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Chapter Twenty-Three

Edinburgh 3 September 1724

O ur life events change us, of course they do. But there is nothing that will change you like a brush with death.

It is the day after my Hanging Day.

Morning shatters on the Tolbooth Jail like dropped crockery on tiles. The women around me wake furiously and swarm at the gate, begging for clean linens and water and medicines and visits; and then, when they are ignored and ignored, they collapse back into the cell and fight over the pocket mirror. I lie on my mat. I am so exhausted I can hardly move. If anything, my limbs feel even sorer today than they did when I woke up in the parish coffin. I touch my throbbing, agonizing rope-burn and keep my fingers on it, feeling the pulse of me through it.

I am alive.

That promise I made to Dr McTavish seemed all very well and good when I was pleading for my life. But now I owe him. And he is not a man I should displease.

I am safe from him, here in the Tolbooth, but I must wait whilst the sheriffs come back to me with their decision.

The breakfast gruel-pot clatters in and the women are doled out their slops. The pickpocket takes Molly’s gruel, for Molly doesn’t need it. She has ways of getting a bit of bacon and a boiled egg. I have barely eaten in days and I am starving now, and I take mine and the watery mess does not even taste half bad, which goes to show how desperate I have become.

Molly watches me eat. When I catch her eye, she looks away, fiddling with her stockings. She is not a whore like Mrs Rose. She is not even a whore like the girls who loll around the Mussel Inn for sailors and fishermen. She is an Edinburgh whore. Her eyes swivel, surveying the room for dangers and opportunities. Before, I even heard her speak filthy words to the turnkey as she did her business with him – some words I recognized and some I did not, and others she put on in a foreign accent, and he seemed to like that.

Finally she approaches me.

‘How did you do it?’ she asks, her voice low, for of course the women are silent, listening intently.

‘It was an Act of God,’ I tell her, rasping, as my voice still croaks. She laughs at that, the rich laugh that turns into a hacking cough.

‘I heard the other woman who hanged yesterday morning jerked like a marionette,’ she says. ‘And one of the men even fainted on the gallows and they had to revive him and manhandle him to the noose.’

‘You know a lot, for someone who wasn’t there,’ I tell her.

‘The turnkeys always talk of hangings,’ she replies. ‘You went calm and docile. At peace with your maker – that’s what they said about you. Yet here you are. Was it a trick?’

‘It was no trick. I am not the first and I will not be the last person to survive the gallows.’ Dr McTavish had told me what to say to anyone who asked awkward questions. He saved his instructions for the last minute, as I’d stood on the gallows. Said this kind of event had happened before, from time to time, and even though a hanged convict might seem dead, they could revive some hours later.

Molly scrutinizes me, looking for untruths. I carry on, repeating his words. ‘Hanging is a craft, but they can’t always get it right with the measurements and weighings and the drop, and so on. My hangman was supposed to be one of the better ones, but here I am. Mibbie it’s an Act of God, like I said. Or mibbie it was just that he got it wrong.’

I think that satisfies Molly, for now. She turns on her heel and goes back to her mat. The rest of the morning is long and is filled with bluebottles swarming around chamber pots. The rest of the women continue to avoid me, but I catch them all looking at my neck. It throbs, and I wait. But a long wait is a good thing, for the sheriffs are likely debating whether or not they can hang me again; and the longer it takes them, the more likely they will concede that I have served my sentence.

Dr McTavish had said as much. ‘The sentence is hanging and that will have been served,’ he’d murmured from behind his hood as his parting shot, before he’d loosened the rope around my hands and made sure I had wriggle room. ‘The sheriffs have recently been debating whether to change the wording of the statutes to hanged by the neck until dead , but that has not been written in yet. So if they try to hang you again, you must argue that they cannot do it twice. Now, Mistress Dickson, act meek. The sheriffs will be watching you from their vantage point at the first-floor window of the White Hart Inn. By the time you regain your senses they will be drunk and easy to argue your case with. I will see you very soon, and you will help me reunite with Mrs Rose.’

And then he hanged me.

I can’t remember everything about being dead, for there must have been a space in time, a gap of nothingness. But I can piece together bits, as if it were a dream. I remember Dr McTavish, and the rope, and the snake. Sometimes the snake and McTavish are one and the same. His hands coil around my neck and when I look at them, they are made not of skin, but of scales; and then when I look again, they are made of rope. Best hemp. And then I am back at the House of Correction again, beating the hemp for my own noose.

But that is a story about a dream. Usually I find stories about dreams boring. Joan used to tell me her dreams. ‘Oh, last night, Maggie, I dreamed a funny one, and you and I were mermaids and then we turned into sea creatures and I was a dolphin, nimble as anything, but you were a big, ugly whale and you swallowed all of Fisherrow.’

But this was not one of those.

I do remember the moments before. Seeing Ma and Da and Joan near the foot of the scaffold, ready to rescue my corpse from the anatomists and take my good gown. Joan wearing the glass ring.

I remember looking up at the building tops, and down on the crowd, seeing the world as a bird might and praying to God, ‘Don’t take me yet.’

And although there were hundreds of men and women there, children too, with all manner of hats and flags and banners, my eye was drawn to a man standing at the edge of it all, under a tree, for he stared directly at me with a look of sorrow and regret, and I recognized him.

And he had no trace of a sea-beard or weather-tan about him at all, but the clean, pale look of a man who has been hiding away from the world for months.

My husband, Patrick Spencer.

And that was not a dream. It was real. Spencer had returned.