Before I went down to ask Benham to fetch the doctor, I’d thought she was sick, sleeping. Now I see that she must have been dying, even then.

I’m coming to the end. As I write, all I see is her. Opening the cabinet, laying her book inside, taking out one of the amber bottles. All that care she took. Lined up like instruments, isn’t that what Linux said? Like laying out the dead. The last time she ever opened that cabinet. The last time she ever took out the bottle. The last time she crossed her room, towards the portrait, her letter in her hand . . . Was she as terrified as I am now? The dose is the poison. Oh, and she was the poisoner herself.

I have wondered about the knife. The one Constable Meek said he took from her cabinet. Why was it there? When she went to the kitchen that night ‒ or at some other time, even earlier than that ‒ could she have brought it up without them seeing? It pains me to think of it. But Pears swears she didn’t use it, that it was laudanum she chose, in the end.

It’s possible that Meek put that knife inside the cabinet himself, or that he never found it upstairs at all, but only said he had to make sure I took the blame. They’d have needed to produce some weapon, after all, since they’d never found the scissors, hidden in the skirts I was arrested in. I doubt they even kept those, seeing how filthy they were.

I know I should have told you during our very first meeting about what happened with Benham. That one burden, at least, I can finally set down. Like all those times in the coach-house. Like that time with Henry. The world went black, and black things were done in it.

But would you have understood?

I knew I had to tell you my story first.

Chapter Fifty-Three

I have received your letter. I am to be pardoned for the murder that wasn’t a murder. As for the other, I will hang.

Chapter Fifty-Four

Across the flagstones, through the chapel yard, thirty-five steps to the chapel door. I counted. That’s the real miracle, the time they let us spend outside.

I turned my face up. The clear sky, and the arched windows gleaming, like iced buns on a baker’s shelf. I breathed in, slow and deep, almost expecting the smell of sugar. Too soon inside, we were herded into the condemned pew, no choice but to sit with our knees poking the coffin they keep in there. You pray there’s nothing inside it, though no one will say. They make us stare at death before we face it.

We were there to be stared at, too. It’s instructive for the other gaol-birds to see us on our final night. The service for the condemned. Some of them reach for us, try to touch us on our smocks. Put in a word for us, they say, where you’re going.