Him not just the devil you know, Phibbah would have said. You and him the same devil. I shook it off; shook her off.

He looked across the table at Madame. ‘I hope Frances is making herself useful.’

‘Frances?’ The light made her face all shadows and sharp bones. She raised her glass, so that champagne clouded her from view, stared at him through it, eyes squeezed as if she was trying to remember who I was. ‘Oh, yes. I am sure she is.’

Her cold words knocked me like a beaten rug. She picked up her spoon and pecked it at her bowl of soup. She didn’t say, ‘Frances? She and I have become such friends.’ She didn’t look at me at all. You’d never have believed she was the same woman who’d twirled in the kitchen hand in hand with her servants. I might as well have been a book-end, for all the attention either of them paid me. Useful. There to serve. Staying where I was put. She was a show pony, glossed by candlelight so her powder-blue dress shone, bright as false coins. I was a mule. My thoughts went roaming out of the room again, to the woman in the park, wind giving her little taps, holding her loose hair back. I began to wonder, had I imagined her?

Ha! Niggers have no imagination. I heard Langton’s voice in my head.

Soup, then sweetbreads with caviar. Fried soles and button mushrooms. Tomatoes stuffed with olives. Tongue, glistening pink in its little paper crown. Then beef. The kitchen had smelt of bacon all morning from the white soup simmering on the stove. Each dish was to appear at their elbows, as if they’d conjured it themselves. Dining à la Russe, Linux called it. ‘Make sure you’re neither seen nor heard.’ Well, I’d wished to be invisible, hadn’t I? There I was, put in my place.

I remember now, writing this, something else Linux had said, when she’d been undressing me in the scullery, stuffing me into the linsey dress. I’d asked why she hated me, and she’d jerked her head up in surprise. ‘Hate you? Oh. No. The Lord made you, girl, just as He made me, just as He made Charles and Prudence and Mr Casterwick. Just as He made Mr Benham. Just as He made the King. God is our superintendent. We are, all of us, and every bird and every flower and every leaf, under His hand. But we are in different ranks! You do not even begin to understand the work Mr Benham does. Nor do I. Nor he ours. There is a natural order and when you know your part in it, and do your work, no matter what it is, in the knowledge that it is God’s work, then you will work with all your heart, for you will be working for the Lord and not for human masters.’

Madame lifted her glass again. Watching her, I was ashamed to recognize the stirring of the admiration I’d felt in the park, in spite of my thoughts. The curse of a kicked dog’s devotion. ‘Have you been enjoying your visit to our little hamlet, Mr Langton?’