I spent the next four weeks in the drugged, dislocated half-sleep of a caterpillar in its chrysalis. I found that my body had acquired strange new tastes: I ate quantities of sweets and cakes, much to Tabby’s uncritical delight, although I had never been fond of such things before, and instead of tea I began to drink lemonade. I was not allowed out of the garden-the servants saw to it that if I wanted fresh air there was always someone to keep me company as I sat by the pond or on the terrace, Em with her light-hearted babble or Tabby, inarticulate but unfailingly kind, the sleeves of her flowered smock turned up to reveal her thick red arms, her chapped, agile fingers busy with sewing or crochet. As the weather turned grim I spent hours at the window watching the rain and working at my embroidery: for the first time I actually enjoyed the tedious task of setting stitches. Sometimes the whole day passed without my noticing it and without my having formulated a single coherent thought. There were vast spaces in my mind where I remembered nothing at all, and between these spaces spun fragmented images which sometimes caught me unawares, blinding me with their sudden intensity.

One morning when Henry was out Aunt May called with Mother; my senses were so confused that day that for a while I hardly recognized them. Mother was resplendent in a pink coat and bonnet of ostrich-feathers, talking animatedly about a Mr Zellini who had taken her for a ride in his gig. Aunt May looked older and, as I kissed her, I found myself half crying for no real reason, remembering with a sudden nostalgia the old days in Cranbourn Alley.

She looked at me shrewdly from bright black eyes, holding me tightly against her hard, flat chest and murmured, so low that I could hardly hear her: ‘Oh, Effie, come home. You know you’ll always have a home with me, whatever happens. Come home with me now, before it’s too late.’

And a part of my tears was the knowledge that it was already too late. I had a new home now, a new family. At that moment a terrible sensation swept over me, of drowning in alien memories…perhaps if we had been alone I might have tried to tell Aunt May what was happening to me; but Mother was there, happily cataloguing the virtues of her Mr Zellini, Tabby was polishing in the hall, her voice raised in a lusty rendition of a music-hall song…it was so far away from Crook Street that I could not find the words to begin.

One night, as I was preparing for sleep, I thought of Mose with an abrupt, hurt longing: stunned to realize that fully two weeks had passed since I had thought of him at all. My head began to spin and I sank helplessly on to the bed, filled with a tremendous confusion, loneliness and guilt. How could I have forgotten the man I loved, the man I would have died for? What was happening to me? If I had forgotten Mose, my mother, Aunt May, what else might I have forgotten? Perhaps I was losing my mind. What happened to me at night, when I seemed to sleep so deeply? Why had I found my cloak hanging in my wardrobe dripping wet one morning, as if I had been out in the rain? Why did the level of laudanum in the bottle diminish regularly, although I never remembered taking any? And why the growing knowledge that very soon something was going to happen, something momentous?

I began to keep a diary to remind myself of things, but when I reread the written pages I found that I could not remember having written half of what I saw there. Scraps of poetry, names and scribbled drawings punctuated the rest; in some placees the writing was so different to my own that I doubted I had written it at all. My own hand was neat and rounded; this stranger’s hand was a shapeless scrawl, as if she had only recently learned her letters.

Once I opened my diary and read my name, euphemia madeleine chester written over and over again. Another time it was the names of Fanny’s cats: tisiphone, megaera, alecto, tisiphone, megaera, alecto, tisiphone…covering nearly half a page. But at other times my mind was a diamond-point of precision and clarity and it was at one of these times that I realized that Henry hated me. In the panic which followed the revelation I was able to accept, with something like joy, that I had to fight him, with all the cunning I possessed, using his own contempt for me against him. I waited, watching, and began to see what he was planning.

Tabby had warned me without meaning to, of course: as soon as she mentioned Dr Russell I knew; but the fear which had flooded me then had long since subsided. I would not let Henry win. I wrote it in my diary in blood-red capitals, so that if I suffered one of my memory-lapses I would be reminded: I was going to escape from Henry; I was going to run away with Mose; Fanny would see to that. When Henry was there I always pretended to be especially vague and somnolent…but my eyes were razor-sharp beneath my drowsy eyelids and I waited.

I knew what I was looking for.

Four weeks passed with the aching slowness of those summer afternoons when I was twelve and all Nature’s treasury lay flung outside the schoolroom’s dusty green windows. I waited, deliberately working myself to exhaustion in the studio so that when I eventually had to come home I would be able to present at least the semblance of sanity. The studio walls were covered with studies: profiles, full-faces, three-quarters, hands, details of hair, eyes, lips. I worked at a pace bordering upon mania; I littered the floor with sketches in watercolours, chalks and inks, every one perfect, infused with the clarity of my lover’s memory.

On Saturday I went to my Bond Street supplier and bought a superb canvas, stretched and treated, the largest canvas I had ever thought to use. It was fully eight feet high and five feet across, and because it was already pinned to its frame I had to pay two men to transport it from the shop to my studio. But it was worth every penny of the twenty pounds I paid for it, for as soon as I had it set up against my easel I began to sketch feverishly, directly on to the beautiful creamy surface the monstrous, sublime figures of my fantasy.

I suppose you have seen my Scheherazade: she hangs at the Academy even today, queening it over the Rossettis and the Millaises and the Hunts with all the colours of the spectrum in her cryptic eyes. She is rather taller than life; almost naked against a background of blurred Oriental drapery. Her body is barely mature, hard and slim and graceful; her skin is the colour of weak tea, her hands long and expressive with raking, green-painted fingernails. Her hair falls nearly to her feet (I have bent the truth a very little, but the rest is real, believe me) and there is a suggestion of a strut in her posture as she stands watching the watcher, defiant in her nakedness, mocking his guilty desire. She is gloriously immodest, reaching out to include the spectator in some exotic tale of perilous adventure; her face is flushed with the excitement of the tale and there is mockery and a wild humour around her mouth. At her feet lies an open book, the leaves fluttering randomly, and in the shadows two wolves lie waiting, teeth bared and eyes like sulphur. If you look at the frame you will find a fragment from a poem inscribed there:

Who goes to find Scheherazade

By land or air or sail?

Who dares to kiss her crimson lips

And lives to tell the tale?

I dare to seek Scheherazade

A thousand nights and one.

I seek her in the waning moon

And in the sinking sun.

O who can keep Scheherazade

Beyond the rising sun?

I’ll seek her in the waning moon

A thousand nights and one.

On Thursday I came home earlier than usual: the vision of my half-completed Scheherazade was too powerful for me that day. I had left the studio in haste, omitting to change, my head suddenly filled with an ache which surged monstrously into the bloodshot orbits of my eyes. I had left my chloral at home and, as soon as I reached Cromwell Square, I ran directly to my room and the midnight-blue vial. I was halfway to the medicine closet, the bedroom door ajar behind me, when I saw her, frozen beside my writing-desk, as if by keeping quite still she thought she might pass unnoticed.