I was too tired to answer her.

I could pull you behind one of those very elms, I thought, hook my thumbs beneath your bodice . . . Oh. Inside, I could do what I wanted. Bend her over her writing desk and kiss her breasts to my heart’s ease. But outside I was no one, nothing but a maid.

I pictured myself looping a hurting fistful of hair around my hand. She took a step back.

Now I begin to worry that it was me she feared after all.

Later that afternoon, not knowing what else to do, I went into the garden in search of roses. The scissors were still nowhere to be found. I twisted with my fingers at the few blooms left on the bush. Petals fell away from me, like ash. I was bringing in those broken stems when Linux came behind me. As always, her mood was sewn into her lips. ‘It’s you I’m looking for,’ she said. ‘I’ve come from speaking with the mistress. She’s asked for Pru to take up her tray.’

‘What? Why?’

‘Do you truly believe you’re owed any explanations, girl? Occupy yourself downstairs for a change.’ She smirked, her smile slipping and clawing. I turned away from her, one foot already on the stair, but she reached out and held fast, her fingers tight around my wrist.

‘Down,’ she said.

My mind scrambled and scrambled and scrambled, but got nowhere.

She set me to work scrubbing pots with sand. A pile of them slumped in the basin, coated with grease. Soap spat up onto my sleeves when I plunged my hands in. It felt like a fall from grace. Pru came down, saying she was no longer needed upstairs, as Madame had decided to go out. Again? My heart pumped. I stilled my hands above the basin. Fingers withered and dripping, like leaves. I hated the way my own mood teetered, trying to keep pace with hers. I hurried to finish the pots, thinking only about how to get back upstairs. When Linux had left, I slipped away, to the staircase, the hallway, her room. This time, no one stopped me.

She was gone.

My hands fled away from me of their own accord. Mantel, bedcovers. The dying roses. Her drawers. Her cabinet. The kindness of laudanum. Though it did nothing to stem the awful sour terror rising through me, like a flood. I drank more and more. Then, for the first time since Benham had asked it of me, I became a spy.

They were in her egg-keeper. Of course. I felt a low scrabble of panic in my gut the moment I decided to open it. I put out my hands to grip the lid, tried to steady myself. My hands. How I’d hated all my life to watch them going about their work. I didn’t know how long before she’d be coming back. The woman in red watched from the wall, her eyes wide, in warning or in judgement. I opened the box. Lifted out her black brooch. Beside it lay a gold ring, what they called a signet. A man’s ring. Then a lock of grey hair tied in a black ribbon; a letter – to Papa – from Marguerite Delacroix, aged 7; a single white pearl, lost as a tooth. I lifted them all out. Even the simplest thing was all confusion in those days, my mind and my hands gone slow, my own face a puzzle in the glass. Therefore, when I first saw the scraps of white, I thought, Here are her father’s eggshells. Smashed. Peck-peck-peck.