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Chapter Thirty-One

Edinburgh October 1724

T he men hand me over at the door and, after taking a payment from Dr McTavish, they disappear.

I am still trussed. Dr McTavish pushes me into the bedchamber and throws me onto the bed. I bite my mouth to try not to weep.

‘You should never attempt to run away from me,’ he says. I can hear the boards creak as he stalks around the room. He lights candles and paces, and lights more candles. There is a difference in his voice; it is hoarser. He sounds as if he has not slept. ‘It has cost me a small fortune to have you brought back here. And that was money I could have spent on something nice for Mrs Rose.’

He is a madman.

I open my eyes and watch him. He paces and his eyes dart everywhere. His mouth moves from snarl to grimace.

‘I only want one thing of you. I have tried to approach Mrs Rose myself, and she simply will not accept my offers. And now you have made everything worse by showing me you are not to be trusted. What am I to do with you?’

He sits on the bed now, resting his weight on the thick bedspread, leaning over me. He puts his hand to my throat. ‘A thick neck,’ he murmurs, ‘so unattractive on a woman. And you smell of fish bait too. What man would ever want you, Mistress Dickson. You are disgusting.’

I weep, for fear and for the fact that I think he speaks the truth.

‘I would not even enjoy fucking you,’ he says, ‘but perhaps I will do it anyway.’ He pulls the chains down from the wall and secures them to the cuffs on my wrists. ‘You are tied now,’ he keeps saying. ‘I bet no man has done this to you before. Some women enjoy it. Mrs Rose will enjoy it, I am sure of it.’

‘Do not touch me, please,’ I beg him. ‘I will do as you ask. I will do whatever you need.’

But Dr McTavish ignores all of that and runs his hands from my throat to my breasts, and then down further. I cannot say what he does next, for I close my eyes, but I know that he satisfies himself looking at me like this.

He does not fuck me. Instead he pleasures himself whilst watching me whimper.

‘I would not fuck you. I would dirty myself,’ he whispers.

He leaves me for a while afterwards. It must be all the afternoon, for I grow hungrier and more distraught, and my wrists ache from the cuffs. I have no sense of time, for the windows are boarded. I hear him creak the floorboards in the next room and I smell a fire start in a grate, and I wonder if he will just leave me here to rot.

Eventually he opens the door again. He comes in with a silver tray piled with food. Bread and eggs and cheese and fruit, and a crystal glass of wine.

He takes off the cuffs and watches as I rub my wrists.

‘You will be free to go, once you have had some supper,’ he tells me. ‘Free to go anywhere. But you know what you must do before that, don’t you? And if you don’t do it, then I will track you down again. Now there is a good gown in the wardrobe, and your pick of bonnets and boots and all sorts of girlish things. Get dressed and go and fetch me my Mrs Rose.’

‘And what if she won’t come with me?’

‘She will come,’ he soothes. ‘She is weak-minded and opportunistic, and she will be desperate to see what she can get from you this time.’

‘And what if I can’t? I have friends. Family. They will come to my rescue if I need them.’

He laughs, tilting his head to the ceiling. His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat, and I think I would like to hang him myself.

‘You will do me the one single favour I ask, or you won’t see your friends or your family again,’ he replies.

The coffee house where Mrs Rose plies her trade is full of men who look like university scholars and physicians, all talking politics. They gather on long benches, but the proprietor nods me towards a stool at the side and sits me down, then sets a cup of cocoa and a dish of walnuts on the shelf beside me. I am not the only woman here. There are one or two others, rouged and cross-legged, dangling from their stools and looking unimpressed by me.

I have a kerchief about my neck, a white lace one, to cover my rope-mark and I am wearing what the whores do: gaudy skirts with a flash of petticoat underneath. But as I sit on the stool, I come to understand that I really am no great beauty, for the debating intellectuals remain more interested in their conversation than in the new arrival.

I never thought I was beautiful, but it smarts to see them ignore me. I finish my cocoa and my mouth waters for a gin, but there is no liquor in the place. None of the other women drink their cocoa, their little cups and saucers growing stone-cold on the bench. I pat my mouth with my fingers and feel quite awkward.

