On the seventh day, there was a bundle laid at my place at the table, wrapped in twine. When I tore off the paper, it unfurled into two dresses, made of rough linsey. ‘One to wear, one to change into,’ Linux announced, staring through the window. I could hear the soft crunch of boots, coal tumbling into next door’s chute. When she turned, her jaw clicked, like the lid on the pot. ‘Jamaican gowns might be flimsy, but English women are more modest.’

I rolled up the fabric and set it back on the table. ‘I have a dress,’ I said.

But she stared and stared until I rose slowly to my feet, and picked up the bundle. Then she followed me into the scullery, laid both dresses across the copper. ‘The brown for now,’ she said, nodding at it. ‘The green will keep for Sundays.’

I’d dressed myself in my navy serge since leaving the Pride, when all of London had been spread in front of me like a picnic rug, and I’d just as soon have peeled off my own skin, but I swallowed, brought my fingers up to my chest, rubbed them along the bodice.

‘Too slow,’ she said, and swooped her fingers onto me quick as crows, unhooking me herself. Cold seeped around us, like the steam from the copper when Pru heated the bathwater in there. There was a smell of pork and caraway on her fingers from the sausages she’d been making that morning, and the usual scullery smells on top of that. The lye and piss we mixed up for the laundry, old sweat, damp. Her fingers crept down my bodice. All the while she kept up a constant chatter, and I heard a snick-snick-snick that made me swing my head in search of a clock, or dripping water. ‘You dress for the use to which you’re put, here,’ she muttered, pinching my jaw to keep my face still. ‘Do you hear? And you will not be wiggling your tail all over Mr Benham’s house.’

My throat clenched. You need this place, I told myself. You need this place. When she saw that I’d made no reply she snapped her head up, fingers stilled on my hooks. ‘Have you nothing to say for yourself? I saw you. With Charles.’

Charles? It came back to me, then, that the afternoon before, I’d been in the front hall, shining the clock. Charles had crept behind me with no warning. ‘I’ve been wondering about something,’ he said. ‘Maybe you could settle it for me.’

‘Settle what?’ I’d asked.

He sniggered. ‘How you sleep on white sheets without getting them mucked.’

Anger made hairpin jabs in my skull. I’d set down the polishing cloth, turned to face him. He blinked and rubbed at his jaw, tottering like a new foal. I stepped close. My voice came out rough. I fancied a murderous tone crept into it. ‘Is that what you wondered?’ He laughed, but backed away, as if he’d heard it too, that killing note. I thought of the preacher, who used to sit in the heat at Paradise, red as a crab in a pot, calling out Bible verses. The way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a serpent on a rock, and the way of a man with a maid. ‘“Maid” is one of those words that can have many different meanings, Frances,’ he would say. ‘Servant, yes, but also girl, virgin, unmarried woman.’ A maid to a man, a serpent to an eagle. Just something to stick his claws into. Once a house-girl, for ever a whore.