I was at the wardrobe now, pulling out the items one by one and throwing them on the bed until I found what I was looking for. The pale blue velvet jacket that I had picked out for Vincent to wear at Crillick’s wretched party. I looked from the design embroidered on its lapel – two lions bearing a laurel wreath – to the paper I held in my hand and back again. I willed them to be different but they were one and the same. Grace was staring at me as though I was cracked. I’d had such strange dreams while I recovered from the mix of opium drink and bitter cold, but this waking nightmare was real. Woodward Trading was Vincent’s company. The warehouse where Crillick had kept the Leopard Lady belonged to him too!

‘Come on, Zillah. It’s time to go.’

It was Vincent himself at the door. I scrunched the paper into a ball and stuffed it in my pocket.

‘Won’t you hurry up? The carriage is waiting.’

I stood blinking at him before he stepped into the room and grabbed my arm and said, ‘Come on, you goose.’

As he prattled on about the picnic he had bought for us, I stumbled in his wake struggling to understand the enormity of what I had learnt. Vincent the owner of the warehouse where the Leopard Lady was kept. However many times I turned it over in my head, I couldn’t quite believe it.

XXI

A Picnic at Richmond

The parkland stretched as far as the eye could see. But though it had the flowers I’d imagined, the feeling it gave me was not a patch on what I’d felt when I sat before the painted flats at Crillick’s theatre. Maybe it was the October weather – the sky grey with a threat of rain to come – or perhaps it was because the Zillah who had wanted all it had to offer was no more. Vincent had been helping Crillick hide the Leopard Lady all along. We sat on a tartan picnic blanket, its corners weighted down so it wouldn’t blow away in the wind. Cucumber sandwiches with bread sliced thin as paper, a selection of cheeses, even a pork pie. We ate it all in silence and every morsel was like a mouthful of cotton wool.

‘You’re so far away from me,’ Vincent said. He patted the ground beside him, encouraging me to shuffle over, but we both knew that was not what he meant.

‘Why can’t things be like they were a few weeks ago?’ he said. It was the first time I’d thought of his voice as whiny. A few weeks ago, I’d been made headliner and Crillick was in France. It felt like a different lifetime. Before the Leopard Lady I’d been a different Zillah.