Despite everything that’s happened, and the terrible trouble I’m in, if you gave me the choice of one moment to undo, to take back, that would be the one. That moment is the heaviest thing I carry. How I long to set it down.

I write this by tallow light, having now paid sufficient guineas to be moved to a cell of my own. No law says I can’t read and write here, but for all I know the turnkeys would throw these pages away if they caught me at it, same as they did with Madame’s letter when I was first brought in. One click of a key, one turn of the knob, and I’m ready to shove paper, pen and ink under my skirts. They’re always spying, which means I must speed my pen. Now, it’s a case of gobbling backwards. As if I spent my whole life putting those words in, and now I’m spitting them back out.

It’s Moll Flanders that leaps into my head sometimes while I write. But Moll has always been a favourite, so it’s no surprise I should be thinking of it now. Oh, I know it’s the kind of smug nonsense that is always written by men when they write about women. A sermon in sheep’s clothing, Madame used to call it.

A man writes to separate himself from the common history. A woman writes to try to join it. What are my own intentions in writing this? The simple answer is that it’s my life, and I want to assemble the pieces of it myself. Mr Defoe made a novel and a romance out of the adventures of a felon and a whore, so it must be possible that of my own life I could do the same. Though it’s only one part of the world that’s taken up with novels and romances, the other part being taken up instead with death and vengeance. It’s that part which crowds the doors of the Old Bailey at cockcrow waiting to see meat such as me tossed at hungry prosecutors.

Some will ask why I address this manuscript to you. A man I’d never clapped eyes on before I was arrested. But there’s a simple answer for that also, which is that I want the same thing Langton wanted. English publishers. And I know enough to know that a white man is the only person on God’s green earth who can get me one of those.

Miss-bella’s health improved after Phibbah’s death, which Langton took as a sure sign he’d been right. She and I were the only ones who knew she’d stopped taking the Surgeon’s mercury. It fell to me to empty her pot, with Phibbah gone, and I’d seen her let the silver pearls run into it, and it was then that I put two and two together, made an awful sum. ‘You never said anything. You should have said something. He would have listened to you.’

Her eyes shrivelled. ‘I was sick as a dog, child. I scarce knew what was happening around me, let alone downstairs.’