A sick feeling tickled at my stomach. ‘This is why you sent for me.’

‘I sent for you because you are dear to me, because –’ I went to the bedside table and swirled brandy into her glass, swallowed down that drink and poured another. She watched me. Set the basin aside and gripped her hands. ‘‒ because you are dear to me. I do not know what to say,’ she said.

‘You are not ill.’ All I could see was the swollen lip of belly under the nightdress.

‘Non.’ She twisted her lips.

Brandy burned the back of my throat. Then the thought struck me. My lips went cold. Of course. Whose it was. I turned. ‘Does Mr Benham know?’

I helped her into the bath. My nails scraped along her spine, thin as a string of pearls, her shoulder blades pressing the skin of her back. I was shocked at how she’d dwindled. Everywhere except her round belly, she was skin knocking against bone. Clear skin. The truth between two people is a slow poison, though I’d say that love is even worse. The truth dribbled out between us then.

It had been the drug, she said. After I’d left, she took more and more. As many as eighty, ninety, one hundred grains. It’s a wonder she hadn’t died. A pity, I thought. A blink of hate. It had taken only weeks for her to recognize herself as a true opium-eater. Even then, she couldn’t stop herself. She started to eat it raw, and it had made her fevered, and mad. As deranged as any Bedlamite. She remembered hardly any of it. Her memories of that time were all noise and light, shapes and shadows. Several times she’d thought she heard me calling her name, or answering when she cried out to me. Sometimes she’d thought she saw me at the writing desk.

She tried to turn around, look at me, but I pushed her back. I lifted the pitcher, poured water over the hard shell of her belly, over her pink nipples, over her skin in private floods.

‘It was only once. I went to see him, because I had no one else. And he was my friend, once.’ She went in the carriage, swore Charles to secrecy. She needed help . . . she thought . . . she thought . . . she didn’t think. ‘Everyone had accused us already . . .’

‘He didn’t notice?’

She looked to the door. ‘He only notices when my misbehaviour scales the walls and makes news that gets back to him. And you had left me . . .’

‘You turned me out.’

‘Turned you out?’ She twisted, still trying to catch my eye, and again I held her at bay, feeling once more all the wretched agony of that afternoon. ‘Non! You said you were leaving, Frances. Remember? You told Mr Benham. I was upset, because of what I found, but I would not have turned you out.’