‘You will be free to go, once you have had some supper,’ he tells me. ‘Free to go anywhere. But you know what you must do before that, don’t you? And if you don’t do it, then I will track you down again. Now there is a good gown in the wardrobe, and your pick of bonnets and boots and all sorts of girlish things. Get dressed and go and fetch me my Mrs Rose.’

‘And what if she won’t come with me?’

‘She will come,’ he soothes. ‘She is weak-minded and opportunistic, and she will be desperate to see what she can get from you this time.’

‘And what if I can’t? I have friends. Family. They will come to my rescue if I need them.’

He laughs, tilting his head to the ceiling. His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat, and I think I would like to hang him myself.

‘You will do me the one single favour I ask, or you won’t see your friends or your family again,’ he replies.

The coffee house where Mrs Rose plies her trade is full of men who look like university scholars and physicians, all talking politics. They gather on long benches, but the proprietor nods me towards a stool at the side and sits me down, then sets a cup of cocoa and a dish of walnuts on the shelf beside me. I am not the only woman here. There are one or two others, rouged and cross-legged, dangling from their stools and looking unimpressed by me.

I have a kerchief about my neck, a white lace one, to cover my rope-mark and I am wearing what the whores do: gaudy skirts with a flash of petticoat underneath. But as I sit on the stool, I come to understand that I really am no great beauty, for the debating intellectuals remain more interested in their conversation than in the new arrival.

I never thought I was beautiful, but it smarts to see them ignore me. I finish my cocoa and my mouth waters for a gin, but there is no liquor in the place. None of the other women drink their cocoa, their little cups and saucers growing stone-cold on the bench. I pat my mouth with my fingers and feel quite awkward.

But all of this is swiftly overtaken when, in a sweep of skirts, Mrs Rose arrives and I remember the enormity of the awful task ahead.

She is much changed. Her face is drawn and painted in brighter hues to compensate. She looks as though she has had molars pulled – that is how sucked-in her cheeks have become. She wears strings of cheap glass beads across a white bosom. Her hair is piled too high and is set with too many red ribbons. Joan would say she has gone to rot.