“I do not want to remain at the Amwell house,” I muttered. It was not untruthful, even if it was not the whole truth. I let out a cough and felt the sticky, wet sensation of blood leaking from me. Yesterday, I’d snatched a thin cloth from the laundry and cut it into pieces, just to keep the blood from soiling my undergarments.

Nella cocked her head to one side, confused. “What of your mistress? Your work?”

“She has gone north for a few weeks to be with her family in Norwich. She left this morning, her carriage dressed in black, on account of needing to be with family while she—” I paused, repeating what she had asked me to write in several letters before she left. “While she is in mourning.”

“There must be plenty of household work to keep you busy, then.”

I shook my head. With my mistress gone, her husband dead and Sally returned from her visit with her mother, there was little for me to do. “I only write her letters, so Mrs. Amwell said I did not need to remain at the house while she was gone.”

“You write her letters? That explains your penmanship.”

“She has shaky hands. She cannot write much of anything anymore.”

“I see,” Nella said. “And so she dismissed you for a time.”

“She suggested I visit my parents in the country—in Swindon. She thought perhaps a rest would be good for me.”

Nella raised her eyebrows at this, but it was true; after I fell sobbing to the floor and Mrs. Amwell found my streak of blood on her chair, she took me in her arms. I had been inconsolable about Mr. Amwell’s released spirit, unable to quiet my hiccups, but she seemed unperturbed, even calm. How could she not see the truth? I began bleeding the very same hour that Mr. Amwell died; how could she not see that his spirit had done it to me? His ugly ghost wrapped itself around my belly that night.

No tears over this, my mistress had whispered, for this is as natural as the moon moving across the sky.

But there was nothing natural about this death-blood that still had not stopped, despite the passage of two days. My mistress had been wrong about Johanna—I knew she died in the room next to me—and she was wrong about this, too.

“And yet you did not go to Swindon,” Nella said, bringing my attention back to her.

“It is a long journey.”