‘Nothing at all?’

‘But that was not unusual. We could not hear the upper rooms from so far downstairs. We were in the kitchen, the stove going, the noises of the clearing, and cleaning.’

‘You did not see the prisoner commit these terrible murders?’

‘No.’

‘Nor did anyone else?’

‘No one has said so.’

‘How did you and the prisoner get on?’

Her jaw twitches. ‘We got on with things.’

‘There was animosity between you?’

Another hesitation. ‘No more than the usual. I ran that house, sir, and the servants in it. It would have been impossible, then, for them to be happy with me all the time, or me with them.’

She blinks.

‘What kind of master was Mr Benham?’

‘What business is it of yours?’

‘It is the business of this court.’

‘A good master, a fair one.’

‘You felt the prisoner was a threat to the household, you tried to warn the master, you wanted her turned out.’

She makes her eyes small. ‘I wasn’t wrong . . .’

‘On one occasion you burned her hand, with the kettle ‒’

‘That was an accident! What has she said?’ She whips her head around to me again. ‘What has she said? That was the night she attacked one of Mr Benham’s guests at dinner. Mr John Langton. The one who’d brought her here, given her to Mr Benham. I took her down to the kitchen. She’d disgraced the master by what she’d done. I expected her to be turned out then, though she wasn’t. They took pity on her, always, and look how she repaid them. When I tried to make her go upstairs, she rushed at me, nails flying, she was trying to claw at me, and I had the kettle still in my hands. I had yet to make the teas for after dinner. That’s how it happened, and that is God’s truth. Is she trying to blame me for it? You can say what you like but I saw who she was. I saw her exactly. And I was not wrong.’

‘Did her race count against her, too, so far as you were concerned?’

‘It was her deeds that counted against her, not her skin.’

‘You bullied her.’

‘No. I did not.’

‘You bullied her. You harassed her.’

‘No.’

‘You set your mind against her from the start. Dark in complexion, dark in nature. Was that what you thought?’

‘No.’

You stare at each other, only the soft sounds of the courtroom between you.

The silence really is a marvel, here. So different from the gaol. There, the constant shouts and cries and squealing hammer and hammer at you until you spark and bend, like an iron nail, and can never feel straight again. Newgate’s noise is a pig-yard noise. Now it’s all this silence that seems loud.

Her chest is heaving, and yours a mirror to it. The floor heaves too, like the floor of a ship.

I look at the judge, squirming on his bench.