MORNING POST, 21 MARCH 1827

Madame Marguerite Benham, as she was widely known – no doubt as a nod to her French racine – was notorious as much for her eccentric behaviour as for her ravishing good looks. Indeed, she was once heard to declare that life without adventure was death, and no London season was ever in full swing until Mischief Meg had stormed the gates of Almack’s wearing her own buff breeches, and a man’s jacket with gold buttons topped by her crowning glory, a swan-feathered turban rumoured to have come all the way from a modiste in Istanbul. Not only pretty but interesting! And that in an age when so many women seem capable of being only one or the other.

No wonder a frenzy attended her wherever she went; no wonder so many described her as beyond compare. The latter a sentiment which, some say, was shared by none other than the Negro boxer known as Laddie Lightning, or Olaudah Cambridge, the African genius, if you prefer his nom-de-plume.

Though we give no credence in this newspaper to vexatious rumour, might it not be said that the ravishing Mrs Benham was prone to adventure as some people are prone to accidents?

Chapter Twelve

There’d been a moment down at the West India Docks, after I’d just stepped off the ship, when I stood stock-still and looked around me. Another stroke of good fortune, I thought. Another I didn’t deserve. The tall-masted ships and barrel-hulled barges. The tablecloth of fog laid over everything. In the drowned light, the dark shapes of porters dashed between the warehouses, crooked under weighty puncheons of sugar and rum, their shouts knocking against the glass. It had been so different that, for the span of one moment, I’d thought I could be different too.

But now Levenhall’s four walls were all my world, and it felt small again, narrow as the inside of a stocking.

That’s what I was thinking, next morning, as I watched Pru slide a bowl of broth onto a pewter tray, a cup and saucer beside it, pour in chocolate. She fetched the kettle to water it down. Linux looked up from where she was refilling the coal boxes for the charcoal irons.

‘Again?’ she said.

‘Did you not hear her bell, ma’am?’

‘High time she brought herself downstairs.’ Linux sprinkled the tablecloth, passed the iron down the length of it, made it hiss. There was a smothering heat. The smells of salt, lime, coal-ash.

Pru shrugged. ‘She is down. Said she’d have breakfast in the parlour, since the master’s out. And she was down yesterday. She went out with Lady Catherine.’

Be that as it may, Linux said, she’d have to speak to the master about stopping the trays. Madame shouldn’t be encouraged to eat wherever and whenever the mood took her. Let things become regular, for a change, and see how long it took her, then, to consult Linux about the many matters that were going stale, to take an interest in her own household, for once.