‘He always plays husband after staying out all night,’ she said, from the bed. ‘The manners of a tomcat. Blow in at daybreak, snarl out complaints, eat, then sleep all morning.’

The gifts kept coming the whole time I stayed with her in that room: sweetmeats; nuts; jewelled pins; once, a kaleidoscope, the kind of gift you’d send a child. But the man himself never did. Which suited me, of course.

I crackled a sweet out of its wrapper. ‘Let him stay out all night.’

I asked her where he went. ‘I have never asked,’ she replied, ‘and he has never said.’

I remembered what she’d said to Linux, that night in the kitchen. How lonely she’d seemed. No doubt he keeps a mistress, I thought. There’d have been nothing odd in that: those ton marriages make a wife of one woman and a courtesan of the next. But I didn’t like to think about the times when she might be required to play wife to him, so I selected a little marzipan heart, just as if I was a lady in a shop, crossed the carpet to stand over her.

My hand skimming her thigh, lifting her gown. Her eyes flying open. A dart of shock. A smile. I snapped the heart between my teeth, and then put my tongue to hers. She pulled me to the bed. Came over me. A soft rain of hair falling against my face.

The other thing I didn’t like to think about. That now she was keeping a mistress of her own.

Then we had to go down for breakfast, though neither of us could bear to face him. But he wanted them to be seen taking meals together, she said. And if she had to, so did I. He was already at the table, lining up the cutlery beside his plate, even though Casterwick would have had the inch-rule to them twice that morning. I stopped at the sideboard, slid an egg into a cup, for her, poured her chocolate. There was a hush when we took our seats, but some men see silence as a net, to toss their own words into. ‘Good to see that you’re fit again, Meg. A man expects a sighting of his wife from time to time.’

‘I am lucky you have such low expectations.’

He made a noise like a laugh. ‘All the better for you to meet them, then, my dear.’

She sent a smile across to me, as if to say, Patience. The quicker we endure this, the quicker we go upstairs.

I leaned back into the pinch of my dress, kept my gaze to the window. The weather had turned, and there was a smell of grass, and coming rain, the garden littered with curling blooms that frisked across it, like mice, when the wind lifted. Birds crying out.

I lifted my cup, marzipan sticking on my tongue. Even my coffee tasted like her.

I sent her a look. Just know I’ll come apart if we don’t go now.