Yes. I know it. All too well. I take a step back, straight into the table. The moment snags, and snags me with it.

‘‒ an indicator of opium. Her lungs and sinuses were congested, her heart also. There was cyanosis of many of the organs, including the skin. Signs of poisoning. Taken together with my suspicion about the nature of the wounds –’ he shrugs ‘‒ I told Wilkes we should test. Argued for it. But he refused. The laudanum had been prescribed, he said, and therefore was not a matter to concern ourselves with.’

You interrupt, impatient: ‘Wilkes swore on cross-examination that there was no reliable test.’

Pears hinges backwards, against the wall. ‘No test for opium. But there are ways to detect morphia, which is its active principle. Dr Wilkes would have been correct to say other evidence would be necessary before any sound conclusion can be reached. But, considering what I suspected, about her wounds ‒’

‘Sound conclusion about what?’ I say, the words dredged up from my throat, slow, dry as cotton.

‘About whether it could have been a case of death by poisoning.’

There’s a whip of anger in your voice. ‘All we needed, Dr Pears, was a grain of doubt. A grain. The only thing that determines whether the prisoner’s shown the rope or the door.’

What you mean is something that would have had the jurors looking in another direction: some other murderer, some trickster excuse. But this? This has shaken loose the thought that’s been there all along, one I haven’t looked at, because I didn’t want to see it.

I put my hands over my ears, blocking out Pears’s noise. But nothing ever blocks Phibbah. Men got their hands full with the big deaths, we make do with the small ones. I thought about how she’d always mutter to herself while she was fixing up her potions, that list she tapped out through her teeth. Boiled gully-root to flush a womb, or crushed peacock-flower steeped in river water. If those failed, tinctures in the milk, a needle through the fontanelle. Ground cassava root if it was the mother not the baby you wanted to kill.

The mother, not the baby. The mother and the baby. The baby, then the mother.

A cold moment of truth.

Here, at last, was a terrible certainty, which had come matched with an equally terrible doubt.

Pears unfolds himself with a click. I want to sweep him off the bed, so that I may lie in it. ‘But who would have cut her? Why did Wilkes lie?’

‘Same reason I didn’t testify, I’m sure.’

You scoff. ‘Because you’re cowards?’

He reaches up to tug on his cravat, turns to me. ‘It was I who searched out your lawyers. Said I’d attest to my findings and let Wilkes swear to his. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I thought it could be a difference of opinion. Some surgeons search only for what they expect to find.’ He drops his chin. ‘I thought we’d simply let the jurors decide.’