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Chapter Twenty-Seven

D r McTavish says I am to do the deed tomorrow evening, and he will be waiting. He lets me out of his apartment and I run down the stairs.

When I get out onto the street again, I could kiss the foul ground with relief, for I thought he might tie me to that bed and do all manner of horrors. Then I remember my dreadful task – the task that will free me from him, but will put Mrs Rose in her own hell.

I wander like this for an hour or more, my thoughts spinning too wildly to go back to Aunt Jenever’s. There are dark things that a person can be driven to. You never know, until you are faced with such choices. What price, my own survival? I suppose some folks who came to see me hang would not be surprised if a woman like me goes off down to Greyfriars the next day hiding a secret plot, as one might cover a baby in a creel.

I thought Dr McTavish might keep me in that chamber of delights. Fasten me by the wrists and have his wicked way. Probably strangle me afterwards too and enjoy it, in private this time. Human life is cheap. They die on street corners, in rags, an empty bottle rolling around beside them. They die of poxes and plagues and starvation and hangings. They die in childbirth. Or shortly thereafter. Whispers of the afterlife are sometimes the only hope we have.

Mrs Rose will be caught in a trap of her own making. Were it not for her selfish, self-serving act of theft, of taking everything I had, I would have been off to London, and I am quite certain that I would not have been left dangling on a rope.

But I do not want plots and wickedness. I don’t want to go back to the gin shop and face the queues of soul-searchers. I don’t even want London or riches, or any of that. I want home comforts and a roaring fire, and good stories and the feel of a warm blanket over me as I get into bed of a night. My feet ache and my neck still troubles me from time to time.

And I don’t know if this is a coincidence or if something is pulling me along the streets like a baited line, but as I am nudging my way through a crowded wynd, pinching my nose against the high stink, I hear a cry that rises like a gull above a tide.

‘Fresh fish!’

I follow the cry, for I am just by Fishmarket Close, and when I turn into the close there is a sight so familiar – of striped aprons and white caps and silvery fish – that I start to weep. Tears prickle at my eyes and flood down my cheeks, tears for lost families and lost fishermen and lost babies, and I stand – what a sight I must look! – and breathe in the tang of it and it feels like home.

By and by, the fishwives notice me standing there, for I am a sorry sight by now, and one shouts out, ‘It’s Maggie’, and they rush to me and I am embraced and held, and fussed over and murmured over.

And all the things I feared – like being shunned and called a baby-murderer, or worse, by my neighbours – well, they simply do not happen.

‘When are you coming back?’ asks one of the women by the name of Betty. ‘You always had fast hands and a good singing voice when we used to all sing together while we were collecting cockles.’

I have not sung for months. Joan was the singer really, in the choir, and I always thought myself a drone, for that was what she said I was. But I liked a sing-song; I don’t even know that I could sing again, for my voice is even huskier now. Mibbie Dr McTavish broke my singing voice.

‘I don’t think you will have me back in Fisherrow,’ I say.

There is a flurry of protest at that, and more stroking of my head and petting of my shoulders, and I feel entirely gathered into a press of striped bosoms.

‘You have had a terrible ordeal,’ says Betty, ‘and your ma misses you something shocking. Your sister too. She is quite at a loss without you.’

‘I am making something of myself here in Edinburgh,’ I reply. ‘I have a room above a shop.’ I do not say ‘gin shop’. I do not say there is a madman waiting for me to bring me his Mrs Rose, to play with until he bores of her.

‘But is Edinburgh home?’ asks Betty. ‘Does it feel like a place where you could live out the rest of your days?’

Well, of course it does not, for I know that if I stay in Edinburgh I will put Mrs Rose in a lair, and I will drink more and more gin and live out my days as Half-Hanged Maggie: half-woman, half-myth. And the thing with Dr McTavish, well, it will always be staring me in the face every time I walk past his well-appointed rooms. I will always look up and think I catch a glimpse in the boarded-up window of something awful.

I turn to Betty.

‘Let me come back with you today,’ I say suddenly. ‘If there’s room on the cart. I’ll squeeze in and come home and see everyone.’

There are shrieks of excitement at that, but I urge the fishwives not to make more of a fuss, for I do not want word leaking out and somehow getting back to Dr McTavish that I am running away.

The Fisherrow carts leave town at three of the clock. At five to three I go back. I have my belongings from Aunt Jenever’s, and she was unsurprised to see me flee. I told her I was going home, but if anyone should ask, then the story is that I have finally gone to London, to make my fortune there.

Dr McTavish will come looking for me, see, and I want to muddy the trail. I did not tell Aunt Jenever about him. I do not want her to try to talk me out of it, or get her into any of my own trouble.

By five past three I am back with the fishwives, tucked amongst them and hidden under my scarf. The cart rolls out of Fishmarket Close and off down the High Street. The women rub their feet and roll their shoulders and pat my arms, and tell me what a good choice I have made, coming home.

I think of Mrs Rose going about her business in Greyfriars, none the wiser to any of this. I think of Dr McTavish waiting for me to arrive tomorrow with her, waiting and waiting and growing more restless and urgent and furious, and finally realizing in the small hours that I am not going to come.

He will look for me. I know it. He will search the streets and quiz Aunt Jenever and eventually he will hear word that I fled with the fishwives.

I think of Patrick Spencer.

But for now, home is the safest place I can be.

It is the only place I want to be.