And then the sudden knowledge. A flare of light.

What would you take with you if you could leave?

I claw my way to my feet, bang my fists across the door, cry out for the keys. No answer. No one comes. For the first time in this god-forsaken place, all is wretchedly quiet. Not a shuffle. Not a whisper. I knock until my hands are numb, until I feel my own frustration beating through my skin, like a second heart. Then I stop, listen to the walls creaking around me. I serve other masters now, and nothing will happen until they come.

At last, I’m permitted to send word out, and then follows the agony of waiting.

That single silent nod of yours slams into my throat. Prickles salt into my eyes.

I had hoped to be wrong.

‘It was behind that portrait,’ you say. You give me a sharp look. ‘Tucked in against the frame. How did you know? More to the point, why could this not have occurred to you during your trial? Tomkin found Meek and asked him to go back to the house. They went together. He noted the contents, if you’re interested? This is a copy. The document itself has gone off to the judge.’ You hold it up, gingerly, like something that might leave a stain.

And I snatch it, so I can read it myself.

Death is the only thing that scares me now, and yet the only thing that can take away my fears.

I am sorry.

It strikes me that these may be the last words I will ever read, these last words she ever wrote, and I read them greedy as a calf at a teat. Delivered by the woman in red, tucked behind her frame.

I am sorry.

‘It bears her signature. Here.’ I point. ‘Ritte Delacroix.’

‘Yes,’ you say. ‘Self-murder. There can be no doubt.’

The long dark days following my trial, it seems even the skies have turned black with spite. Fits of lightning at the window, so the light seems to slice the walls. I pace my cell. A felon should never dwell on her own verdict. It’s a waste of time, when time is all she has left. Yet I’m sad to say that’s precisely what I do. I think about my trial, about you, about that defence you concocted. You’re all the talk here, even though you lost. That sleepwalking defence. Lushing called it science, but it seemed closer to magic if you ask me: a black shade drawn down ‒ by sleep or intoxication ‒ then a kind of dreaming madness in its wake. That was your own spell, to make them think me an automaton, a zombi. Then I stop dead in my tracks, struck by the thought that it was the very spell some would say Langton cast, the minute I set foot in that coach-house. Stripped of my free will. But death can be a choice too, the dark link between dreaming and madness. Her melancholia that same black link, opium the shade she drew down on herself. All those rotten branches, growing from the same black root.