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must see that. You must
sense
that, if you have any sense or any heart at all.”
    And then she brought out some small part of the whole, before she could stop herself, something I might have expected and that I’m sure she believed. Whether or not she thought saying it would help her leave the garret alive, or whether she thought it was her last word before dying, she blurted it out and it was as sincere as a child’s prayer in a hurricane: “Mr. Boswell’s a lovely man. He’s a lovely happy man to be with, whatever else. You know it yourself, sir.”
    I held my breath, and I uncocked the dags, because I could not trust myself not to shoot her by impulse alone. The anger was awake now, entirely awake and livid, pouring through my chest, down my arms. I could feel it heating my cheeks. But it wasn’t her, I realized that even in the midst of it, so much as it was him and what he’d done to the inside of her little black head. A thing that only James could manage: he’d made her genuinely grateful for his whoring her out to himself.
    But I’d expected something similar before I entered the room. And I had laid my own plans as well. So I told her the very least of what she should know. “Listen well, fool. I followed your lovely happy man this morning, you know, every step of the way before he came to you, and I can tell you that you weren’t the first he had before his cup of tea.”
    She threw her arm over her face, twisted on the bed.
    “He was with the nymphs in St. James’s Park, Peggy Doig, and by my count you were number three this day. Three as in one more than two, and one less than four. And you may very well not be the last. And don’t think for an instant that your Charles will be the last of his kind either. He likes his housemaids, James does, and waiting maids and laundry maids and charwomen, and if you’re wondering why he’s a happy man it’s because the Kingdom’s packed to the rafters with them.”
    A whisper, barely audible: “Don’t say sich things. Please, sir. Just leave me be.”
    “But I said there were two things I’ve come to do. The second is to give you this.” From my coat I took a small heavy leather purse, and I threw it onto the mat next to her. It bounced and clinked and settled, and she knew it was full of guineas without once touching it. Her hands stayed where they were, but she looked at it, and the hand went back to her smicket, holding it down against her leg.
    “There are fifteen guineas there. As much, I should imagine, as you would make in two years of trundling your mop. With the ten James has given you, you have now twenty-five in total, a small fortune for a girl such as yourself. It is yours upon one condition only, and that is that you never see James again. Never for a moment, even.”
    She was still covering her face, but she was listening, searching the sky beyond the window, breath coming in small slow gasps. A part of her had begun to hope against hope, even amid the horrors of the morning, that she might somehow be bailed from the confinement of her own life. She had no way of knowing that the guineas, like the letters, had been taken from James’s rooms last night, while he was sitting up late with Johnson and his stone-blind charity-case Miss Williams.
    I went on, letting her mind work. “Now that he knows where to find you, now that he knows this room, and the trick of the coffin-maker’s stair, he will be back, and soon. His talk about many months was a fit of post-coital responsibility. And when he comes back it won’t be for anything but finally to consume you, like a left-over pudding, for which he has a half-hearted late-night craving. That is the long and short of it. And in so doing he’ll ensure that you destroy even what little security you have here, which is little indeed, and it will all be lovely and happy until you are cast out onto the street, and in the end he will be not a particle the worse for wear.
    “And that is why I