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Chapter Twenty-Four

T he heat of the September sun has warmed the women’s cell to a humid broth, high up into the afternoon, when the turnkey eventually calls my name. The lust is still gone from his eyes.

‘Mistress Dickson,’ he says, unlocking the gate and avoiding looking at my throat, ‘it’s your lucky day. I’ve received instructions that you are free to go.’

I can hear the change in the air behind me as I leave the women’s cell. The exhalations. The murmurs. I can feel them watching my skirts whisk beyond the gate. I do not ask questions of the turnkey. I can only assume the sheriffs have come to the conclusion my sentence is indeed served.

‘You are blessed, Mistress.’ It is the little pickpocket, who has done nothing but ignore me all morning as she ate her gruel and asked the other women to whip her back gently, to get her flesh used to it. But I cannot even reply, for the turnkey is bustling me back outside. I am free to go!

I did not expect a gathering at the Tolbooth door, but there is one. No sign of my family, but instead there are half a dozen men and women there, who fall silent when I am let out. It is bright and I am so elated I think I might faint and it takes moments for my eyes to adjust to the light, so I try to steady myself and not scream or cry or kiss the ground. This goes on for a few minutes and I notice that I am being watched. At first I assume these folk are waiting to visit their kin. But as I pull my shawl over my rope-burn and think of a direction to walk in, a girl approaches me. She holds her hand out.

‘Are you the half-hanged one?’ she asks, staring at my neck. ‘You are, I recognize you from the gallows. Oh, Mistress Dickson, can I see it? I’ll give you a penny if you let me touch your neck.’

The news has flown around Edinburgh. Passed from the turnkeys to the water caddies, from the sheriffs to the landlady of the White Hart Inn, to her other patrons and the ale merchants. I back away from this girl. I have had too many people – parish officers and matrons and hangmen – come at me these past weeks and I have not been able to refuse any of them. But my movement only triggers the rest of the group to come forward, and I turn and hurry away, heading I do not know where, down the High Street, trying to close my ears against the cries.

‘Half-Hanged Maggie, did you see the Lord?’

‘Let me touch the wound for luck!’

‘Was my husband at the Pearly Gates? Did you see a handsome man with a terrible pox, although the pox might have cleared from him on the other side?’

‘Mistress Dickson, how did you do it? Is there a method?’

‘Are you a witch?’

‘I saw her hands in the noose!’

‘That hangman will never work again!’

I march as fast as I can, caring not about bumping into folk. In my haste I send a caddie flying, his barrel of well-water spilling over the street. I cry, ‘Sorry’ over my shoulder. I can’t keep up this chase for long.

I turn into a close and see the poky hole of a gin shop, its open door revealing a peek of its depths, a flickering yellow haze of old pipe smoke and bottle-gleam. I make straight for it. I slam the door shut behind me and find the bolt and pull it across, then put a chair in front of it for good measure.

There is only one person in there, it only just having opened for its day of grim trade: an elderly woman with a wizened face. She regards me in a considered way, as though wondering whether to call a constable, but with no apparent fear of me, then wipes her rheumy eyes.

I sit down at a spindly table, out of breath. Is this what is to become of me? Hounded? Am I like a human curiosity in a travelling fair of rarities? One came to Musselburgh once, and folk queued with pennies to see two men: one the height of a small child and one with no hands or feet. Joan was desperate to see it, but Da forbade us from going.

There’s a hammering at the door and I jump, and the woman and I lock eyes. She makes her way to the door faster than I would have thought, being of some considerable years, and shouts through the timber planks, ‘Away with all of you, we are closed.’

I wonder if the crowd will simply batter down the door, but things quieten and she nods, seeming satisfied, then turns to me.

‘You can have rest for a while in here, and let them get bored waiting and get on their way, but I do not hoard thieves or servants who are running from their masters. Are you either of these?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, what are you then?’

And that is a good question, to which I have no straight answer, for I could tell her what I once was, and what I was accused of.

But what I really am, I do not know.

I know what I wish to be, though, and that is free of this grief and this mark on my neck and of the name ‘Half-Hanged Maggie’, which is abhorrent to me. But I don’t say that.

Instead I say, ‘I am in need of a drink’, and the woman’s eyes, faded though they are, light up, as I have given her all the excuse she needs to pour two drops of gin into two grubby glasses. ‘I can’t pay you today, but I will pay you back,’ I go on, and she shrugs.

‘That’s what they all say, but you need a tot of medicine.’

Well, gin is not a medicine. Ma would not have gin in the house, and even Da avoided it. Whisky, yes. A glass of Spanish sherry after kirk on Sundays. Smuggled tea galore. Even rum. But gin is an unregulated liquor, not like whisky or rum, and anyone can set up their own shop and distil it; and it is cheap too, which means only the poorest of the poor drink it. Gin is nasty and potent and it will rot your guts. Gin is the road to hell.

Today, though, I am the poorest of the poor, and yesterday I avoided hell, and so I drink it.

We get through three glasses before Aunt Jenever – as that is what she says everyone calls her – pulls my story from me. It unravels, although somewhat back-to-front and with the looping repetition, in some parts, of a liquor-laced tongue. I tell her almost everything except the part about my pact with the hangman, for that is a dangerous secret I would not trust a stranger with.

