‘Did you ever love me?’

‘I am all in agony, Frances,’ she said. ‘And you wonder about love.’ She touched cold fingers to my cheek. Her eyes looked flat, dead already. I thought of her small affections. How I’d sucked it all down like a child’s ration of sweets. How she’d sucked me down, too, as greedily as she drank her tinctures. She took a dose, gave me one too. And another and another. I try to think what it was I saw on her face. Pity? Fear? Now it was my hands plucking at the sheets as I sat and watched. She drained the glass and turned to leave. But she stopped at the door, her back quivering.

‘I think it ‒ it has broken me,’ she said. I didn’t need to ask what she meant. Then, ‘He can divorce me now,’ as if she had just thought of it, clutching her own sleeves.

‘Then come. Let him divorce you. Come.’

She shook her head. ‘I did not agree with him about you, Frances. I am sorry. But if it is the only way . . . Please. Go back upstairs. Go back.’

I called her name.

She spoke her wounding words, and left.

I took more laudanum, took the bottle upstairs with me. No chance of rest. I listened to the carriages, their guests departing, and tried to slow my breaths. A minute passed. An hour? Time wriggled away. I couldn’t measure it.

When I crept back down, she was in bed. Dark hair pooled to her waist. A single candle burning. It seemed that her eyes were fixed on the woman in red. For a strange moment, I thought each of them was about to speak. Then I saw she was asleep. I felt the heavy crawl of the drug. Slowing me down. I felt rooted. I tried to take a step. Her head felt hot.

Then I was in Benham’s library, swaying over the jamb. ‘I think we should call a doctor. She’s not well.’

He looked up, laughed. ‘I’m quite sure she isn’t well.’

‘Send for Fawkes, then. She might need help, for the bleeding.’

‘It’s the drug, as you well know,’ he said. ‘Her constant solace. Tomorrow she’ll be the same thorn in my side she always is.’

‘But it could ‒’

His laugh as bitter as the laudanum on my lip. ‘It’s nothing. And even if she is ill . . .’ His head wove. ‘I think it was de Sade who said he’d prefer a dead mistress to an unfaithful one. One could well ask how one prefers one’s wife.’

‘You’re drunk.’

‘It was a party, girl. Everybody’s drunk.’

The room was shrinking like wet cotton.

‘All those nasty little gossips . . . right . . . about that nigger cuckolding me.’

Oh, but so did I. My throat felt gritted. The blood rose in me, like flame through a wick. Rage welling hot. ‘You pretend you’re without sin. Sit here casting stones at the rest of us. You pretend your hands are clean. But all of it is your doing. Crania. Langton. Me. You brought Laddie here. How is that any better than what Langton did to me? And her. Forcing her into your small spaces . . .’ I brushed my face with my hands. ‘What if the world knew what kind of man you really are?’