Page 25

Chapter Twenty-Five

T he best way to attract attention is to go on a long walk through town, neck exposed. Aunt Jenever helps me dress, my old shawl soaking in a barrel of soap and water, for I am not to wear that now. Instead I wear one of the eye-catching gowns she used to wear when she was younger. It is her brightest one, in a murky shade of yellow, and she cuts a new neckline into it, so there will be no mistaking the bruise, which clashes horrifically with the dress. She gives me a small, fine shawl in a similar yellow hue and says I am to wear it as loose as I can.

‘I look a sight,’ I cry, when she shows me my reflection.

‘The crowds will certainly part for you,’ she agrees. ‘Someone must tail you, for we do not want you coming to harm. Cornelius will be a few steps behind.’

I agree, relieved to have a chaperone as hefty as Cornelius, who is as bulky as I had hoped, but bows when he meets me, most respectfully. I step out of the shop into the shock of the High Street and make my way up towards Edinburgh Castle.

‘My God, what happened to her?’ a passing caddie cries to the pal he is walking with. ‘Have you been beaten?’

I shake my head, though that smarts when my neck moves, and walk on. But the other caddie knows.

‘It’s the fishwife,’ he says, ‘the woman they couldn’t hang. We saw her likeness in the Courant .’

The pair stop and tip their caps and give low whistles. I stand for a minute or so and let them do this, holding my shawl loose so they can take a good look at me, then continue walking. More men stare. Women stare. Pedlars and children, and mothers with babes-in-arms. At the bottom of Castlehill someone makes their first attempt to touch me. It is a pretty girl in a loose dress, who has the rouge of a whore about her high cheekbones. I step back and grip my shawl close.

‘Let me have a look at it, hen,’ she pleads. ‘There’s chaps who’ve tried to do that to me. How sore is it?’

‘It aches like nothing else,’ I reply.

She bites her lip and stares. She is fragile about the face and neck. I imagine her being strangled by a nasty sort and wonder at the horror of the world.

‘What waits for us, on the other side?’ she asks. ‘You must have seen a glimpse of it?’

‘I saw something of it,’ I tell her. ‘But I do not talk of it in the street, for free.’

And this is how a line is formed, of stragglers and misfits and folk who are grieving a loved one, and folk with a spare penny in their pocket and not much else to do. They follow me, a dozen or more by the end of my saunter, back down to Aunt Jenever’s Gin Shop, and I am glad to take a seat in a corner and see folk one by one. They queue mildly, without pushing and shoving, and await the answers to the questions of life and death.

There was a mystic that used to knock at the doors in Fisherrow, and some would take her in. Others, like us, would not. For my ma is Presbyterian, all the way from her striped apron to her Sunday sherry. Ma said the mystic was a confidence trickster, and Da said she danced with the Devil. The fishwives who saw her muttered of her claims in hushed, awed tones: ‘She said my old ma was looking down on me’, ‘She said I will find a husband if I go to the Mussel Inn next Tuesday and wear green.’

I find I am somewhere in between. Somewhere in between the Presbyterian and the confidence trickster, which, given my roots, makes sense.

I say that the world next to death, next to God, is a dark void and there is neither fear nor anger there, nor regret of things said or unsaid. It is a great peace. Folk like to hear that. It lights up their faces. I admit that I have not seen their dead kin, but I say that I feel, with all my heart , they are with the Lord now. I suppose that is the trickster in me, for they look at me with a bit of awe and consider me delivered from death, which gives great importance to my words.

I do not talk of the snake, for he is my particular nightmare, and mine alone.

I do not tell them of my deal with Dr McTavish, or that I pissed myself on the gallows in fear under my best dress. Or that the hangman loosened my bindings and I gripped onto the noose, clinging on for dear life, until everything went black.

I do not tell them that I think I searched for my own babe and did not find her there, in the beyond, and that terrifies me.

I don’t need to go out wandering again.

Over the next week or so it even gets into the Courant that Half-Hanged Maggie takes an audience at Aunt Jenever’s Gin Shop on weekday mornings: a penny for a five-minute private sitting. ‘“But do not be tempted to stay and drink the gin, for this craze of taking these cheap medicinal waters is leading to a generation of drunkards”,’ cries Aunt Jenever, reading out the article, before slapping the news-sheet down on the table.

But she is pleased, I can tell, for the woman I first encountered with a greyish visage and sombre eyes now has a lightness about her, now that she has a new project to run. And run me she does. The pennies pour in, and she takes her rent and sends me to a dressmaker in the Luckenbooths for nice gowns – ‘Nothing gaudy, you are not a trollop’ – then to the milliner for a decent bonnet, and so on.

‘You look quite respectable,’ Aunt Jenever tells me, as I come downstairs one morning, ready for my customers. ‘You must feel back to your old self again?’

‘I will never be back to my old self again,’ I say. The rope-burn has left a weal, calmer now and more like the lash of a whip. Cornelius picks up the Courant . I do not think he can read, but he muses over it for a while, looking at the sketches, before putting it down.

‘I suppose you are branded, of sorts, aren’t you, Mistress Dickson?’ he says. ‘Like what they do to some of the criminals – vagrants and the like – who don’t have the funds to pay fines. They brand them with irons on the cheek and banish them out of town, so they can’t get back in at the turnpikes. Happened to a pal of mine, not seen him since.’

I put my hand to my cheek in horror.

‘Now, now, Cornelius,’ murmurs Aunt Jenever. ‘Maggie’s situation is nothing like that.’

But Cornelius is right. My situation is exactly like that. Only worse, for I am forced by circumstance to live a life that Ma and Da – petty criminals though they are – would look down on. Letting strangers touch my neck. Telling them half-stories to please them.

I think of my pile of coins that grows slowly. My piles of coins always seem to grow slowly and shrink again, and never quite come to anything much.

I think of London. The city paved with gold and bodice-makers’ apprentices and cheap theatre seats.

Mibbie I should try to get there again. I could be anonymous there.

After my morning’s customers have been served with tales of the afterlife and peeks at my neck, I slip up the close, hiding under a large shawl, for I want a bit of solitude and a walk. The stalls and shops of Edinburgh never cease to be a wonder to me, but I am not tempted to splash my pennies, despite the wares. They have lost their gloss. Painted pots and fur shawls and silk gloves sit side by side with stands selling pies and live chickens and blood sausage. The air is eye-watering from chimney-smoke and old piss, and worse things, and everyone all in a rush to be somewhere. I pull my shawl further up my face, covering my mouth and nose, and breathe the scent of soap-soaked wool instead of the reek from the street. Perhaps some rosewater might help. I look for a shop that might sell it. I finally chance upon one, seeing bottles stacked in a window. But just as I am about to go in the door, the lettering above it catches me.

I am not a learned woman. I had to get a scribe to write a message to my own family. But I have grasped the meanings of some letters over the years, as we all must do, to get by. And there are four words etched above the shop door, four words I recognize, for I have seen all of them written down in one form or another, in what seems another world entirely.

Patrick Spencer’s Perfume Emporium.

I am dithering about whether to go in or whether to flee back to Aunt Jenever when someone grabs my arm and pulls me towards the wall. I have no good vision to the side of me, for my shawl is up about my head, and I have to fight to see who has grabbed me. I think it will be Spencer of course, as I am right outside what seems to be his new shop.

But it is not my husband.

It is Dr McTavish.