For a moment, I could not determine whence the question had come. My heart pounded as I searched about the room. So deadened to the world had my senses been that in the short time I had stood in that place I had failed to note who sat in judgement over me. I turned my head and then spied the judge, or president as they called him, and the jury to the other side of me, each of them a proud patriot, adorned in their rosettes and tricolour sashes.

‘I am Henrietta Katherine Lightfoot. I am twenty years of age. I am an Englishwoman, living in Paris, until of late in the Hôtel Blanquefort, upon the rue Saint-Honoré, Section Saint-Honoré.’

At the announcement of my nationality there came a wild noise from the barn of beasts.

‘Citizeness Lightfoot is charged with corresponding and conspiring with émigrés and assisting the counter-revolution. She is also charged with harbouring in her employment the conspirator and traitoress Thérèse-Marie Bertrand,’ came a high-pitched cock’s crow of a voice.

This last proclamation had been the cue for the prosecutor, Monsieur Fouquier-Tinville, to step forward. Such an odious, hateful scoundrel as he I have never had the misfortune of again encountering. He wore a scowl so unmoving, so deeply etched into his features that I was certain his very heart was hewn of marble. He wore his hair long, undressed and without a ribbon to tie it back, and two great hooped earrings, as if he were an African savage. I had come to notice that of late, many of the most zealous had taken to such an unkempt style. They preferred to attire themselves as would lawless bandits and ruffians so as to pretend that they had not been born as men of learning, nor practised as lawyers or schoolmasters. Striding across the courtroom in his jackboots, he looked more like a messenger just dismounted from his horse at an inn than an official of state.

Something in the sight of him stirred me. My otherwise muted heart, which until that instant felt nothing, sparked to life. Contempt began to burn within me. It rose into a sense of fury at those monsters who gathered in the gallery and who laughed at my misfortunes and howled for my death. It raged at Her. It was Her deceptions that had led me to this place, She, whom I had called mother. It was She who had sent Thérèse Bertrand to her death. Where was She now? I wondered. Where was She as I stood falsely accused for her crimes?