I let myself picture it.

‘How many rooms?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘How many bedrooms?’

‘One. I think.’

‘Where would I sleep?’

He turned back to his desk, opened the cat’s head and took a pinch of snuff. ‘How would I know, girl? There’ll be something ‒ a kitchen, I’m sure.’

Something splintered in me. I felt the sharp pain of it in my head, blinding. I blinked. I laughed. The whole time she’d sat without speaking. Now she looked up.

‘What?’ he said. His eyes slithered to her.

I kept mine on him. ‘What about the infant?’

‘Would be yours, to do with as you will.’

Her rooms spread measureless. Time did too. Grey dust over everything, twirling in the air. She wouldn’t let Pru in to clean. For a time, she neither spoke nor looked at me. I sat on the bed, she at the desk. Miles between us.

I watched her twist her hair to ropes, jerk out of her chair. A marionette. The drug. Her husband’s demands. Her own confusion. Thin as a fly-leaf, with that terrible energy wicking through her.

‘One of the mercies of my marriage has been to discover that I would never want his children. Now he tells me I must not want this one. But it is as if –’ she stopped ‘‒ as if this baby has come with some trick that shows me how to want it.’

Her words went through me, my own pain so large that I hardly had room for hers.

‘If my scandals stay quiet, he does not care. But the minute he decides that I am an embarrassment . . . again, he requires me to contain myself in my own rooms. Let things blow away. Or ‒ how do you say? ‒ blow over. He spies on me so he can know what measures to take, when. If I must go somewhere, during that time, then he sets Lady Catherine as guard dog and gaoler . . .’

I thought back to that first day, on the steps. ‘And you oblige him.’

‘And I oblige him! What choice do I have? He only agrees I may go out and about again eventually because otherwise the talk would be worse.’ She gave a thin smile. ‘When he asked you to . . . watch me . . . did you think he might be looking for evidence, to have me sent away?’ A laugh. ‘It would never be the asylum, not with him. Too prosaic. Too public. He would never want it known that his own wife had sunk so low.’

I held my tongue. She had no idea how low he’d sunk. The truth about George Benham would have broken her, then. I could not tell her.

‘But this,’ she continued. ‘There would be no way to hide it. If I have a black child in the wake of a divorce – everyone will see his shame.’ She looked up at me, her face green as a pear. ‘Yet if he divorces me, he knows he could not control whether I had it or not. And could not be sure that I would not. Therefore, a new marriage pact: he will let me stay, but I must give it away to you. Then give you away.’