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Chapter Thirty-Four

I might have shown a bit of bravado with Spencer, but when I stand before the imposing doors of the Incorporation of Barbers and Surgeons on the southern edge of Edinburgh, that bravery slides away.

There is no bell or door-knocker of any sort, so I push the door open and walk into a high-ceilinged hall that smells of pungent medicines and ointments. A man in a bottle-green coat is standing by a bookshelf, inspecting its contents, but comes to a standstill when he sees me.

‘Do you have an appointment?’ He looks me up and down, then up and down again, as if not quite believing what he sees. I don’t know what he disbelieves – the fact that I am shabbily dressed, or evidently poor, or a woman, or carrying a huge parcel – but, in any case, I put the box on the floor.

‘I have no need for an appointment, for I shall not be taking up much of anyone’s precious time,’ I say. ‘I have come for something of mine, sir, that I believe has been kept here for a while.’

He frowns so deeply that I fear his face might stay like that, if the wind were to change.

‘Something of yours ? This is a library and museum, and a medical place. Perchance have you got it confused with another building? Might you have thought us a shop, or a workhouse?’

I shake my head. ‘This is the place where the surgeons do their dissections, is it not, sir? Well, a few weeks back the surgeons took something of mine: my babe, sir, after it had died. They performed a post-mortem on it and now I should like to have my poor babe back.’

‘An infant post-mortem,’ he says, still frowning and with no hint of sympathy. ‘And what was wrong with the infant? Was it defective or conjoined, or somesuch?’

‘She was born too early and passed not long after her birth,’ I reply. ‘And I was accused of concealment and hanged, but survived the hanging, and I am here to claim my child. In fact I have heard that after my hanging, great efforts had to be made to stop your lot from bringing my own corpse here, into this very building, to endure God knows what indignities.’

‘You are the half-dead woman!’ he cries, his eyebrows shooting up, and opening his mouth to display a row of good white teeth, so perfect that I wonder for a moment if they are his own or if they have been pulled from one of his cadavers and glued onto his gums.

‘I am not half-dead, sir, I am very much alive,’ I assure the horrible man.

‘My colleagues should like to talk to you,’ he says. ‘Very much indeed, for there was much excitement at the fact you survived.’

‘I am not having any of them touch my neck or ask me of God,’ I answer.

He shakes his head, most vigorously. ‘None of that, but more so the technique by which you escaped strangulation. We pondered over that and concluded that perhaps you had a breathing technique, or a way of easing your fingers beneath the noose? You quite confounded the sheriffs. I hear they are changing the wording of the death-sentence altogether, so that now it reads, You will be hanged by the neck until dead !’

‘I have no recollection of my hanging,’ I lie, ‘so I am afeared I would be of no interest to your colleagues.’

He looks crestfallen at that. ‘Perhaps an error by the hangman,’ he comments.

‘That is your guess, not mine,’ I reply. ‘I am only here to collect my own flesh and blood, which I fear is on one of your shelves.’

He considers the request for a moment or two.

‘You see, Mistress – Dickson, isn’t it? – everything in the collection is recorded, and so I would have to officially release it and might need permissions from my supervisors too. The infant cadaver is our property now. We use specimens like that for teaching purposes.’

The man is awful. The ointment-stink and the waft of warm air that seeps through the building make me feel I might vomit, and I put my face in my hands. It has all been too much. Really it has. To have come this far and not get my Susanna. Mibbie I should have brought Spencer with me. My neck starts to ache again.

‘Oh, well,’ I say, more to myself than to this man, ‘at least I tried my very best.’ There is a chair by the bookshelf and I sit down on it, for if I don’t, I am sure I might collapse.

He watches me all through this, folding his arms across his waistcoat. I look up at him.

‘I shall tell you something, sir,’ I say. ‘I did not spend long in the world beyond ours. I can’t tell you what heaven looks like, for I do not think I truly got there, but I knew, when I was preparing to meet God on that gallows, that I did not have any fears that I had sinned against anyone. They said concealing a pregnancy is a sin, but I held that babe in my arms and loved her. In fact the infant cadaver you speak of is called Susanna.’

He swallows.

‘Mibbie my Susanna will give you and your scholars lots of teaching. But it is truly something to go to the Lord with a clear conscience, and if you do not give me back my Susanna – if you do not let a mother and her daughter be together – let us both be on your conscience until the day of your death, sir. And that is the price you will pay for such teaching.’

He opens his mouth and shuts it again. He hovers and his fingers flit about the bookcase for a moment or two longer, then he nods his head, tells me to wait, turns on his heel and makes his way through another set of doors.

It is a long trudge from the south side of the city back up to the High Street, especially carrying half a dozen bottles of perfume, a heavy bag of coin and Susanna.

The anatomist gent took a while over the task, mibbie even an hour, but eventually came back through the doors with a wooden box.

‘Is she still in a jar?’ I asked, feeling all of a sudden squeamish and horrified.

‘Your Susanna is in a shroud and a small sealed casket now,’ he said. ‘I have placed her there myself. And she looks perfect. Perfectly at peace. Have no troubling thoughts about her at all.’

I liked the man after that. Mibbie he had a babe of his own. He handed her over to me with such gentle respect, I think that he might. It is astonishing what a bit of persuasion can do.

It is a strange feeling to have Susanna back. Like a weight has been lifted, even though the load of carrying her is heavy. Like I have saved her, yet failed her. I talk to her all the way up the road of course, the tears streaming down my face, and folk staring at me as I pass.

I thank her for waiting so patiently for her mama, but say that I had matters to attend to. I tell her what a good babe she has been, and what sights she must have seen in that anatomy museum; and all about what I have seen, and that the first thing I did – in that half-world between life and death – was to search for her. I tried to find you, Susanna, I knew you were there somewhere.

