A. I suppose.

Q. Now. Let’s come on to Mr Olaudah Cambridge, Miss Elliot. Also known as Laddie Lightning. What did you know of him?

Chapter Twenty

It grows so hot in my cell that the air is thick and damp, and always there is the rattle of bolts, the hammering of boots in the passages, the shrieking from the other cells, worse in the moment just after it stops because then it keeps ringing in my head. When I’m not writing, my head’s as empty as any gaol-bird’s. The slightest sound rolls around and around in it, and that’s when thoughts of her spill in, and cause me at times to doubt my own account. Not just of the murder, but of the love. It’s nonsense to say it didn’t happen. That it was all in my head. They say so only for Benham’s protection. But a dead man’s reputation means nothing to a dead man. They took my letter away from me when they first brought me here so that I cannot prove it. And though I have no care about proving it to them, some days I have a powerful need to prove it to myself.

How I wish I still had that folded scrap. Creases oily as fish skin, her handwriting sprawled across the page, the single line that she had copied out herself:

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.

They say it didn’t happen only because they can’t believe it could. A woman like her loving a woman like me.

It was all in your head, Frannie Langton.

No. It was there on paper too. Black marks. Necromancing marks, with all the power to bring her from the dead. It was the only letter I ever got from anybody.

It was all in your head, they say. But where else is love if not in your head? And, as Sal used to say, why is it that fucking is always our story, and love is always theirs?

It started when she said I should sleep in her room one night, so as not to wake up Pru when we got back.

We’d been to Almack’s. She wore her men’s costume. Breeches and a cambric shirt. Told me to wear one of the dresses she’d given me, a striped velvet, though I don’t know why, for I sat in the maids’ room all night.

Maids’ room was what they called it, but it was in truth the withdrawing room, where the ladies came to relieve themselves, attended by their own maid. I sat near one of the little screens beside a potted plant. Hands folded in my lap. The ladies had been coming and going, and now it was quiet. Some of the other maids gave tight smiles, nodded hello. But none approached me. I overheard some of them talking and, having nothing better to do, I strained my ears to listen.

‘My own mistress says there was talk the poor mite would have been left worrying Meg didn’t love him after all, the way he was turned out ‒ bags into the street, and his own arse behind them. The real problem might have been that Mr Benham suspected she loved him too much. That last Season he lived with them, they took up fencing, the two of them together ‒ alone! He hung off her carriage at every party, too, like some shameless baboon. Too big to fit inside by then! She must have known it wouldn’t be possible to carry on like that after the boy had grown.’