front of him, facing the wall whilst he adjusted the weights.

‘Mrs Rose told me a funny story – not funny like your quip, Doctor, but a strange tale that made my hair stand up on end, so gory it was. A tale about you.’

This time he did stop.

‘And what was this tale?’ he hissed.

‘Well, I hardly dare tell it, sir, for it paints you in a terrible light, but if you insist,’ I answered.

And he stood and listened to what Mrs Rose had said about him: that she thought he had poisoned poor Kitty, for she dropped dead out of nowhere, and Dr McTavish was a master of all sorts of potions. And that Dr McTavish was sorely fed up with his wife and would do anything to get her out of the way.

‘A chaste marriage, that’s what you had, and that’s why you employed the services of Mrs Rose. Your wife would not give you your conjugals and was, by all accounts, a harridan to you, to boot.’

And although I could not see his face, for he was behind me, remember, I could tell by the rapid way he breathed that he was suddenly feeling very grave indeed.

What things we say, what promises we make, when we are pleading for our lives. But the way Dr McTavish stared at me, open-mouthed with horror, told me I was right. And that Mrs Rose had been right in her suspicions.

‘Sir,’ I said, ‘here is the thing. I do very much fear that if you don’t help me survive the gallows, then I might scream your secret to the world, and those would be my last words, for all of Edinburgh town to hear.’

‘No one will pay any attention to the last pathetic words of a baby-killer,’ Dr McTavish spat.

‘You will loosen my hands,’ I said, ignoring him, ‘for they’ll be bound at my chest, not behind my back – you will make sure of that. You will help me slip them up, under the noose. And you will make sure that the noose is not going to strangle me or break my neck. And if you do not do that, but put that noose tight and firm around my neck, I will scream on that gallows and tell everyone you are a poisoner and that if they dig up your wife’s grave and examine her, the body will be full of laudanum.’

I knew about post-mortems by then, you see. I knew surgeons could make the dead talk, just as they had weighed my poor babe’s lungs and seen that she had taken breaths.

‘The folk of Edinburgh will listen with great intent to what I say on the gallows,’ I went on. ‘And the broadside-writers will be there, and everything will be scribed and put into news chronicles and books. If I tell them the hangman’s wife lies in a Kelso kirkyard full of his poison, it will be an almighty scandal.’

A rodent scratched at the floor and we both glanced at it, but only for a moment, for me and Dr McTavish were coiled to each other now.

‘Mistress Dickson,’ he replied, ‘I wonder if we might both do each other a favour. You remember Mrs Rose well. You know what she looks like, and you were clearly a confidante of hers.’ I nodded. ‘Well, as it happens, I have glimpsed her, here in this very town.’

‘Have you indeed, sir?’ I said, keeping calm and still. ‘How very interesting for us both.’ Here? In Edinburgh? That wench has been here all along?

‘She is whoring again,’ he whispered. ‘Any gent will do, it seems, apart from me, who she refuses to see. I have tried, a number of times, but she will not conduct business with me. And I do have a particular hankering for her. A craving, if you understand me.’

We stood a moment – hangman and condemned – and considered the situation.

‘Well, it looks like we are both in a bit of trouble and might be able to help one another out,’ I said. ‘Mibbie I might talk to your Mrs Rose and persuade her to see you.’

I feared then that he would laugh at my proposal, and even that he might put his hands to my throat and strangle me there and then. But there was a turnkey in the passageway and he would not have got away with it.

Instead he put his lips very close to my ears and said, ‘I will hold you to that promise, Mistress Maggie Dickson.’

Later Ma, Da and Joan came, and we were put in a little visiting room where bluebottles rattled at the walls. They brought a creel with clothes and fresh bread and apples.

‘We brought rum as well, but they confiscated it,’ said Da. ‘A rum would have helped you, too.’

‘Do you want us there, when they do it?’ asked Ma.

‘We will have to be there,’ said Da, ‘or the anatomists will take her.’

Ma turns to me. ‘And we’ve been promised the use of the parish coffin, so you’ll have dignity on your final journey home.’

‘I spoke to Kirk Session at St Michael’s myself and it took some persuasion,’ admits Da. ‘Because of the circumstances. But coffins are expensive and we did not want to cart you all the way back home in a shroud.’

I shivered and they thought I was shivering for myself, and the thought of being dead on a cart in a shroud or a coffin. But I was not. I was thinking that the anatomists still had my baby.

I wanted to tell my family, to give them a sign that I was going to try to survive the hang, because the sight of their faces was so horrific to watch. But the guards stalked the corridors, and the silence that fell over the Iron Room in the final hours leading up to Hanging Day was so still that overheard words could be plucked from the thick, sweltering air like fruit.

‘I need you all to be there,’ I replied. ‘Get as close as you can to the gallows and then claim my body quick. Do not let the anatomists take me away for dissection. And then get us out of Edinburgh as fast as you can.’

They thought it was to get away from the body-snatchers. To get away from the shame and the boos, and the cruelty of being associated with me.

I could not tell them my plan.

I had seen the utter humiliation on their faces in that courtroom. Seen them look up at the jeering folk in the balcony and curl themselves as small as they could. Ma and Da were petty criminals, tea-hoarders. But they had always got away with it. Mibbie they thought my crime and punishment were a retribution of sorts for what they had always done.

Ma bent her face to me and whispered, ‘The Lord will take you, and your poor babe will be waiting for you. Think of them as you go. Don’t worry about us.’

Those were strong, kind words.

But also they probably thought it was best that I hang quietly, so they could try to put the scandal behind them. I let them hug me and cry and weep and I gave Joan the glass ring, and I let their wails rise up above me, out of the Iron Room, up to the street above. I hoped everyone out there would hear them and know what this world and its laws had done to my family.

Joan clasped my hand. ‘Sister,’ she whispered.

I clasped her hand back. We held onto each other, a tightness in our grip, and eventually it was only when Da dragged Joan away that we let each other go.

On Hanging Day, like all the other condemned, I rose from my mat after a night of no sleep. I put on the gown Ma had brought – my navy wedding gown.

But unlike all the other men and women who were with me down in the Iron Room for those wretched days, I went to the gallows with hope.