And other things, like how sorry I was. Sorry she had been born too soon and had slipped from me, and sorry she could not get to know Joan and Ma. Sorry we did not fetch the Baxters to help us. Sorry I had been so stupid as to try to keep her a secret. At some point the kerchief comes loose from my neck and folk stare at my rope-bruise, which is not much of a bruise any more, but more of a mark; but they do not cry ‘Half-Hanged Maggie’ at me, so mibbie it is not so apparent now, how I came to be marked as such.

It is a long trudge from the anatomists’ place to Aunt Jenever’s, heavy with tears and sorrow and relief, and I feel a passing of sorts as I do it, from Half-Hanged Maggie – the person I was for a while – to just plain Maggie; but no longer the girl I once was. Now I am a bereaved mother, finally allowed to grieve.

Can you believe this? When I get back to Aunt Jenever’s Gin Shop, which must be a full three hours after I left this morning, Dorothy and Cornelius are still sitting together at the same table, in rapt conversation. Cornelius is looking at Dorothy as though she is the only woman in the world, and she is flirting like mad with him. But it is not the silly-goose flirting I have come to expect from her, all fluttering eyelashes and tossing of curls, but more of an open sort of a way with him. She wears no rouge, and the morning sunlight streams though the window and makes a play on her skin, showing up her shadows and her flaws, but she looks like she could not care less, a smile on her lips and her eyes flashing with life.

My goodness, I think, they are falling in love.

‘She is back!’ cries Dorothy, putting her hands out to me, and I sit down beside them like a little gooseberry, taking care to put my precious parcels on the next table, where I can have them in plain sight. She puts her arm around me. ‘Where on earth have you got to all morning? We were just saying we are peckish for a spot of late lunch, and Cornelius here knows a place that does all different sorts of game pies.’

‘Pigeon, rabbit, hare – you name it, Mistress Dickson,’ he says. ‘Down by the White Hart Inn. And all the condiments you could imagine too.’

Dorothy looks brightly at me. ‘Fancy it, my dear? We could share a pigeon pie.’

‘You two go, but not me,’ I reply. I have no wish to go to the White Hart Inn, for that is the place near the gallows. ‘I must get back home to Fisherrow, for they’ll have no idea what has happened to me.’

Dorothy looks solemn now. ‘My dear Maggie, is this to be goodbye?’

‘I think so,’ I tell her. ‘I cannot see myself returning here, for all my family are by the Forth and that is where I belong.’ I suddenly want to talk to her about Mr Munroe, the harbourmaster, and that I felt something for him, an affection towards him that I haven’t felt towards a man for a while. Dorothy would understand and would tell me what to do, how to behave with him. But I can’t say anything like that in front of Cornelius, and anyway Mr Munroe might not even wish to see me again. Not after I left him in the lurch like that – upped and off on my first day working for him.

‘But you must return for visits, and we can take a night out together and drink a bottle of wine, can’t we?’ she pleads.

‘Indeed we shall,’ I say. But I know, in my heart, I will not return. And that is nothing to do with Dorothy, for she is a most amusing and entertaining woman really. But I am not at home in Edinburgh, the town that tried to hang me.

‘I shall find a boy with a cart,’ says Cornelius, ‘whilst you say goodbye to Aunt Jenever.’

The woman herself is just emerging. Ready to fill her customers with gin and make their troubles disappear for a few hours. She comes creaking down the stairs, her skirts sighing with age.

‘The very woman, for I have something you might want to buy from me, at a very good price,’ I say, reaching for the perfume box. ‘Patrick Spencer sells these bottles in his perfume emporium up the street, and terribly expensive they are too. But I have obtained a few and I am sure you can do something with them.’

Aunt Jenever picks up a bottle of the perfume and unstoppers it and dabs some on. The scent of musk and spice rises from her wrist.

‘Oh,’ breathes Dorothy, ‘that is magnificent.’

‘Can you take them?’ I ask Aunt Jenever.

She sniffs her wrist and nods her head.

‘It is mighty strong, though. I might need to water it down – what say you, Cornelius? I’m sure I have something in my gin shop we could dilute it with. We’d have twice the bottles then, would we not? And make much more coin!’

We agree a nice price, and it is not long before my cart is waiting, with an impatient boy and an impatient horse, and I am saying my goodbyes to Aunt Jenever.

She comes outside with me and fastens a threadbare shawl round me.

‘You want to look poor,’ she says. ‘So that no one guesses at the fortune you carry. You have quite cleaned me out, my dear, but I dare say it was a good investment. I will make a tidy bit from that perfume, and I could do with it too, for what is to come.’ She grows solemn. ‘Now I am nobody’s fool, but I don’t think I will see you again. I’m not in my first flush of youth and winter is coming, and the Edinburgh winters are wicked. I might need a nurse, and medicines. I nearly succumbed to the past winter, and I do not fancy my chances with this one.’

‘Oh, don’t talk of such things,’ I plead.

‘Age makes us face up to such matters,’ she replies. ‘One day it will make you face up to them too, but that day will be a long time coming. You are not just a survivor, Maggie Dickson – you are reinventing yourself. I see it in the way you carry yourself with confidence. So when you go back to Fisherrow, do not let them dwell on your past. Make them see that you have a bright and shining future.’

She watches as I clamber onto the cart, and the wisps of her hair float in a breeze that sweeps up the street, bringing a few golden leaves with it, and her hair dances around her face.

That is the way I will look back and remember Aunt Jenever, when the snow falls in a few months’ time, and the windows ice up and the winter coughs start.

But for now, forward! The cart leaps into life.

My money is fastened tight under my skirts where no one can reach it.

I have travelled too far in this world, and met too many of its inhabitants, to risk letting it out of my sight.