‘Non. You are something, Frances.’ She reached down, plucked at a blade of grass. ‘But . . . you are not happy.’

I shrugged. ‘That’s a small word.’

I turned my palm over, dug my thumbnail into it, thinking. I looked up, and held her gaze, and did not look away. ‘What we did,’ I blurted. ‘We have not even spoken of it. As if it never happened.’

She blinked.

‘And it is sending me mad.’

Oh, I knew I should not have spoken to her in that way. She was my mistress. But I could just as soon stop my own breath as hold the words back. I felt as if my heart was packed tight as gunpowder. I’d had enough of silence, of endless wanting. Of knowing my place, and staying in it.

‘I –’ She twisted her fingers among the grass stems, plucking and plucking until she pulled one loose and lifted it to bite at it.

At last, she spoke. ‘What we did . . . It was wrong of me.’

Behind us, the murmur from the ballroom, like water over rocks. She pointed towards the lake. ‘Scoop a thimbleful of that lake under a microscope and you’d see a thousand beings in it. A world in a drop. All frantic, dizzied, colliding . . . dying . . .’

My head thumped, like something beaten against a rock. ‘So?’

‘So. There are some things that cannot be brought into the light, Frances.’

‘Then let it be done in the dark!’ I cried. ‘Only let it be done.’

She turned to face me again. ‘You are a surprise.’

‘I don’t want to be a surprise.’

She laughed. ‘You are so grave . . .’

‘You’ve done it before.’

She hesitated. ‘Yes.’

A picture of Hephzibah Elliot. Watching, always watching. But, perhaps, behind that, another picture also. The one of the boy whose mistake had been to become a man.

‘With one of those other quality ladies?’

She rested her hand on my arm. ‘You are a quality lady.’

A cry rang out, behind us, and made me jump in my skin.

‘Fox,’ she said. I let out a breath, and the soft cloth of her voice wrapped around me. Kerseymere. Jersey. Silk. ‘A thing like this . . . can be warm and dark, in the beginning, delicious . . .’

‘You make it sound like molasses.’

She laughed again. ‘Even more delicious.’

Then she pulled me to her, breast to breast, leaned us against the splayed tree trunk, made her thumb a lever on my lip. ‘Open.’ My mouth parted wide as the lake, and she kissed me on my lips. Her mouth bitter as almonds. Laudanum. I saw my buttons weave in and out of their hooks, I saw her fingers, working their way down the front of me, I felt air on my breast –

Then she bent her head and took my nipple in her mouth. I jerked like somebody wasp-stung. My back struck tree bark.