He scraped out a laugh.

‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘Aren’t writers more reliable for drugs than scribbles?’

He said how unexpected I was, like finding a guinea in mud, which he supposed he had, if one stopped to remember that the coins are themselves named after Guineamen. Then he laughed at his own wit, fumbling at his breeches, and said that, as my luck would have it, he had more than one thing that might tickle my fancy, back in his rooms.

I took my skinny earnings back to the coffee-house, tried to buy a drink. I was turned away. For being a woman, they said. But at a table in the corner, nose tucked into a newspaper and a cup, was a face I’d thought never to see again. Pomfrey. He saw me through the window, tapped the glass. When he came out, he remembered me straight away: ‘Langton’s girl! By the looks of it, that’s some tumble you’ve taken, since he left you.’ I said nothing. There was a long silence while he sized me up. But I was sizing him up, too. Wondering if I could bring myself to sink so low.

‘I think I have something useful for you,’ he said, at last. ‘Remember me mentioning the School-house? My contact there gives me a finder’s fee.’

I remembered something. If you’re sinking, and someone throws you a log, it can be a weight or a raft. But the quickest way to drown is fighting it.

I know what’s said about my time in that place, how it counts against me now, shows me as a savage character and unrepentant whore, as Jessop would have it. But the first thing to know about whoring is that it’s work. You do it same way you’d empty a chamber pot, head down, nose pinched. Many an English wife must get herself through the same activity in the same fashion.

‘Bright-eyed thing, aren’t you?’ Mrs Slap said. She squinted. ‘In the right light, you could play innocent.’

My stomach lurched. ‘But I’m not.’

She laughed. ‘All you need’s a white nightgown and a fresh razor. Though looking at you, you could just as easily go dark.’

‘Dark?’ I jerked my head up. She was giving me a choice. I didn’t yet know what.

She smiled. ‘You ever whipped anybody?’

Chapter Thirty-Four

You can’t ever get clean enough in a bawdy-house. It’s even worse in prison, where the simple act of lying down covers you in the kind of muck you’d find under a cow’s straw. But at least at the School-house I had my own bathwater and my own tin tub. And my own Martha to thump upstairs, carrying bathwater to the Scarlet Room, which was mine also. Or, at least, the one I slept in. Though I could see Martha’s brown eye rolling at the keyhole while I washed.

Mornings found me stretched in my little tub. Arms and legs hooked over the sides, and the swill of water warm as blood. But my heart was always somewhere behind me. Was she in her own bath? Between her sheets? Was it Pru who brought her chocolate up? Did she still see him? In my mind’s ear, I still heard her, screeching: Get out! Get out.