I held my brush up, let the suds drip.

She stopped suddenly, on the bottom step, swung her eyes back to where we stood. Blue as those long-ago pails of indigo. Shocking, bright. Little puckers at the corners made her seem sad. ‘You are . . . ?’

‘She’s the new girl, Madame,’ Pru called out. ‘From the Indies.’

She squinted, little creases pulling like thread around her eyes.

‘I’m Frances,’ I said, trying to hold my hands over my skirts, where soap had scummed snail-tracks into the blue. The likes of her expect nothing but curtsies from the likes of me, I thought, so I lifted my chin, puffed the hair off my brow.

‘I see. Frances. How are you finding us?’

‘A shock.’

It sprang out, before I could think better of it. But she only laughed. Like coins jangling, copper chiming copper. ‘I suppose we are . . .’ she said ‘. . . or this place is.’ She motioned at the door behind me, where I imagined the lion knocker must still be making its awful grimace.

‘Meg!’ Pink-frock called out, from the pavement. ‘Will you come?’

She cocked her head and looked me up and down. Studied me the way the Surgeon used to study a body before cutting, a little stitch of worry between her brows. Suddenly she lifted her skirts and clicked her heels and nodded, the kind of bow a gentleman would make to a lady. How strange she is! I thought. Charles opened the carriage doors and helped them inside, leaving us to gape as it pulled away, all quiet again, except for the plink-plink-plink of water from our brushes. There being no help for it, I went back to my hands and knees, and Pru did the same, swiped at her forehead with the back of a wrist.

‘Madame must be feeling herself again,’ she said. Her voice had brightened ‒ the women had lit her up. ‘And didn’t she take a shine to you!’

I made no reply, rubbed my finger into a crack that was already damp with moss, for all the house was new. Green as a stale crust. She pursed her lips. ‘Friendliness makes the day go faster.’

She hadn’t sounded friendly in the kitchen, but I’d have to swallow my anger, I knew, just as I’d been doing all day. I squatted back on my heels. Thoughts of my new mistress had mercifully crowded Benham out of my head. She’d spoken to me as if we were being presented, one lady to another. I’d felt a tug. Quiet had slipped into me, like water into sand. Like those times when Phibbah pointed at a chicken hawk, or a pair of parrots, whatever she could find streaking across the sky, then dabbed whiskey on my cuts and bruises. Of all London’s surprises, I thought, she was the only pleasant one. I dropped my eyes, scraped my brush across the stone.

‘That was the mistress?’ I asked, though I knew full well.