Linux’s voice snapped behind me, like a lead pencil. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I jumped, turned around. ‘Didn’t I instruct you yesterday?’

‘Instruct me?’

‘Not to address the master or mistress unless they address you first.’

‘La! Mrs Linux.’ Madame cut her off, rose to her feet, shaking out her skirts. ‘Frances has been answering my questions. Is there really any need to stand on such ceremony?’

‘I see.’ Her face hardened. She looked from her to me, wavered a moment, like someone who’d lost her way. Then she stepped between us, her skirts spreading across my face, like potted beef on bread. ‘Since you’ve decided to come downstairs this morning, Madame, may I take this opportunity to speak to you about the menu for next week’s dinner with Sir Percy?’

I felt erased, blotted. My face flared hot. I bent my head to the task that was supposed to have brought me there, rubbed and rubbed with the cloth, watched black creeping into the cracks in my nails, staining my fingertips, crawling across the grate and making it clean.

‘Oh, Mrs Linux cannot forgive Madame for being French,’ Pru mumbled later, as she bedded herself down, punching her pillow. She snorted. ‘That’s part of it, anyway. And no house can serve two mistresses. They are always at odds.’

The window-glass hung above the bed, silvered, flat as a mirror, reflecting the bright moon. You had to be this high up to see it at all, I thought. I pressed my back against the hard floor, remembering how I’d gone over to the chair after Madame had followed Linux out of the parlour, how I’d stood staring at her book, then lifted it and smelt it, and how, holding it thus, I’d thought that, no matter the gully between us, here was one thing that had been laid across it, like the first flagstone set into a floor. All while we’d been speaking, it had felt as if she’d forgotten who she was, and who I was and, for that span of time, I’d felt like a dog fresh off its leash, sniffing earth. Perhaps that had been freedom, or some measure of it, though it had only been in my head.

I’d noticed a cloying smell, like apples simmering on a stovetop. When I looked down, I saw that it was coming from the apple core, which had fallen to the carpet and lay damp with juice and spit. Already as sweet as any rotting thing. For a long moment, I stood and stared at it, the weight of the book like a brick in my palm.

I fell asleep wishing Madame could see me as I’d been. Not the maid, not the house-girl, but Frannie the scribe. White cambric sleeves rolled up and marked with my own ink-stains, crow-feather pens, trimmed the way I liked them. Feet planted under a table, scribbling until my wrists cried out all their aches and pains. The Frannie who read Milton and Mr Defoe. Reading, thinking, writing.