She thought it was important for women not just to live in the world, but to think about it. ‘Thinking is so much better than living,’ she said. ‘Montaigne said all the wisdom in the world teaches us not to be afraid of dying.’

Sometimes Benham came in there, too, and they spoke in whispers or not at all. Sometimes her friends came, ladies whose skirts made noises like doves on a branch. But most often, it was just the pair of us. She read to me The Castle of Otranto and Vathek during the weeks that followed, but neither affected me as Frankenstein had.

A month passed. February to March. She said she wanted to open Levenhall before the end of the Season. Soon every day seemed to start with a salon, and end with a soirée, the lower rooms lit bright as stars. I usually took down a book with me, or a bit of sewing, so I could keep my head down and my fingers working, pulling stitches, or following the lines. Perhaps it will impress you that Mr Zachary Macaulay himself called often. Always following behind a group of milk-faced women with tight hair, like a rooster with his hens. He was tall and thin, very pink in the cheeks, white hair waving like rat’s whiskers. The first time, he pressed my hands in his. What a grip he had, for someone who looked so weak.

‘What a pleasure to have you in England, girl.’

I didn’t much like his palabber, or his airs of hawkish charity. But I felt the same about all of them. Why is it that every white you’ll ever meet either wants to tame you or rescue you? What no one will admit about the anti-slavers is that they’ve all got a slaver’s appetite for misery, even if they want to do different things with it. And, for all their talk of men as brothers, most of them stared at me as if I had two heads.

‘She’s quite the reader, isn’t she, Meg? All those novels?’

Benham had asked the day before whether I’d try my hand at a poem or two, no doubt wondering might he have his own Phillis Wheatley. I suspect she led a very sad life, if it was the kind that impressed them. Doing all those parlour tricks. And what they never tell you about her is that she didn’t die a poet, she died a maid.

I could never trust someone who’d rather read a slave history than a novel, which was what many of them confessed: ‘Surely novels are a mere frippery, Frances, when you think of the weight of suffering in the world. They make such a great fuss out of nothing.’

‘Why not?’ I answered. ‘In the end, life makes nothing out of such a fuss.’

Oh, they all hollered at that. I was as amusing to them as a dog walking on its hind legs.

But misery is certain as a wound clock. There’s no need to go chasing after it.