But all of this is swiftly overtaken when, in a sweep of skirts, Mrs Rose arrives and I remember the enormity of the awful task ahead.

She is much changed. Her face is drawn and painted in brighter hues to compensate. She looks as though she has had molars pulled – that is how sucked-in her cheeks have become. She wears strings of cheap glass beads across a white bosom. Her hair is piled too high and is set with too many red ribbons. Joan would say she has gone to rot .

Mrs Rose sits down, right next to me, not recognizing me at first, and is served not cocoa, but a tincture of reddish-brown liquid that I assume to be laudanum, and a small cup of coffee.

It takes her a few heartbeats to realize it is me, but when she does, I think she might fall off her stool.

‘Mistress Dickson, from the River Inn at Kelso,’ she breathes.

‘Do not try to leave,’ I warn her, ‘or I will follow you and make a fuss.’

She grips onto the shelf. Her blue eyes dance. ‘I had no choice but to run away that night,’ she says. ‘I knew you would come looking for me. Oh! I am such a fool. A silly goose. A selfish, silly mess of a girl . Here,’ she starts to fumble in her skirts and pulls out a drawstring purse, ‘I can pay all the money back. Some now – look, here is half a crown, and some English coins too. Are you set for London still? I can recommend lodgings near Covent Garden.’

She carries on in this fashion for minutes, tipping coins out of the purse and sniffing, as though she might burst into tears.

‘People are watching us,’ I warn her. ‘Stop making such a scene. Put the purse away. They will think me your procuress or somesuch.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ she replies, scrabbling the coins back into the purse. She places it on the shelf. ‘It is yours, though – all yours.’

There are many things I wish to say to her about the peril she left me in with her thieving, but now I find that I can’t. I suppose I built Mrs Rose up in my head to a bigger thing than she really is. But isn’t that often the way, with those people who cause us ill?

Instead of telling her these countless things, I take a deep breath. ‘I have had a most terrible ordeal,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I was nearly hanged at the Grassmarket Gallows.’

She had heard clearly, for she nods enthusiastically. ‘The story of your half-hanging is still the freshest news in town,’ she gossips. ‘I put two and two together that it was you – the Maggie Dickson I met at Kelso – when the gents in here were discussing the botch job the next day. They said a hanging must be done in a certain way, and you either bribed the hangman or he was drunk. So tell me what happened, for I am agog.’

She stares and awaits the tale. She says nothing of Dr McTavish. Her eyes are wide and her face blank. She has no idea that he’s a hangman. He has kept his secret well.

My God, the poor fool.

‘I did bribe the hangman,’ I say.

She edges closer. ‘And with what?’

‘I bribed him with sex,’ I lie.

She sits back, satisfied. ‘I am in admiration,’ she answers. ‘You must turn a marvellous trick, for you are quite plain to look at, but they say it takes all sorts and the quiet ones are the naughtiest.’

‘I am a magician in the sheets. But tell no one of my rope-trick,’ I whisper.

She is earnest now, leaning in again, looking at my belly. ‘So you were with child then, back in Kelso? Well, you said nothing to me.’

‘I did not know it then,’ I reply.

She pauses to take some laudanum, her eyes watering at the bitterness of it.

‘I have had two pregnancies,’ she says eventually. ‘Many years ago. I take a tonic now – a draught from the apothecary – but I had to have two aborted. I was so young, you see: fourteen the first time, and then the second one only a year later. I was frightened the childbirth might kill me. I went to a midwife. She had me wear a tight girdle and, when that did not work, she gave me a purgative.’

She slides her eyes at me. They are beginning to glitter, now that the laudanum is taking effect. The lanterns glow and the pipe smoke billows and the scene becomes her. Her skirts rustle and the strings of glass beads about her throat twinkle. She is far from gaudy and gaunt now. Mrs Rose is the sort of lady who lights up at night. Luminous, with her sad tales and her sorrows.

‘I am not a good woman, as you know, Mistress Dickson, but I was not dealt a good hand in life,’ she goes on. ‘I try to make the most of what I’ve got. I am pretty to look at, but spiky underneath. It’s survival. It’s why I call myself “Mrs Rose”. It’s not even my real name! My real name is Dorothy Donaldson – how dreary is that. Now I know a secret of yours, and you know a secret of mine.’

