Listening brought me back to my last time in there. Swarmed with questions. I’d asked if he would turn me out if I didn’t answer.

‘Well, you must do what you want, of course.’ An amused look had crept onto his face. ‘Though sometimes it’s easier to do a thing by convincing yourself you’re being forced. As you would know.’

Had there been any other path, I wouldn’t have gone down the one of appeasing him. But the truth is I was stuck, terrified of being out on the streets alone. I had to tell him something, though my answers were never fast enough or good enough.

‘We have a common object, girl.’

‘I wouldn’t presume to have anything in common with a man such as yourself, sir,’ I said. They never notice when you give your modesty a double edge.

I told him he’d find all of Langton’s methods easily enough in Langton’s book, but he already knew that to be a lie.

He gave me a look. ‘He could have produced a beautiful book of skulls instead of all that gallivanting about with skin. As soon as he saw sense he managed to lose all his specimens.’

Oh, Langton never saw sense, I thought. He was hell-bent on nonsense, right up to the end.

‘Perfectly awful,’ he said, ‘about that fire.’

‘Perfectly awful,’ I replied.

Defeat ate at me, soured my stomach. I listened for a long time, yet heard not a single word about me. The tall windows marched away down the long hall, black and silent under their yellow drapes. Those were the soft bars of my prison. My head felt empty and cold. I had already worked the skin off my fingers. Nothing stretched ahead of me but more of the same. And then what? What became of a mulatta maid in London, when her fingers grew too crooked for carrying pails?

A throat cleared behind me, and I spun around, startled. Madame.

‘Could there be anything going on in there worth spying on?’ she said, tipping her head towards the door. She wore a grey morning gown, with lace and seed-pearls stitched across the waistband, hair hanging loose as the drapes. I tugged at the stuff dress, pinching where it was supposed to be loose, hanging where it was supposed to pinch, billowing around my hips, like sheets pinned out to dry.

‘Sorry, Madame,’ I said, not knowing what else to say.

‘I do not believe you are.’ She laughed, and that jerked my head up in surprise, almost drew a laugh out of me in return. ‘I see your Mr Langton has come back at last,’ she said.

He’s not mine. I wanted to ask if she knew whether he’d come back for me, or what was to happen to me, where I could go. I wanted to shout, How could he leave me here? Too many thoughts crowded my head and smothered each other, so I said nothing. Silence threaded itself between us. At last, she smoothed her palms down over her skirt. ‘Well. I must go in there and be presented to him. No choice.’