At last, she set aside the magazine. ‘Mr Benham,’ she said. ‘I have been thinking.’

‘Oh?’

‘What if we sponsored something like the Bordeaux prize? Invited papers on the debate motion? Have those read out?’ Her words crept up to him.

He clanked down his fork. ‘Didn’t we just speak about this? My answer is no. Besides, the Bordeaux prize was a failure.’

‘I wish you would reconsider. There is still time for a change of heart.’ She’d become brave, I thought. This was not the same woman who’d eaten the egg in silence.

‘My heart is an ever-fixed mark. Have always said the institution can be reformed.’ He licked at a crumb pasted above his lip. ‘The trade is at an end, has been for decades. Since Frances was a babe.’ He sniggered at me. I kept my head down, pretended not to hear.

‘But the suffering of the thousands still enslaved is no less of an emergency than those who were transported in the ships.’

‘Careful, wife. You’ll make yourself sound like a Radical. Half the income that keeps your bottom cushioned on all that velvet comes from those same estates. Don’t forget that.’ He cocked a hand at his ear. ‘I don’t hear you volunteering to give it up.’ He leaned over, set down the plate, dipped a napkin in a glass of water and swiped at his forehead. ‘In any event, I am on the brink of sharing my opinions, which will put paid to that very suffering. Design a benevolent framework for the institution. When my essays are published, the vultures can pick them over. They can scoop out the contents of my skull then. Isn’t that what vultures do with skulls? Frances?’ He swivelled again in his chair. I hated the way he kept calling on me, the way he kept looking at me.

When I think of her, it’s with the kind of love that makes murder seem a lie. But I could have killed him.

I busied my hands on the hoop. Needles ticking. The drug made it as if my head was sleeping, even if the rest of me was not.

Searing hot in the kitchen as always. Smells of roasting. A rabbit carcass twirling on the spit, grease burning black into the stove. I took myself a plate down from the dresser. China for me, no more tin. I looked around to make sure Linux was watching. Their heads flickered, like candles in a breeze. The room seemed to curl and uncurl before my eyes. I hardly went down there in those days, so busy was I with Madame. But that evening, she’d said she wanted only brandy and laudanum mixed in a tumbler, and for me to give her a few moments’ peace. A few moments’ peace.

The kitchen had been the sum of all my choices.

I felt that same itch of worry I’d felt earlier, in the parlour. Did she draw away? Did she no longer want me? That thought had struck such terror in me that my hand shook, and before I knew it I’d pricked my finger.