When I went back in, she’d cast her covers aside. Worrying about what lay in store. Fawkes swore by bleeding, dieting, hot baths and opium, to restore the balance. ‘Those are his articles of faith,’ she said. ‘Only the opium is pleasurable.’ I coaxed her with barley broth, teas, mashed carrot. Nursery food. And I poured out her doses. A little for her, a little for me. I washed her blood from the bowl. I cleaned her. I did it gladly. And never allowed myself to think of Phibbah, or of Miss-bella.

Melancholia. Black bile. The very thing that stains black skin, and that I’d scribed about, for Langton. Even her affliction is the same as mine, I thought.

It shrank the world to her bed, and blackened the windows. A great hand pressing her down: she felt it in her head, and her aching joints.

The first evening after Fawkes came, she wanted to sit near the window. The sky was just turning pink and she wanted to see it curling like a ribbon around the clouds. That night, this is what she wrote: Whenever I stand on the edge of a great height ‒ a bridge, a balcony ‒ I am swept by a sudden desire to leap. But melancholia is not the leap, it is the desire. The constant irrepressible agonizing urge.

Sad for no reason, Pru said, sniffing.

But it seemed to me she had more than one.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Two days later, Fawkes came again. He told me to warm some tumblers over the stove, and then he cupped blisters high on her back, between her shoulders. When all else failed, he brought in a jar that had LEECHES printed on it, holes punched into the lid. There were hundreds of the creatures inside, like little black tongues, blind as earthworms. I propped her against my chest while he fastened them one by one across her shoulders, and then we waited, him at the window with his hands clasped behind his back, her in one of the chairs, the fastenings of her bodice still loose, and her gown slipping off her shoulders. The leeches grew like soap bubbles, until one by one they fell away and we could carry her to bed.

The only good thing about it was that it drained her enough to sleep, curling and withering, like paper in a fire.

I am sorry to say that my own taste for laudanum grew then. It had started with single drops, but now built to a need that shook through my hands as soon as I took out the bottle to prepare her dose. Before it begins to eat your insides, opium is like a flame. It is all energy, and at the same time all rest. It pulls close all the meshwork of your own brain. Joys become raptures. Best of all, it drains the world away. I grew to need it as she did, the only thing that could soothe my cracked heart. Yet that is one of my most bitter regrets. For that evil substance made it impossible to keep my wits about me, and smudged all my remaining days with her.