Words kept tumbling out of her like stones. ‘Do not be so cruel.’

‘You are singing a different tune. Yesterday –’

‘Yesterday was madness talking.’

‘It could only have been madness. What else could it have been?’ I raised my voice.

A bow of silence, pulled tight. She swings back and forth on this, same as with everything else, I thought.

She let her hand drop. ‘Will you do it?’

Before I could answer, before I could know, there came a knock at the door. Linux pushed past me when I answered it. She looked ill herself, her face pebbled by the scars. She must know something of what it’s like, I thought then, for the mere act of showing your face to the world to make you feel shrunken, and small.

She had a tray in her hands, a single glass. ‘Mrs Benham,’ she said, ‘the parlour has been swept now. You’re not to worry.’

‘Thank you.’

‘If you are not well –’

‘You are mistaken, Mrs Linux.’

‘I’ve brought you water.’ She swayed. I stood by the mantel, breathing hard, and she flicked her eyes over me too. ‘You do seem fevered. I can’t see why the master won’t just send for Dr Fawkes.’

Madame rose from her chair and held her shawl tight around her and made her voice sharp. ‘Mrs Linux. I do not want your help or your presence.’

‘No.’ She blinked, scuttled forward, set down the tray. ‘No. No. Very well.’

I heard her shoes clacking away down the hall after she closed the door and wished I could follow her.

Rain shook like a gourd, rattled at the windows. It was damp, again, and grew colder and colder. That night she woke weeping. Bursts of memory, and remorse. ‘What have I brought on myself?’ She drank more and more laudanum, licked constantly at her dry lips. Her skin felt warm. I drank too. It went back in easy as water. That is a thirst that never goes away. Opium rowed me across black oceans, back to the guinea grass and the cottonwood and the coach-house. I saw the lines of people, waiting. I saw myself, holding a little blade. I saw blood.

As she slept, I lit a candle and went to the shelves and took out her books, one after another, and tried to read, but the fog in my head wouldn’t let me. The glass was fogged, too, with rain and cold. I sat beside her. Time was moving away from us as it does for everything, but now it was ticking towards life as well as death.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Benham’s agent came the next morning, and sat for hours with him in the library and, after he’d left, Benham told us both that the man had secured the lease on a cottage on the coast near Cornwall. Isolated enough. They could now start to put it about that he wanted peace and quiet, and would go there to finish his Encyclopaedia away from the noise. Madame would go with him, to convalesce, for it was no secret she’d been unwell. They’d take no servants but me. He’d stay to see the thing done.