My thoughts crowd each other like frightened cattle and I see you give a small shake of your head. This will harm your case, not help it. I find myself wishing for the drug again. To wet everything and make it slide easily, whether in or out. I must tiptoe around my first days back, picking out what I can and cannot say. ‘It has been said that I am an opium-eater, that I have been a whore.’ I pause. ‘Those things are true. I did fall into the habit of taking opium, but it was my mistress who gave it to me, saying it was to help me sleep.’

I press my hands together. Steady. Steady. ‘And for a time last autumn I . . . did live at the School-house. That was the work I could get. I had to eat, and it was a more moral course than thieving. Mr Benham forgave me for it, and I’d beg your forgiveness, too, if I need it. I’d remind you –’ I lift my chin ‘– if bawdry alone was cause to convict of murder, there’d only be a handful of women left in all of London.’

High up in the gallery, a flurry of fans. Bright as butterflies. Sniggers. Even Jessop coughs up from his papers in surprise.

I’m a puzzle. They expected a sly African. Or a bent-double maid. A mulatta whore. The Black Murderess.

Which one will save me?

My next words are as much of a shock to me as to them.

‘Sirs, I wonder . . . in the whole sum of history, by what order have you white men been wrong more than you’ve been right?’ An uproar. From the whole crowd of them, there rises a squabble like hens quarrelling over corn. Judge, jurors, clerks, turnkeys, barristers and gallery. One of the jurors shakes his head. I’ll have put them off me, as so often happens when you speak the truth. It’s the reason so many do not.

But I press on. ‘Whatever it is . . .’ I raise my voice ‘. . . whatever it is, that must be the whole scale of human suffering.’

I come to a stop, needing to draw in both breath and courage to go on. Swarmed by the cries, the heat, the gold letters hammering into my head: A false witness shall not be unpunished. The unbearable smell, so very like the reek of this city when I first came to it. Perfume on top, but down below, where rotting always starts, a stench. There’s not much you can do to get rid of an honest smell, which you’d know if you’d ever been a maid, or the sort who can’t pay another to maid for you. I lift my head, and try to fix my eyes on the stone columns at the very back of the gallery, so I don’t have to look at the jurors, or the other snarling faces, so I can compose myself and speak again. But what I see up there makes me cower. It can’t be.