‘You are a sorry soul,’ she says, over and over. ‘And the poor babe.’

I weep then, heaving and ugly, and feel I will never stop. The emptiness of it, and the shame of my bleeding in the carriage ride from Kelso, and the way my milk bloomed at my breasts, and how the men talked of Jacobites to distract themselves. And, finally, the guilt. Not the guilt that the law men put upon me, but my own guilt about failing to bear a healthy babe and failing to save her. And my own guilt is a monster that eats me.

‘I should have done more to try to save the babe,’ I tell her. ‘To try and stop the labour happening, or to revive her. I should have told Mrs Baxter.’

‘Babies succumb,’ she replies tightly. ‘We mothers know the grief. But she is in heaven now.’

‘She is in a jar,’ I say. ‘At the surgeon’s college. She does not even have a name. She was not even christened.’

‘Well, name her,’ Aunt Jenever says, ‘the pour nameless soul. You are her mother.’

I blink at that, for I had been desperate to name her, but was embarrassed at the thought. The baby had become such a thing , so dehumanized by all who were caught up in my own scandal – myself included – that I had held off naming her.

‘You will never mourn a babe properly if you don’t name her,’ Aunt Jenever says. ‘Trust me, I have tried. It helps. Even the tiniest ones.’

‘I will think of a name,’ I agree, for I had not even settled on one, but the thought of it makes me feel a little brighter, which I had not thought possible. ‘But I have other worries. I am a freak-show, and folk want to touch my rope-burn for pennies.’

‘Well, let them,’ she says. ‘Let folk touch you for pennies and ask you if you saw God, and give them the answers they need, for you are a sorry soul and they are sorry souls, and the world is a cruel place and surely you can give some hope to one another. Besides, you can save the pennies for a proper grave for the babe.’

Oh, I had not thought of letting people touch the rope-burn.

Aunt Jenever blinks once, twice, and watches me consider it.

‘I have a spare bed upstairs,’ she tells me, ‘and you can use it for a while if you like. I dare say you could pay the rent easy as anything if you charge folk to use you as a lucky charm. And I have a man that minds the door to make sure no one too rowdy gets in or things get out of hand. You will like him; he is decent, despite being rough around the edges. But what of your kin, the fisher people, will they not take you in?’

I do not wish to think of my kin at all. The few hours I spent with them, after my delivery from death, from the Sheep Heid Inn back to the High Court of Justiciary were plenty. They did not want me causing trouble by coming back to Fisherrow where, by now, I will be scandalous. Besides, I want to find Spencer – who had come to see me hang! – and the best chance I have is sticking around town to see if he reappears.

People with all manner of superstition and grief will soon start to come and find Half-Hanged Maggie when word goes out that I am living above Aunt Jenever’s Gin Shop.

One of them will be Dr McTavish.

‘There is a chance that certain gentlemen may come looking for me,’ I tell Aunt Jenever, who rolls her eyes. ‘It is nothing untoward,’ I go on. ‘One of them is my husband, Patrick Spencer, and I am most keen to speak to him, for there is a mystery about his disappearance that I would like him to answer for me. The second gentleman is a Dr McTavish, a physician and my hangman.’

At this she shudders and blesses herself.

‘He is not dangerous to strangers,’ I say, ‘but he might be a danger to me. I survived his noose, you see. I might need protection from him.’

‘My doorman will keep an eye out,’ she tells me. ‘He loathes the hangman, who has seen off more than one or two of his own pals. And my Cornelius is a burly sort and keeps trouble away, so folk can get on with the business of gin-drinking. I will warn him to look out for you. It will cost you, mind. He will want a tip. But you will have the means to pay.’

‘Is it like whoring?’ I ponder, thinking of the prospect of making myself into a half-hanged curiosity that folk can touch and ask questions about.

‘Heavens, no, it will be much better paid and you can keep your drawers on,’ Aunt Jenever replies. ‘Come, untie your shawl and let’s have a look at this bruise.’

She stands up unsteadily and leads me over to a large, grubby mirror. I am glad I’ve had three gins. I’ve not seen myself since the River Inn and I look how I feel. My face is dirty and my bonnet askew, my hair a grease-slick. My shawl is a grubby shade of grey. But worst of all is the bruise. The rope has made a clear, wide line all the way around my neck and the bruise spreads above and below, up to my chin and my ears.

I wail.

‘Shush, shush, it will subside,’ Aunt Jenever says. ‘But you should gird your loins and make the most of it, before it does.’

So that is what I do.

Aunt Jenever sets me up in the other bed in her living quarters, which are one flight of steps above her shop and consist of two rooms, one where she sleeps off the gin, and the other where she takes a tenant when she sees fit. She is not a poor woman, nor particularly rich, nor particularly generous, for she wants a shilling a week for the rent, but I do not think her a schemer or a liar. And I have come to be an expert in those.

She makes her living from selling Mother’s Ruin and has no shame in it. She is industrious in her trips to the fruit market for juniper berries and blackberries, and labours in the tiny workshop at the back of the shop that she uses as her distillery. And I have come to a point in my life when I have seen a lot of what the world is about and have found out that there are some people who will pretend to be good, but really they are not. Aunt Jenever makes no pretence.

So now I have my own bed in my own room, but little time to lie in it and ruminate, for I need to make my rent.