The year after her wedding, her mother had died, leaving her truly alone.

Madame announced that she intended to form a committee to plan a debate. For many of those ladies, time trickled through their hands. They might as well make themselves feel pious and useful with it. Though pious is hardly ever useful. Nevertheless, I helped. I copied out the proposed motion into her letters. What is the purpose of variety in the species of humankind?

‘What do you think?’ she said.

I thought she was turning Langton’s and Benham’s very own question against them, and said the pair of them would find it instructive to hear sensible opinions on it, for a change.

The anti-slaving business lifted her spirits, and when she was happy so was I. Her friends pressed her to join the boycott. Even if she’d had any say at all in that household, which it seemed she didn’t, I couldn’t see what good it would do to refuse to buy sugar with all that sugar money. In any event, she was too fond of her sweetened chocolate to go that far.

It was a gasp of rebellion, pitting herself against him, and she knew it. She decided she’d plan first and ask him later. Put the cart before the horse, so to speak. In the meantime, the meetings would be social affairs. In that way, when she announced her intention, he’d be unable to refuse without it becoming a public spectacle. There was nothing he hated more than that.

One day, she was too low for hosting, or for gadding about in the park, and said we’d have to make do with the garden. It was very hot, coming towards the start of June. The flowers were out at Levenhall, and I decided to fetch a basket from the scullery, and asked Pru if I could borrow her pearl-handled dressmaker’s scissors to snip some for Madame’s mantelpiece. I found her unpicking silk rosettes from the hem of an evening gown. Poor Pru could have done with a day in the garden herself. Her eyes and cheeks were red and raw, no doubt stung by lye, and her shoulders drooped. ‘I’m fine, Fran,’ she said, when I asked how she was. ‘You know how it is, or perhaps you’ve forgot already. There’s enough work to kill an ox.’

In the kitchen, Linux had a goose splayed out on the table for plucking. I went carefully around her, wrapped some slices of bread and cheese and a pat of butter I’d brought from the larder. When I set the basket on the table, she stared hard at the scissors, which were peeking up over the rim. ‘What is it you think you want with those?’

I wanted nothing with them, I said, but Madame had asked me to snip some of the flowers in the garden so that I might fill her vase. My nerves were all over the place in those days, so I am sure my voice shook. I was lying about that one thing, which I fear now made everything I said sound like a lie. She looked at me askance. The truth was that I was full of some of the savage intents she had suspected of me all along. Lust, chief among them. The truth was that by then I was a threat to the master of the house. I wanted what he had. There were too many things I wanted. I can hardly confess them all. There isn’t paper enough, or time.