‘No, Miss-bella.’

‘Some brand of wickedness, I just want to know what brand.’

I shook my head, but I couldn’t say yes or no. It was some brand of wickedness. I had seen it.

‘Girl.’ She shook her head, sniffed. ‘I speak frankly, and I expect you to do the same unto me.’

‘Yes.’ I started to say more, then stopped. There was nothing frank about me, not any more.

When she turned her eyes on me, they were windowpanes. ‘I want you to consider . . .’ She stopped, bent over to set her flask on the doily, her hands slow as tar. ‘That man is your father.’

‘No.’ It slid out quick as a cough.

‘Look around, girl. Look around you.’

My voice went small, crawling back to the past, the old talk, my mind scrabbling, clutching on the overseer, the book-keeper, men I had never given any thought to before. ‘There are other white men here,’ I said. And then I staggered away from her, vomited into her roses. Head swirling like stirred soup. Everything around me stained to the same rust, the colour of the dry dirt, the walls, the bushes, even the dogs.

It was his sickness that had saved me, in the end. His body had long grown too weak to be a burden, to me or anyone else. But not before it had already happened, that first night, the nights that followed it. I would have killed him, had I known it then. I let that dark shard in, and had to keep it stored, and hurting, in my chest.

I went down early. Linux was in the kitchen alone, nursing a cup of tea. She was staring down at a pile of coins, and looked up when I came in and said they were for me, so it came to me that she must be turning me out, that they were my wages and, without thinking, I reached out a hand –

‘No. When you come back down. You’re to go up, now. Madame wants you.’

Her door was open. Books tumbled around the desk in a bramble of cloth and leather. There was a faint smell of fruit, heedless and ripe. A musk of leather and ink. Lilies in a vase on her mantelpiece.

I saw her, crouched among the books. Cleared my throat.

‘Frances! Yes. Sit.’ She pointed to an armchair, one of a pair, yellow with a winding pattern of blue leaves, pulled close to the fireplace. ‘Just a moment, I am . . . looking for something.’

I could map that room now, needing no compass. My fingers my only tools. Seven steps from the japanned bed to the writing desk, four steps from there to the red cabinet painted with storks. Between them, the portrait of the woman with dark hair and pale cheeks, raised onto her elbows, the field around her dotted yellow, her gown a freshly butchered red. The woman in red. On the mantel, Madame’s little wooden box, with her initials carved into it – MD – ringed by bluebells.