I felt again that same pricking of fear, the cold wash of terror, which I couldn’t quite explain.

EXAMINATION OF EUSTACIA LINUX BY MR JESSOP, continued

A. Some weeks before the prisoner was turned out, there was the incident with the scissors.

Q. What incident?

A. There was a pair of dressmaker’s scissors, kept in the scullery. I found the prisoner attempting to take them outside, hidden in a basket. I challenged her, and she said she’d been asked to fetch them for Madame. When I questioned the mistress later, I discovered that to have been a lie. That same afternoon, I’d seen the prisoner in the garden, holding the scissors very near to Madame Benham’s neck. It appeared to me that she was threatening her with them. But when I asked the mistress about that, she said she had not been threatened. I believe by that time she was afraid of the prisoner and did not want to speak of it for that reason. The prisoner had some hold over her by then. And the scissors were not seen again after that afternoon.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Now I come to Olaudah Cambridge. And if anyone has questions to answer, it is him. Though there’ll be no way of getting answers, seeing as Olaudah Cambridge has not been seen since the night of her soirée.

This I know for certain. If Madame hadn’t seen him again, she’d still be alive. And she wouldn’t have seen him again if we hadn’t gone to the Cambridge lecture.

She wanted to go. It was her idea. The anti-slavery cause was all her excitement, then, and she’d read about the forthcoming speech in the Morning Chronicle, and then talked about nothing else for two whole days. Her little Laddie, all grown up. In the carriage, she twisted and turned and her eyes darted with excitement. She drew the window-shades, though I wanted to lift them and look out at the ash-dark streets, the domes and spires. Feel that I was a small part of it, at last. Maybe not the apple in the bowl, but one of the grapes.

The hall was near Bloomsbury Square, long and wide, panelled in dark, gleaming wood. They crowded the room, some of the women with arms linked, the men talking only with each other. All of them dressed in brown or grey. Anti-slavery people, mainly. Upholstered chairs lined an aisle as neat as a hair parting. It was dim in spite of the sconces flocking the papered walls.

Laddie walked in with the snap of a sail in high wind, and they took their seats. He wore a black jacket, shiny at the elbows, and, when he lifted his hands, he flashed crooked fingers and mashed knuckles.

He brought one hand down on the lectern, kept the other raised, cast his head slowly around. You couldn’t help but stare back. He had the body of a prime buck, but the face of a man who’d rather be dead than owned.