‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ I said. ‘This time I’m staying to suit myself.’

The night stretched before me deep as a well. I was a stone he wanted to cast into it. I found her door locked. I roamed the halls, went outside, stood beneath black trees once more picked clean as bones. In the kitchen, wine-glasses had been laid out, and silver platters for canapés. Everyone else upstairs, cleaning. It smelt of salt and meat. I watched the clock. Paced and waited. I knocked into the table, and the glasses jumped.

When, at last, she let me in, I had a question burning through me that I was afraid to ask. The truth is she frightened me. I didn’t ask because I didn’t want the answer. Same reason I’d turned my eyes away from the tiny swaddled bundle earlier in the day.

She wanted to wear her lavender silk, so I took it down. Did she shrink from me? Did she avoid my eyes? When I lifted the dress, she raised her arms. The shadow of the silk darkened across her neck like a blush. How delicate she was, and had always been. She had never had the courage this world requires. I told myself to speak.

‘He said I’m to leave. Do you agree with it?’

‘I do not.’

‘But you will do nothing about it?’

The white gleam of her in the glass. I wanted to walk out of there, then, and ask her to come. But what could I offer her? A bedroom in a bawdy-house, if I was lucky.

It would be death, for a woman like her.

Speak, Frances. Say it. Just say it.

But that was when she turned, twisting her hands. ‘Please stay upstairs tonight? It will cause too much trouble with him. And – I . . . cannot bear –’

‘Cannot bear?’

‘To be reminded.’

I told her she was a coward, then. I said other horrible things.

This time, as you know, I did not obey.

After Charles left me in the attic, I crept back down to her room. It gaped around me and I gaped back. It was so like a room in a novel, for hiding treasure, or lunatics. Yet it was the place where I’d had my own romance, my own measure of happiness, fleeting as it was. Inside as well as out, there was nothing but smothering black. I went to the cabinet, took out the bottle, touched my lip to the rim, and felt the drug, cold then warm. More. I sat. Waited. More. I knew she’d come. Arranged my hair and skirts as prettily as I could.

She pushed open the door. ‘No one knows I’m here. I must go back down soon.’ I sat up.

She went straight for the bottle and tipped it to her lips. The thought shuddered through me that it was the drug she’d come back for, not me. She held the bottle out. Her eyes shone like poisoned fruit. ‘Shush.’