Q. And she gave you the same excuse?

Mr Pettigrew: My Lord –

Court: Yes, yes. Mr Jessop, need I remind you to refrain from leading the witness?

Mr Jessop: How did she respond, Mrs Linux, on that occasion?

A. Same as before, sir. Said she’d heard a noise, only that time she said it was a scream. I remember that because it gave me a chill down my spine.

Chapter Nineteen

You want a confession. Or an explanation. Give me something I can save your neck with. Well. I am guilty of this. I was a woman who loved a woman, chief among the womanly sins, like barrenness and thinking. After that, my thoughts were all of her, and coarse and lewd, disturbing as dog-barks. Oh, the shock of it. The wrongness. The dark, surprising glee.

That was the beginning of all my misery and all my joy. So close to what I wanted, yet just as far away. She was writing her own confessions after the manner of Mr Rousseau, who said he wrote his as a portrait. Mr Rousseau also wrote that man was born free but is everywhere in chains. I didn’t know what chains he could have been speaking of. Page-gazers like him feel the weight of chains in a feather. When I told her that, she laughed: ‘Indeed. Let one of them try being born a woman.’

She dictated, and I wrote. Her family had fled to England from France when she was a small girl, and soon discovered you can’t eat noble titles, though you can suck on bedsheets. Many French starved, she said. Her father had brought his violin and a little chest, in which he kept his eggs. He couldn’t bear to be parted from them. Mistle thrushes and wagtails and eagles all came with them, wrapped in cotton in his little box, yet he hadn’t thought to bring something his wife and daughter could actually eat. The violin proved useful, however. After a while, he found work tutoring the children of one of the landed families in Wiltshire. It was there that George Benham had found her.

Most afternoons, she wanted to sit in the parlour and read.

‘Oh, but of course you must come down with me, Frances!’ she said. She sat on the blue damask sofa, me at the window. She wanted me to read Mathilda, so I would know what she was talking about when I scribed her essay. I read it and didn’t like it, and didn’t know what I could say to her about it. In the end, I said only that, having had no father or mother, I was nobody’s daughter. When I told her I’d never read Frankenstein, she said she’d read it to me. We passed three afternoons on that adventure, my heart thudding as I listened with my head resting on the glass behind me. By the time she read, ‘I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer be felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct,’ I burned myself, with the urge to weep. I felt tears creeping behind my eyes and had to turn my face away from her.