‘Will we do that again?’ I asked.

Her laugh tunnelled under my skin. ‘It is all I have wanted since the first day.’

‘On the steps?’

‘On your knees! In soap. Even then. I never saw anybody like you. When we first came here, there were these almond macarons my maman would buy, when we had money . . . She found a French baker, near Spitalfields. You remind me of those . . . you . . . your skin.’ She bent to nip at my ear. ‘I wanted to see you. You must have known, surely, when I came to the kitchen that night?’

Her words slowed my thoughts to molasses.

She smoothed a hand over my ribs. ‘Just think. You are scribing my confessions, and now my body comes also under your spell. You will know me, body and soul, n’est-ce pas? Though self-revelation is never pretty . . . Richelieu said all he needed was six lines in any honest man’s hand, and he could find something in them to hang him with . . .’

I felt the blood moving through me. I felt swollen with it. I looked at her. ‘I don’t believe there’s any such thing as an honest man.’

Life is a brief candle but love is a craving for time. Therefore, I was already cursed to want what I couldn’t have. What I wanted was to learn her inch by inch. To read her like a book that wouldn’t end. I lay beside her, watching the small waves of her breath against the sheet, lashes thick with sleep.

Just before she slept, she’d asked me to move my pallet to her room for good: ‘Many ladies do the same with their maids! Had this house been properly designed, there would already be a maid’s bedroom over there, where the dressing room is. You could bring your pallet here.’

I turned and turned, and my mind turned also. I lay awake until I heard the first stirrings of the house, the screeches of doors that needed oiling, and Benham’s bell from his library below us. He’d be wanting tea, and kippers and coddled eggs, Pru would be up to start the sweeping, Linux would be running her hand along the banisters, making sure Levenhall gleamed, as it always did. The world cannot be kept long at bay.

I had said yes. But had I been answering as lover or maid?

‘Where would I sleep?’ I’d asked.

Towards the end, Phibbah had slept nights with Miss-bella, at the foot of her bed. Oh, Phibbah. What would she say now? I could almost hear her, laughing.

You go on thinking this white woman for you. None of them can be for us. All ducks don’t dabble in the same hole.

Chapter Twenty-Three

‘There is so much flesh on show in that painting that Mr Benham will not allow it in any other room of this house,’ she said.

We were lying across her bed, looking up at the woman in red. It was a painting by her mother, she’d said, and it had been done after they came to England, one of the two things Madame had brought with her when she married Benham, the other being the little egg chest that her father had brought from France, which she’d had carved with her once-upon-a-time initials – MD, for Marguerite Delacroix. The violin, like her father, was long gone.