Why do you want it written down? she asked.

My motives are none of her concern.

To quote Ovid: Exitus acta probat. The result will justify my deeds.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.

The heat – a slow syrup on my face, her voice dripping Shakespeare straight into my ears. The line should stop after love, she used to say. Love is not love. ‘Have you read Shakespeare before, Frances?’ Fingers hot on my wrists. Her laugh a shop-bell. Then her face shut, and she sat up, remembering. ‘Did he really send no reply?’

‘He didn’t.’

‘La! Well, never mind. I will simply write again. He wants to be persuaded. A bit of flattery. Bring him to the cause.’

‘Is it not more his cause than yours already?’

She shot me a look.

‘Mr Cambridge said you should go to the Devil and he didn’t want your sport.’ The words tumbled out on a single breath.

‘Did he?’ She smiled. ‘Well. That is to his credit.’

The following day, I came upon her scratching notes onto her walls. She bubbled like something boiling. All nerves and sweat. ‘I have to learn to fend for myself,’ she said, without turning her head. She laid her hands flat against the wall, her nails shivering like moons. Ink dripped in black beads from her forefinger. Nothing could be made out against the dark paint, so she took up the poker instead, and scored ash across the skirts of the woman in red. She stepped back and nodded. Become your own WOMAN! she’d written.

I lifted a napkin from her tray, dampened it, scrubbed at the wall until my arms ached. The wet ash clung stubborn as moss, and the entire wall looked as if there’d been a fire.

Her voice, from behind: ‘Are you never tired of cleaning up after me?’

Her words ate at me. Stitched a cruel embroidery on my brain. I set the napkin down on the bed. ‘There you are. Fend for yourself, then.’

She was two women. One confident, the other nervous. One bright, the other dark.

I’d seen from the start how her moods swung, but she’d seemed so happy for a time I’d almost forgotten it. Now they grew rickety and black again, hanging like a burned bridge. I continued to note her doses, as instructed, but the gap widened between the amount I wrote and the amount she took. The cabinet doors stayed open, and the bottles uncorked. The room flooded with that sweet slack smell.

‘You remember how it was when you got here,’ said Pru, when I went down to the kitchen to make up a tray. Watery tea and rusks. Pru cut a slice out of a loaf curved like a jaw, and made me take that also, with some marmalade, to see if she could be tempted. ‘She’ll keep to her bed for a few days, but then she’ll swing around.’

We were closed in her room (which was why none save Linux remarked on it, later, when we were locked in there again). Benham said Dr Fawkes must be fetched, and I heard them whispering: ‘. . . bleed away a few ounces . . . hysteric . . . increase the paregoric . . .’ I heard Fawkes saying it was an imbalance of the humours, an excess of the black bile. From Benham’s response, it seemed it wasn’t the first time. Benham said I must fetch a soup bowl and sit with her while she was bled.