‘Who’s covering tomorrow night?’

‘Yours truly,’ she said triumphantly. ‘It’s exactly the sort of experience I need for when I go to New York.’ She stood up, before launching into a burst of song. She hadn’t said much about her dreams of America lately, but she hadn’t forgotten them.

‘Very pretty,’ I said. It was what she’d wanted for so long. I couldn’t blame her for being excited.

‘You were in a bad way, Zillah. Lucky that exporter found you. Down by the docks it could’ve been anyone. You should’ve known better than to go there on your own like that. What on earth were you doing? Has it come back to you yet? Takes a while, it does. You must have had enough to knock out a horse.’

I remembered the sun coming up, being wrapped in a blanket. There was a man and his wife. I remembered now. They’d found me shivering whilst I waited for the first boat back upriver. The man had been kind, but the woman had asked if I was a runaway.

‘I thought it was laudanum,’ I said.

‘I trust it’s taught you not to steal from me,’ Ellen said. She accompanied it with a laugh, but not an entirely kind one.

Ill as I’d been, she wasn’t above a dig. There was something reassuring in her spikiness. I’d had to grasp and fight and strive for the little I had, so when Vincent called me his Princess and treated me like cut glass, it could throw me off balance. I was not a woman who’d been brought up to be treasured. That’s one of the things I had loved so much about Eustace. That before we were lovers, we were friends and he treated me as such.

‘It’ll come back to you in dribs and drabs,’ Ellen said, helping herself to one of the breakfast rolls that Grace had left out for me. I hadn’t been hungry when I woke up and even now I felt queasy.

‘Bet your stomach’s been a bit dicky too, has it?’ Ellen said. I finally realised: she was enjoying this. I’d been crouched over the pot, my stomach cramping and I felt my face heat with embarrassment.

‘That’ll wear off soon enough. The worst is the day after and you’ve got through that now. Why did you end up there, though? Barky asked me and I couldn’t work it out.’