Linux folded her arms and tried to bar my way, but I held my ground and asked, did she want to keep Madame waiting?

It would be me keeping Madame waiting, she replied, unless I handed those scissors over. Her hands were cloaked with blood and feathers. But then Benham’s bell rang, and she had to answer it herself, with Pru busy in the laundry. She cast me a hard look as she went, but said no more about the scissors.

The garden was hemmed in by high walls. The pond lay at the end, and the gate that led to the mews. The sun was high. Light spilled like lamp oil over the new grass, and made the air hazy. I set the blanket out under the ash tree and laid the food atop a piece of oilskin. She arranged herself under the tree, opened her book – a small volume of poetry – and read aloud. Her voice drifted like a bee between the flowers. The scissors shook in my hand as I clicked at the roses. I decided to thread some of them through her fringe, and so came behind her with the scissors still in my hand. She gave a start, and looked up towards the house, nervous. Her hair was damp and had started to curl and I had to smooth it out between my fingers. By the time I’d finished, several of the petals lay around us, smashed into the blanket by my knees, and the smell rose heavy into the air.

She drummed her fingers on the book, sang some tune she was always singing. ‘It’s called Chanson pour Marguerite,’ she would say. ‘One of my papa’s.’ It was the most drear thing you ever heard, the same repeating, whining notes, but she loved it the way a mother loves an ugly child.

A lather of fear came upon me.

There’s the same lather of fear upon me now. Not just the terror of any woman in my situation. It’s the fear of the teeming brain. That I might cease to be before I can finish setting it down. I find myself scribbling furiously. As if I must finish it, or look up and discover that none of it happened at all. While I write it, I can still believe it did.

I steadied my fingers, kept them brushing through her hair. Before I knew it, I blurted: ‘Is this love, between us?’

She tipped her head back into the silence. ‘Oh, there are many ways to be mad,’ she said. ‘Love’s the surest one.’

It was so close to my own fears, it made my heart thud.

A thud came from behind us as well. A sudden bang that wrenched my head up. I looked towards the house. A figure in one of the upstairs windows. Linux. Black as a moth, her mouth twisting. She had slapped the window, and stood gurning down at us. Even from so far away I could see her eyes, and the scars that leaped across her cheek and her pale palm smeared across the glass. She shook her head, drew her shoulders back, and moved away down the passage. Madame jerked the basket towards her, shoving in book and food and blanket. Cramming everything atop the flowers. ‘We must go in,’ she said. She blinked around at the garden as if she’d never seen it before.