Linux finished unhooking my bodice and stepped back. A man and a maid. Perhaps it would have looked like seduction, if you were watching it from a distance. But what was the use in protesting? No doubt she would take his side, tell me she had similar questions herself. I stood mute. Didn’t say a word. She must have thought me dumb, frightened. Sullen. The noise came again when she looked at me. Snick. Snick-snick. She curled her lip, drew her face back, and I realized it was her tongue that made the noise, clacking like a builder’s hammer.

Her eyes scuttled away from me, and she dangled my old dress away from her like a caught rat. ‘Dress yourself, then. And, lest you mistake me, girl, I don’t want to have to admonish you again, regarding heathenish dress.’

‘I’m not a heathen,’ I said.

The smile curdled on her face. ‘That’s not for you to judge.’

Back in the kitchen, she took down a bowl of apples and sorted through them for a tart. ‘Who would just tip a woman onto somebody’s doorstep? Hot off the ship. A gift! A havey-cavey business, if you ask me. It might be done, perhaps, in dark places, it might be done in far corners of the earth. I wouldn’t know.’

Mr Casterwick looked up from polishing Benham’s hessians, wrinkled his brow. ‘’Tis done here, too, however, Mrs Linux,’ he said. ‘It’s been done. I have heard of it.’

‘It is a dark practice.’

‘Well, but you’ll admit there are dark things done in England, too.’

‘I’ll admit no such thing!’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t suppose it needs you to be admitting it for it to be taking place.’

I felt like a shaved cat without my serge. The linsey dress smelt like camphor, buttoned all the way up to my chin, closed like a fist around my throat.

But I didn’t have time to dwell on it. Charles came downstairs to say there’d been a commotion at the front door, early as it was: that colonial had thundered into the hall, demanded to see the master, and told him to bugger his British manners when Charles had said the master was not at home. He’d been ready to toss him onto his backside, but Mr Benham had heard it all and come down anyway. The news that Langton was in the house split me like an axe-blow. My chest pounded. It shames me to say it now, but I thought he’d come back for me.

The library door was closed. I clutched my rag, and pretended to wipe at it, one ear cocked against the wood. Their voices knocked against each other like bricks being laid, low at first, then Langton’s came louder: ‘. . . you tossed me to those fucking lions!’

‘. . . the same delusions of martyrdom . . . nothing.’

‘You still condescend to me as if we’re schoolboys.’

‘. . . still . . . behave . . . as if we are!’