Oh, she is marvellous. I think, if I were a man or a sapphist, I would fall in love with Dorothy Donaldson, or Dorothy Rose, or whoever she is. But I am neither of these. So I admire her honesty and pity her melancholies, but I do not want to have her or possess her. She cannot be possessed.

When Dr McTavish realizes this woman is her own woman and cannot be possessed, he will snuff her out like a candle-stub.

‘What was the hanging like?’ she asks. ‘I was not there on Hanging Day, for I stay away from that side of town. If I was caught working up there, I’d be put in the tolbooth for whoring .’ She mouths the word ‘whoring’ as though it were a secret between the two of us, when in fact we are in the midst of the Greyfriars whores right now. ‘We night-blooms are safer down here. But what was it like? What did you think, when you were standing there on the gallows, my dear?’

I have answered this question day after day after day for pennies, and I lost my temper and my sensibilities when the fishwives started. But for Dorothy I give the real answer. She is a woman who will not see old bones, after all.

‘I thought I would shit my drawers in front of all Edinburgh town,’ I tell her.

She roars with laughter. I knew she would.

‘Show me your rope-mark,’ she says. ‘They say it is a belter.’

I loosen my kerchief and she puts her fingers to it. They are warm and gentle. I do not mind it at all.

‘Oh,’ she responds, ‘it is red like garnet. It will slim down soon to a silvery mark, I think. It will not look like a rope-burn for ever. One day it will look like a simple line. A jewel, my dear – a mourning necklace. For your dear departed babe. We all have them, you know, we women who have carried a babe in our womb that has not had the chance to live, or that we could not give the chance of life to. We all wear our own mourning necklaces. Some more apparent than others.’

I bite my lip. I had not thought of it like that. I had not thought my rope-burn was ever about anything but me. But it is not just about me. It is about the baby, and the loss of her. For the flutters and the kicks she gave me, all still now. She is long gone. But we are linked through my rope-mark. It is the only thing of hers I have left. They said I would swing for the crime, and I did. Now I wear the rope-mark like a mourning necklace.

Time passes well enough in an Edinburgh coffee house, but Dorothy is so lustrous, so vivid, and her counsel so wise that she deserves a starrier night than this – we both do – so I take her to a wine shop next door, where candles twinkle on shelves and the glasses are crystal, which I have come to prefer.

‘Let’s share a bottle of French wine,’ I say. ‘Like we did in the River Inn.’

We perch, looking like two silly whores, on two rickety chairs in the window, the wine bottle resting on an upturned barrel. If tuts and shakes-of-the-head were pennies, we would have become rich women that night. We talk of lost babies and lost lovers, and I get weepy about Spencer, and Dorothy gets weepy about so many of her old lovers that I could not count them on both of my hands.

‘My husband’s here, in this very town,’ I confess. ‘Patrick Spencer runs a perfume shop now. And I don’t know whether to go and see him or not.’

By this stage in the evening Dorothy has begged a pipe from someone and a pinch of tobacco from someone else, so she puffs and thinks. Then she puts the pipe down and puts her hand on my arm.

‘There is a restlessness about you, my dear,’ she tells me. ‘Rushing to marry Mr Spencer, then trying to run to London, then running from motherhood and now look at you, wandering the streets, not knowing what to be at. You are like a knotless thread. You can go and find your Spencer or you can leave him well alone, but he will likely not give you the answers you need. If he had wanted to find you, he would have found you by now.’

‘And where will I find my answers?’ I ask mournfully. My neck starts to ache again, and the words ‘knotless thread’ made me think of ropes and snakes. I am not good on wine.

‘Well, my dear, if I had the answers to all of life’s questions, I would be a wise woman indeed,’ she cries.

I hope I will find my answers, but I cannot think of any of them now, for we are still spending our evening together. In other circumstances I do believe Dorothy could be a friend to me, and we could have endless nights putting the world to rights, where I am as far away from snake-dreams as I have ever been.

But, alas, tick-tock. The time comes for me to lead her to Dr McTavish’s snake-nest.