That anger would have been reason enough to kill him, I can’t deny it. Tear off his wings. Even now, thinking about it, there’s that hot quiver of rage again, the same quiver that was there that morning, after Linux woke me up. My head charred and black.

There’s no shortage of people who believe I was savage enough to have done it. But some people look at a black and see only a savage, the same way some people will look at arsenic and see only poison. That’s how they see me here, too. They even take their time about permitting me to empty my bucket, and some days I’m so lonely I even miss watching the old birds in the communal cell. Maud, holding her hand over the mark where her husband branded her with a poker, or Miss Priss, the wards-woman who used to be a procuress but who makes a better racket in here than she ever did outside, and Margaret and Jane Whimple, sisters, and therefore always at each other’s throats.

Now I sit on my own, and the turnkeys try to make an animal of me. Though not even an animal can tolerate keeping company with its own pot. It’s them who are animals: ‘We could help you plead your belly, you know, even a filthy murderess like yourself.’ But they’re afraid, for all their talk. I see it in their eyes, and the way they give me a wide berth. I know what they’re thinking. Who else would have murdered the master of Levenhall, but the black he harboured under his roof?

They might see me as the savage, but didn’t Benham and Langton pull me into their own dark corners? Wasn’t it them who tried to make an animal of me first?

EUSTACIA LINUX, sworn.

Mr Jessop: Mrs Linux, you were the housekeeper at Levenhall?

A. Yes, for seven years. Before that for Sir Percy. And under-maid for Sir William, the father, before that. I don’t know what’s to become of all of us now, though a good servant won’t want for offers. The Lord provides. Some of the staff are kept on for the time being, to pack up the house, until Sir Percy, the master’s brother, gives us word. I am here to tell you that Levenhall suffers now, and so do those of us left within it. There was a newspaperman in the hedge last week, they’re as bad as vultures. We had to run him off. Thank God Mr Benham isn’t here to see this.

Q. You were housekeeper to Mr Benham, when the prisoner joined his household?

A. I was not happy about it. He didn’t even tell me why it was being done. Only I gathered it might have something to do with his own work, given that he was revising his Encyclopaedia, but I never enquired too much into that as he preferred to be left alone with it. What we needed was a footman, but we got her instead. I asked him would he really have us break bread with her? All we knew about her was that she came from that barbarous place. Savagery is a cruel nursemaid, I said to him, and cruel nursemaids rear cruel infants.