I tried to watch her without looking as if I was watching, wondering what he’d do to us if he knew what we did upstairs. Mr Casterwick came in to bring the newspapers and lift away Benham’s plate, smeared with kipper bones as fine as hair. I scarcely knew where to put my eyes, so kept them on Casterwick, thinking idle thoughts. How his wages would’ve been paid for by cane and that was where mine would come from too, if I ever got any.

He was still watching her. Taking narrow little bites of her bread and butter.

‘Oh, for God’s sake. Eat!’

When she jerked up in surprise, the egg tumbled to the floor and cracked, yolk spreading, like a slow breath. Spoon tinkling porcelain. We all turned to stare down at it. He rocked forward in his chair.

She took a small sipping breath, and I saw Casterwick slip out, as quietly as he’d come in.

Benham heaved out of his chair and wavered there a moment, like a man consulting a map, speared the dribbling yolk with his spoon. She saw his hand lifting towards her and recoiled. ‘It has been on the floor.’ The spoon jumped in his hand.

I wanted to jump too. Leap at him, yell, ‘All this over an egg?’ But I held my tongue, though the words strained against it. I kept my eyes down, on the tiles, where yolk was drying, and screwed my thumbs into my palms. The thought came screaming. Don’t.

He lifted the spoon again, cleared his throat. ‘We can wait all morning, Meg. Choice is yours.’

At that, she leaned forward. After she’d taken one quick bite, then another, and another, he stepped back, shuddering his chair away from the table and the spoon onto it. I felt the wood shake. She drew in a breath, which shook too. He gave a little nod. ‘I suppose . . .’ he said, looking around him almost in confusion ‘. . . I suppose . . . it’s high time I got on with my day.’

She twisted her napkin up to her lips, coughed into it. Then it was me she was shrinking from, just as she’d shrunk from him. Because I’d been witness to the whole terrible scene.

‘Does he hurt you?’

The idea of her under his thumb sat in my stomach like soured milk. The thought of her eating that mangled egg. Of him pushing away from the table as if she was the one who disgusted him.

The rain had come. Branches close and dark and specked with drizzle. She slipped off her shoes, took her hair out of its coils, saying she’d have some brandy, and as I unlatched the cabinet the thoughts whispering at me sounded very like Phibbah: Drinking brandy for breakfast? And all that hair hanging loose, like her idle hands. But I tamped them back, like tobacco into a pipe. She picked up the hairbrush, beckoned me over to the bed.