During one of those weeks, Mr Casterwick came upon me, as he said at my trial: once in the kitchen, writing upon the table with a pen that wasn’t there; the second time, in the garden, searching for a baby in the hawthorn, saying that I’d taken an infant, and needed to return it.

That frightens me, even as I write it. Because I’ve no memory of it, but it sounds so much like something that could be true.

Laudanum stripped me of memory, as well as shame.

‘You hear such stories,’ she told me. ‘But all that is needed is self-control. According to Paracelsus, it is the dose that’s the poison.’

She ran her fingers over the lip of the vial. I sucked and sucked, and she did too. Liquid stuck to my lips. My feet glided over the carpet, the furniture thickened to dark shapes. The blighted world passed before my eyes in a sweet numbness. I had opium dreams. I dreamed a field, stretching as far away as the eye can see. I dreamed cane into it, in long, straight rows. The earth was wet and dark. The cane has had a good rain watering, I thought, but when I looked down I saw that the wetness was blood. Mud, blood.

When I looked up again, towards the horizon, Miss-bella was there. This is always how it happens. She looks from me to the small boy who kneels in the grass, his head bowed, gripped by calipers. Then I dream Langton. His voice: Note this, Frances. Write this down. The bones of the head are moulded to the brain. The size of the cranium, the quantity of the cerebrum. Then Miss-bella raises her hand, points a trembling finger, and shouts, You are a monster, you are a monster, you are a monster. And I look around. Who is she talking to? Who does she mean?

Then I realize that the person she is looking at, the person she is pointing at, is me.

The next morning I woke in a lather of sweat, drawing the laudanum vial towards me. The more I drank, the more I needed.

The air thickened to wool, soured my armpits. The day wore on. I fetched down a novel, lay beside her trying to read aloud. Laudanum blurred the pages, so I put my finger between them, tilted my head back. The woman in red stared as if she’d spring from the wall. Her skirts still stained. Become your own WOMAN! The more I watched, the whiter her face became. The paint washed together until it could have been anything, until it could have been ash and blood and bone.

I sat up, head whirling.

Madame was too restless to pay attention. A panic had come over her, and now it catapulted her into the cabinet for her dose. A few weeks before she’d fallen ill, we’d attended a Blacks’ Ball held in a public house near Fleet Street. More blacks there than I’d ever seen in any one place before, skin from tar to coffee to milk. Some so pale only their hair would tell you the truth. She had gone in her boy’s disguise, but now she was fretting that we could be found out. The time for worry would have been before we went, I told her. I hadn’t written a word about it in the notes I delivered to Benham. I felt a stab of guilt that I’d written anything, though it had been mostly lies and inventions. I did it because I had to give him something since he’d commanded it. Same reason as I’d answered his questions about Paradise.