She gives out a sob. There’s a terrible quiet, only the whispery shuffling high in the gallery. They, too, smell blood. This is what they came for.

‘I went in. It . . . it was the smell that stopped me. The kind you can feel, sticking to you. I felt my way to the mantel, lit one of the candles there that had guttered out. And saw it. Blood!’ she wails. ‘The whole floor a black sea, and my poor master lost upon it!

‘I ‒ For a moment, I couldn’t think what to do. Then I fell to my knees. It was all I could think. I prayed over him for the longest time. I said the Lord’s Prayer. A few times, I can’t remember how many. I had to breathe in that ‒ that smell all the while. I went out to the passage and knelt there. I ‒ cast up my accounts. The constable later found the . . . found the mess.’

She makes a show of putting herself together, patting her bodice.

‘I went up to the mistress’s room, thinking I had to summon her. I let myself in. You might have thought it was the master and mistress both in there asleep, at first. Bedcovers pulled neat as sails, and –’ she lifts a hand to her cheek ‘‒ there was the same smell there. That terrible smell. Oh, I knew then it would be something I didn’t want to see. I put the covers back ‒ and that was when I saw the prisoner and the mistress. The bed covered in blood. That’s when I saw the mistress was dead.

‘Then I screamed, and that brought Mr Casterwick, who sent for Charles. Charles went to fetch the watch, and it was all such a dreadful shock I didn’t mark the time then. That’s when we woke the prisoner. We did not want to wake her before the constable came.’

‘How was she when you woke her?’

‘She wouldn’t wake, not at first. I had to pour water over her, from the pitcher. When she sat up, I saw her hands were covered in blood. The constable asked her what had happened and she said, “I can’t remember.” That’s all she would say. She just kept repeating it.’

She tells them she later found the jar and the receipt for arsenic under my pallet and handed those items over to the constable when he came back down. The constable found the knife in Madame’s cabinet, beside the laudanum bottles, and her copy of Paradise Lost. It had been wiped clean and laid there beside the bottle and the book with the care a surgeon might take, putting away his instruments.

‘Surgeon or butcher.’ She seems to spit the words straight at me.

Oh, I know only too well. It’s butchery when there’s no need to keep the animal alive.

‘Apart from the blood, there was nothing out of place. As if the room must have been tidied. Another odd thing, sir. You see, the mistress had come below that night, just before their guests left. She came down to the kitchen, and – oh ‒ she was wringing her hands, her voice so thin and soft you could hardly hear her. She wanted to thank us, to tell us the evening had gone well, and not a one of us was to be downhearted about what had happened. She came round each of us in turn. I’ll never forget it. I remember her hands when she clasped mine, so small, so cold. Trembling. She’s upset about what happened, I thought. But now I know she must have been frightened. She must have been terrified.’