The room had an air of waiting for something to happen, while knowing it never would. I wanted to stop her nail-biting, and her chatter, so I asked, ‘What would you take if we could leave?’

‘What do you mean?’ she said, lowering her hand. ‘Leave? Here? What an idea!’

‘What if you could take only one thing?’

‘It would be hard to leave my books, certainly . . . but I would take . . . my portrait. La femme en rouge. No question. And the egg-chest. La! Two things, then! I am a cheat, I know.’ She smiled. ‘Maman would just have to roll herself up and consent to be stored inside Papa.’

I looked up at the woman in red. Her dress a stopped heart. Madame didn’t ask me what I would take, perhaps because nothing in that room belonged to me.

White doctors are more curse than cure and Fawkes was no exception. Useful for drumming up their trade, I suppose, but not for making anyone better. I told her the energy was draining out of her with her blood, that we needed to leave the room.

Leaves swung heavy as apples, and sunlight cast green shadows across the pond-water, where flies looped like black thread. But the light hurt her eyes, and she found it still too warm, and would not walk far, though she consented to sit in the parlour instead. I arranged her on the window-bench where she could look out, with her white lace shawl across her knees. She asked if I might fetch her the newspapers, usually left on the sideboard in the dining room after breakfast. When I brought them to her I instantly wished I’d told her they’d already been cleared. For there’d been a bout at Five Courts, a ‘blood-soaker’, and he was in there. Black fists, blacker grin.

‘Look.’ She pressed a finger to the sketch. ‘Laddie.’

‘I can see that.’

I drew away, folded myself at the far end of the bench. Looked out towards the garden, snaking away to the pond. But it had the opposite effect on her. It pulled a thread through her spine, and put a singing note through her voice. She turned the page, said perhaps she’d take a cordial, and some fruit, and did I want to see if Charles would set up the card table?

Until that moment, her melancholy had seemed to be a kind of rootless grief. Now I wondered if the source hadn’t been the very man whose image had been the first thing to pierce it.

What was it she’d said, the night of his lecture? Laddie Lightning had become his own man, and that was what she admired. Then she had spelled out her own misery on her walls: Become your own WOMAN!

Suspicion began to eat at me like rats on leather.

Perhaps she’d still be alive if I’d been able to stopper up that jealousy. But instead I let my doubts stick fast, like mud on a heel.