Having lost you once already, I did not want to lose you a second time. The memory of how Roblet had reacted when I’d told him about his crossing, all those years ago on the ship, still burned inside me. I resolved to be gentle with Charles, not to push him away with what I knew by foisting it upon him, but to lead him gently to the knowledge I wanted to share. This I did by telling him stories when he woke at night, consumed by his habitual horrors. He loved my stories. Among the many nicknames he devised for me—his Black Venus, his black swan, his giantess, his grande taciturne—he sometimes called me his Scheherazade. He said I was the most gifted storyteller he’d ever known, and that had I been born a man or an heiress I would have made a fine writer. I wasn’t interested in books I couldn’t read. I was secretive and prized discretion; for me writing was a kind of illness, and writers contemptible and untrustworthy, for they did not know how to keep their stories to themselves.