A door slammed below and the noise rattled up through brick and plaster and glass. I felt light as ash spat out of a fire. I couldn’t think what I would do next, where I would go, if I was being turned out. I sat holding my sore wrist with my other hand, watching her. She nudged her books, gave them little smiles and pats. ‘Montaigne . . . Johnson . . . Wollstonecraft! Ah! But look at you . . .’ She lifted one, flicked it open: ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be, before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain.’ She looked up. Her eyes glittered like pins scattered on a floor. Last night’s ice had melted and she had decided we’d be friends once more, it seemed, now that there was no one to bear witness to it. ‘La! Isn’t that just it? Have you read Keats?’

‘I haven’t.’

‘Pity.’ She came across and dropped it into my lap. ‘I think it is true that the best art is driven by fear. The artist swarming with ideas! Like ants, or termites, can you imagine? Eating away. What an image.’

‘Am I being turned out?’ I asked abruptly.

She laughed. ‘What?’

I drew myself up. ‘I am not sorry I said what I said.’

‘No! Nor should you be. Why, I quite felt like standing up and clapping, when you put that awful man in his place. He speaks as if our fate is shot like an arrow into foetal clay. Fixed. Unchangeable. But Locke said we must suppose the mind to be white paper. A tabula rasa. One could take any child and make of him a scholar or a thief.’ She put out a hand. ‘I heard what happened, of course. I am sorry about it. Are you quite all right?’ I held my hand away and would not let her look. ‘I will have a word with Mrs Linux. It will not happen again. She has God’s patience. All that smiting and punishing. But I inherited her with marriage, like the dowager’s pearls, which never warmed to me either, mind you. Mr Benham will not let me dismiss her. She dotes on him. When I first married, I said to myself, a woman with such an attachment to a man must be his mistress. Or his bastard. Though she is neither . . . Have I shocked you? I am too frank, I know. Full to the brim with bad habits.’

‘Do you know what happened to him?’

‘Mr Langton? Mr Benham saw to it. He was returned to his inn. The doctor was called.’

If he died, I thought, I would have been the one to kill him. And that thought made me glad.

She pulled back. ‘Ah! There.’ She’d spied a volume on the floor near the hearth. ‘This is what I was looking for.’ She picked it up, read aloud: ‘I have spent my life in idle longing, without saying a word, in the presence of those whom I loved most –’