I don’t want to say it, because I am terrified it might be true. I know that memories hide sometimes for the simple reason that we could not bear their weight. That sometimes it’s mercy that unwinds the clock.

When night comes now, it’s black as a rotted tooth, and I dream her into it. I hear her voice: Death is the only thing that scares me now. I see Benham shouting, and hear myself shouting too. Though that part isn’t a dream, but shreds of memory, torn from a black cloth.

But, in time, thoughts of what I’d done to Henry faded. I settled to my work. Five months I stayed. I got used to being with the other girls when the house was empty, playing at Loo and cribbage in the corridors, leaning against the walls, or sitting on the velvet settees in the parlour before it filled, watching the fire. Small threads of happiness. Come morning that whole corridor was a dawn chorus. Girls calling down for their ewers of vinegar and their gin. Seven of them, all waiting for Martha. I had a sheaf of paper I’d bought myself at Wickstead’s, though all I did was stare at it, spent so long thinking what to write I never wrote anything. Eating breakfast with the others, from the same table where someone had been served up for the customers’ dinner the night before. It could feel almost like a little family, if you ignored the Berkley horse in the attic, the planks nailed together with leather straps, and the human skeleton in one of the kitchen cupboards that had been bought from resurrectionists.

But that happier part of me strayed back to knit itself to the broken part. Like a cracked but still-living bone. Madame was a door that wouldn’t stay closed; I thought of her so often that when one of the other girls said the name ‘Benham’ one morning, pointing at a newspaper cartoon, I thought for a moment it was I who’d said it, and slung my hand up to my mouth. But it turned out Benham had written a ‘biographical sketch of his friend, John Langton’, which made the pair of them sound as saintly as chicks just hatched. That made me laugh, and so did the word ‘friend’. Then I looked closer and saw the announcement. Langton was dead. The news scrubbed my mind clean, like windows flung wide to let in air. Everything went black. I had to steady myself against the table before I could read on. In spite of their public differences, the celebrated natural philosopher and diarist George Benham would deliver the eulogy. When I read that aloud, the girl laughed too. ‘Oh, I know him,’ she said.

‘Langton?’

‘No, the other one.’

Sometimes, she said, when you whip a cove, pain goes inside them, and hooks their secrets right out.

But it wasn’t Benham I was concerned with then. The awful clock of Langton’s heart had stopped. He’d outlived his doctor and, now, a twin misfortune: he’d been survived by his own ambitions. Crania was to be published after all, in the light of the interest stirred up by the author’s death. But I took some small pleasure in knowing he hadn’t lived to see it. Later that morning, Sal propped herself on my pillows to listen to the details about the funeral. Miss-bella had been still in Jamaica and unable to attend. It had been a sudden death; the body had tripped a chambermaid bringing fresh sheets. Apoplexy. ‘Your old bastard get the same damn death as mine!’ Sal cried.