When Langton’s quill slipped for the first time, I was twelve or thirteen. He reared his head back, looked at it as if it had bitten him. Weakness started in his hands, went through him quick as water. By the next January, he had a hard time to keep hold of a pen at all. I was stirring at a vat of indigo, lifting my dolly-stick, watching the blue drips fall back into the tin bucket. His hand tap-tapped at the table, like someone knocking. His face went dark when he looked down at it, then he threw himself to his feet, as suddenly as if he were casting part of his own body away from him. ‘Girl,’ he bellowed. ‘Come here.’

There was nothing he didn’t try. Strychnine, mercury ointments, sweat baths, bleeding. His body a question mark over the pot, his stools snicking into it, small and hard as those long-ago peas. Around that same time, the Surgeon died, leaving me with Langton. And, if an invalid is lucky enough to outstrip his own doctor, that is news that’s both good and bad.

What can I tell you about the years that followed? I made them dark for so long, sometimes it’s as if I truly can’t remember. Langton needed a scribe. I was there, I could be taught, and I cost him nothing, which was all he could afford. For a long time, I thought that was the bargain we’d struck.

His brain; my hands. That’s how the work got done.

There were times in that coach-house all I saw was my own hands, floating, when the very floor seemed washed in blood. When I went outside myself. First black, then nothing. It was the same that awful morning, when Linux woke me in Madame’s bed. I remember how the constable stared and stared, saying they were both dead, Madame too. And me thinking, I couldn’t have done it. I loved her. But having to hear them telling me I had.

Miss-bella asked me about the coach-house only once, the year after I became Langton’s scribe.

‘I want you to tell me what my husband is doing in that place.’

‘You must ask him, please, missus.’ I hesitated. ‘They only wanting me to clean.’

She looked me up and down, struck her palm flat against the porch railing. She laughed, no mirth in it. ‘He does nothing but play God! He’s a charlatan. Playing at being a scientist.’

Her face twisted, and I turned mine away so she couldn’t see what was printed on it. She looked away, also, and lifted her hip flask. The teapot had smashed, long ago, knocked off the table while she was stumbling out of the chair. She kept one hand on the railing, one on the flask, and I could hear her muttering, under her breath, ‘They are monsters, because this place makes monsters.’

I remembered then all the stories Phibbah had told me. About the teapot. About the dancing girls. There must have been a time when Miss-bella dreamed her husband would come to her, lift her chemise over her head, bare his teeth like an animal, turn her to face a mirror, take her by surprise. There must have been a time when she hoped he would frighten her, when her heart beat for that very thing.