Have you ever wondered how long it takes someone to die when they’ve been bricked up behind a wall, in a standing position, with so much cloth steeped in poison stuffed into their mouth that they can barely breathe never mind scream out? No, I don’t suppose you have. I don’t know the answer because you’re not in any position to notice the time when that sort of thing is happening to you. But immortalised in poetry, where things are measured spatially not temporally, I see that Mr Browning kills me off somewhere between the forty-fifth and forty-sixth line.

The narrative instigator of this outrage was not a poet but my demonstrably unloving husband. The Duke of Ferrara. Paranoid jealousy doesn’t begin to cover it. Enough to fill a book, let alone a dramatic monologue. It basically boiled down to too large an ego and too small a penis. A lethal combination. Especially for a wife. Not that I ever let on. No, I did the best I could. Soothed it, stroked it, flattered it, buttered it up, laid it on thick and sucked up to it. But it was never enough. He always needed more. It even made him suspect me of the same sort of rigmarole with others. A lady never tells, of course.

So, he had me murdered. Gave commands that dear Fra Pandolf’s painting of me (how subtly the artist coaxed the colour into my cheeks) hang on the wall behind which he had had me buried alive. Then he had the painting hidden by a curtain, like a veil (or a shroud), only he draws back. But despite the cloth and the bricks, I am not silent, as you can tell; nor at peace, because it hardly counts as a proper funeral, does it?

And now he’s at it again, sounding out my replacement. Though this time, I notice he’s being more careful to make it known to the family what he expects. Not that he is spelling it out plainly. That would mean admitting he’d made a mistake with me. Lowering himself in the eyes of his inferiors. And, as I know to my cost, in such a fashion he chooses never to stoop.

I am aware of an ambiguity, earlier on, about whether my particular rigmarole with the Duke was over his ego or his other parts. As I said, a lady never tells.