How can I describe it?

I was a knot, untangled. The weight of all my memories was gone.

Night came, to strip another day from whatever tally we had. We blew out the candles, turned over the pillows, and laid our heads together on them, for sleep.

We were happy, no matter what is said about it now, no matter that they’re saying it was me who broke her happiness, and broke her. As soon as I write that, as soon as I even think it, my hand trembles. I must stop here. I fear I’ll dig this nib through the paper, to keep from turning it on myself.

Chapter Twenty-Five

At a ladies’ gaming parlour she went to with Hep Elliot, she and I managed to find ourselves alone in the withdrawing room, behind one of the screens. I’d brought along her little travelling pot, which she called a bourdaloue. It was yellow as piss itself, but painted with gay dancing maids in blue bonnets to trick you that a lady might travel with one in case struck by a sudden craving for soup or blancmange wherever she might be. She had stretched herself out on the bench, her body pressed against the window, gazing out at the brick wall of the next-door building. I knelt and fitted myself to her, fingers to ankles, forehead to knees. She looked down and saw my intention, my fingers on her thighs, her skirts wagging like tails, then looked up at the door.

‘Do you do this with him?’

‘Mr Benham?’

‘Who else?’

I could not bear to think of it.

She looked down at me. ‘When would I? You are always with me, so you know he is not.’ She hesitated. ‘Besides . . . he does not want children.’

Good, I thought, though I’d never come across a man who didn’t want children, especially one as pleased with his own image as Benham was.

But the question nagged at me, drove me to seek out Pru in the scullery next wash-day, to ask what she knew. ‘Only bits I picked up here and there,’ she said. ‘Madame wasn’t considered first water when she came out. Pretty, yes. But French. Nothing she could do to change that. And too eccentric as well, I suppose. Came with too much gossip. Most people will say she was lucky to nab him.’ She swilled one of Benham’s cravats in the rice-water. ‘There was a time I didn’t know who to be sorrier for, out of the pair of them. I overheard them once, arguing. Her saying he was only wealthy on the surface, him saying that must make them a match since that was the only place she was pretty.’

The following week Madame told me part of the story herself. Her mother had said she was lucky to have an offer: eccentric Meg Delacroix, still on the shelf after four Seasons. Benham heard the rumours about her only after they were married, when it was too late. Divorce would have tainted him as well as her, which made it out of the question. He blamed her for that, too, as if he’d been the victim of some trick. The worst of it, she said, was how he’d played husband all this time, in public or where any of the servants might see. How he made her play wife. The appearance of marriage with none of its effects, save the roof over her head.