‘You haven’t answered.’

A noise of frustration. She pressed the brush between her palms. ‘I am not sure how to answer you,’ she said. ‘He does not hurt me with his fists. He does not hurt me now.’

‘That could mean a hundred different things.’

‘It means he hurt me once upon a time . . .’

‘And?’

She dropped the brush on her lap. ‘Frannie. You have a choice. I will tell you. But telling you will hurt.’

She was steering me away, of course, and I was letting myself be steered, letting myself be pulled onto her lap while she whispered, ‘Will you let me brush your hair?’

My little smothered laugh swept away our conversation, like cobwebs. I touched the bristles, soft as her own hair. ‘That brush has met its match.’

Knowing a person’s story, and how they tell it, and where the lies are in it, is part of love. But I told myself there was no point knowing a thing you couldn’t change, though worry pinched at me all the same.

There was no use asking why she wouldn’t speak about it. I’d closed my own mind too, after all, to so many things. I gave myself over to her hands and the brush, letting my head go where she turned it, letting it tick from side to side. A tingle through my skull. I leaned into her, enjoying the tug-of-war between brush and scalp. I wanted to walk out of that house with her. If we were to leave, what could we take? The money was his. The dresses. The portmanteau. The drawers and all their contents. To all intents and purposes, so were we. The portrait and the egg-keeper were the only two things she owned.

She was in a writing mood afterwards. I remember this line: We go from birth to death. We go from love to marriage. Of each we may claim an equal understanding, which is to say none at all.

When Benham called me down to the library that afternoon, the piece of my mind I wanted to give him lay stuck in my throat. Hate can be as strong a draw as love, but it was love that drew me then, a strong rope pulling me back upstairs. I had to hold my own feet fast to the floor.

He was sipping his usual brew of gunpowder tea, toying with his snuff. The same fingers that had put the egg to her mouth. When I came in, he handed me a paper. The Case for Reform: Black River, Antigua.

‘Slavery,’ he said. Spat the word as if he couldn’t bear to keep it in his mouth. ‘Everybody’s scratching about for a solution. Either one thing or the next. Deciding which side will win. Forgetting Solomon’s wisdom. The best way to solve a conflict is to give both sides what they want.’

‘Didn’t Solomon offer each woman half an infant,’ I said, ‘knowing they each preferred it whole?’