She took another swallow, and crossed to the window, still holding her vial. ‘First, he tells me to take Laddie off the wall, and then this.’

She pinched his name out, as if it would sting to say it. I gave her a hard stare. ‘Who is Laddie?’

‘Someone who disappeared. That is what they do best here. Pretend not to see a thing, fermer les yeux and – voilà! – it is not there. The greatest trick in English sleeves. Making things disappear.’

She went back to the window. ‘He would only tolerate my little scribbles, anyway, if he could have some guarantee they would be inferior to his.’ She laughed. ‘I was tempted to promise that.’

She always spoke slowly. Because she was foreign, she said. Afraid of making a mistake. She tapped out words the way you tap a walking stick. Cautious. She stood and chewed at her nail. I could hear the small wet sounds of her breath, and moved to stand beside her, not knowing what else to do. This close, her beauty slipped, like a bad wig. Sharp bones, thin mouth. I pressed my hands into the sash.

‘What is the point of writing for oneself alone?’ she said. And then, ‘Perhaps clever men should be permitted to marry only women with empty heads.’

‘No man can be as clever as the world thinks he is,’ I said, and a laugh cracked out of her, took her by surprise.

She looked at me, her face pleated with a smile. ‘You are amusing,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I should write about my marriage. About him. Publish anonymously. That would serve him right.’

Fat drops of rain slapped the window. Outside, mist clung to hard earth. A cobweb of light hung over the pond, though it was murky and green and had a scum of leaves on it. I could see Pru, beating a rug out over the hawthorn, her shoes slipping in the dew. We stood in silence for a long time. The next thing she said made me whip my head around: ‘London is full of so many people, yet all of them so alone.’

The laudanum bottle rested in the crook of her arm, uncapped. The rotten-plum smell of it rose into the air. She took another swig. The closeness of the room, the weather, the quiet made me brave. ‘Why did you marry?’ I asked.

She laughed, sent her tongue out for stray drops. ‘It was easy as a wrong sum. I wanted his fortune. He wanted my looks.’

Weeks passed, then a month, taking us into April. Soon they all got used to the sight of me. Meg’s black. On her perch at the window bench. I gazed around that room so many times. Now that Benham had had his way, the paintings were all of battlefields: bayoneted horses with rolling eyes, soldiers dying in blood. I stared through the window at the pond, and the grass, which was bright again, and the birds, which had delighted her by coming back.