I saw it. I saw it. He was even more afraid of the truth than I was.

I took a step back. The drug skimmed everything soft, made my pulse beat like wings. ‘Maybe I should put all that education you force-fed me to some good use,’ I said. ‘That would be quite an exposé.’

The old darkness was slipping into my head. His heels clicked through it. He raised his hand and slapped me. The room sagged, tore. I gripped him, but he slapped me again. The tails of his black jacket scuttled around us, and the drug made a strange, slow dance of it, thickened the air, prickled sour under my arms. I twisted my fingers at his cravat. He raised his hands. Scraped at my throat.

Find your backbone, Frannie.

I shook him off, reached down to my skirts.

It was quick. It’s a wonder they didn’t hear it downstairs.

That afternoon in the garden, the summer before. In Madame’s room, while she’d slept, I’d cut a hole in my pallet. Because Linux accused me of stealing them: that was why I’d done it. And they had stayed there all that time.

But now I had them in my hand.

I clasped them high above us. It felt like flying. The room torn open to the black underneath.

I was defending myself. That is what I choose to write here. If I was still the prisoner in court, some silver-tongued Jessop would ask why I had those scissors with me, when I went down to the library.

Did you bring the scissors downstairs?

Wasn’t your pallet upstairs?

You armed yourself, didn’t you, before coming down?

But I don’t have to answer any further questions.

Afterwards, I went upstairs. What choice did I have? I should have run, of course, taken myself back into the streets. But I went upstairs to lie down next to her. The sight of her dragged my heart, like an anchor on rocks. How would I explain myself to her? To anyone? I passed my hands over the books on the table, the mantel, trying not to look at her. Blood had trailed along behind me, so I wetted a towel and wiped the carpet. I took the brush and pan up from the hearth, swept at the cold ashes there, kindled up a fire, then stood back to watch the flames coming. There was some of the drug left in the bottle I’d brought with me. I drained it. I wanted my mind blank. Tabula rasa. Inside all soft and black like soil. The only sound was the crackle of the fire. More laudanum. More and more until the bottle was drained. I felt my hands go cold, let the bottle drop. Let the towel fall into the fire. All my own blood left me, then. I heard her voice. I swear it. I am sure of it. ‘Sleep, dear Frannie. Sleep.’

Then, just as I told you, I slept.

They woke me, in her bed. They told me she was dead. It must have been his blood, around us in the bed, and on her, carried there on my own hands. There are things that cannot be written down. A terrible privacy. Like death, like love. Those things I felt then. I felt a pulling, a tearing, felt my heart dangling like a severed and torn and muddied root.