I wiped my mouth, made my way towards her. When she heard me, she swung her head. Her eyes bright and wide as the eyes of a doll. Indigo-painted cotton. She smiled. ‘Oh! Frances. I’m so glad it’s you. I am tired of being hauled back by Charles.’

My own smile stumbled out and I followed a little behind her as we walked, struck so dumb with wanting to amuse her that at first I said nothing at all. Before I could, she was speaking again, saying she couldn’t imagine me learning to read in such a dreadful place, and I understood that she’d been talking about Paradise for several minutes.

People always ask the same question, wondering how I could’ve been so taken up with novels, there of all places. They blame me more for reading through it than suffering through it, I think. Novels are heresy, in their opinion; man creating man, no need for God. But how could I not read? I always want to ask. How else would I have survived it? What would you do, sitting in a dark, locked room, if someone brought in a lighted candle? I’ll tell you. You’d read your single copy of Moll Flanders over and over until you’d oiled the pages thin from your fingers. ‘It was a wager,’ I said abruptly. ‘Between your husband and my – between Mr Benham and Mr Langton. They wanted to see whether I could be taught.’

‘Oh!’ The wind shuffled her hair. She crossed her arms and gave a little shiver. ‘They made a wager of you, and then a gift? How perfectly awful of them. But sometimes they can be perfectly awful men.’

I coughed. I couldn’t speak about Paradise, but I couldn’t be silent either. ‘Books were my companions,’ I said at last, raising my voice above the wind sweeping the leaves and her skirts. ‘And I am grateful I could learn something, no matter how I came to do so. It was a way to know that lives could change, that they could be filled with adventures. There were times I pretended I was a lady in a novel or a romance myself. It might sound foolish. But it made me feel a part of a world that otherwise I could never belong to.’

I stopped. We’d come to the end of the path, I could see the gates that would lead us back to the street, black railings staked into the cobblestones, and Pru standing there waiting for us. I felt I’d made a fool of myself, but I’d also felt weight spilling out of me. My head going light. The memory flying into it of that other weight, wriggling in my hands. I’d thought to forget it, blot it like an error on a page. But everything a body does is still there inside it, even under all the time that bleeds over it.

I jumped in my skin. The memory seared my mind, like a kipper held in a hot pan.