I look from Jessop, up to the gallery. Gone. They’re gone. They got what they came for.

‘Have you done this sleepwalking trick before?’ Jessop asks, forced to swerve away from the foetus, and trying to pick up speed again.

‘I wouldn’t remember.’

‘Anyone ever told you that you have?’

‘Well, Mr Casterwick ‒’

But his voice skims right over mine. ‘Mrs Linux testified that on several occasions she discovered you late at night, outside your mistress’s rooms.’

‘I ‒’

‘You weren’t sleepwalking then?’

‘No. I was going to see Madame. I –’

What can I say? I was going down to her rooms. Because I wanted her. A longing so powerful it picked my feet up, drove them down the passage to her door. Made me think I was mad.

‘You were awake,’ he says, teeth gleaming. His mouth a trap. ‘Perfectly awake. All those other times. As you were at midnight on the night of these murders when you walked towards your mistress’s rooms. And when, shortly after that, you stabbed her to death.’

‘I was asleep,’ I say in my shrunken voice.

He gives a shrug of a smile, like a jacket he’s trying on. ‘But everything you say is a fiction. The invention of a mind scrambling to save itself. Why should these gentlemen believe a word of it?’

Oh. Then my knees melt. I remember Linux shaking me awake into the cloud of her breath in the cold room. Her face a puddle in the half-dark. I remember she cried, Murderer! Murderer! and the constable said, ‘Dress now, we must have you downstairs at once,’ and his voice swam to me, but I couldn’t lift my arms or my legs. He was a heavy man with a raw-looking face, black in the door frame. Black eyes, black-hatted. I saw a shadow taking shape beside me, which I then saw was Linux. There was blood on my hands, and the bedcovers too. She pinched me, hissed, ‘You’re to come downstairs!’

Jessop’s questions hammer and hammer at me, drive me like a nail inside myself. I’m in the prisoner’s dock, but also in her room, in her bed. The covers, the nightstand, the woman in red. And I can’t bear to look at her, can’t bear to hear that she is dead. I try to cover my ears.

Sleep, Frances. Sleep.

Jessop swivels to look at the jurors before his next question, his face lit with satisfaction. ‘Mrs Linux also testified that you locked your mistress in her rooms, on occasion. What do you say to that?’

‘I did not.’

‘You terrorized her, during the days leading to these murders. Didn’t you?’

I laugh, though I know I’ll seem like a Bedlamite. ‘How?’ My mind gone syrup-slow. ‘How? How would I have done that?’

No, I want to say. I want to laugh, to scream, to shout it out. She terrorized me.

Chapter Forty-Five

It ends as it began. With Jessop’s snapping gown, his ship’s horn of a voice.