Beatrice recalled the first time she’d ever seen one, just a couple of years before her almost-wedding, when she’d been in London for the Season. How astonished she had been by the balloon’s beautiful blue-and-gold colours, and the majesty of its slow rise into the star-filled sky. How she longed to go up in a balloon herself, rather than merely watching from the ground. But then the balloonist had performed his next trick to the adoring crowd by releasing two miniature ‘balloons’ from over the side. They looked like tiny versions of the real thing, except they weren’t really balloons at all, only parachutes that came down too quickly and tilted at too much of an angle, giving the crowd a good look at the terrified eyes of their two occupants.

There was a monkey in one and a puppy in another. The little monkey died when his balloon crashed to the ground, but the puppy survived, although his wicker basket was destroyed. Ignoring her aunt’s cries, Beatrice had pushed through the crowd and gathered the puppy up in her arms. The small creature trembled from head to foot and its urine spread in a warm patch down the front of her dress.

There was a great fuss when the balloonist came back down and tried to take the puppy from her, but nothing would persuade Beatrice to part from him, and eventually the man left with a payment that was double the dog’s worth. The dog had returned to Half Moon House with Beatrice after the Season, and she’d loved Wilkie ever since.

As she lay on the bed hours later, it occurred to Beatrice that opium was rather like a balloon. It took you up very high – for a while – but eventually you had to come back down, usually with a crash, and the breaking of bones, and the splintering of debris that would fly out and impale you to the mattress, so that you couldn’t move when the dead monkeys came, half-mad on their opium nightmares.

And when the monkeys touched her with their rotten fingers, the nightmares became her own and she couldn’t move to escape them. She could only lie there and relive, over and over again, the despicable thing she had done in this house when she’d turned her back on her own mother.

Many hours later she lay in the cool darkness of the bedroom, which twinkled in the silver light of the stars shining through the window. The monkeys had gone and there was only the white frog, sitting on her pillow and staring at her with its over-large eyes. It was the same creature she had seen almost twenty years ago. A golden crown shone upon its head, and in its mouth it held an envelope with her name penned in an elegant script across the front.