We stepped over a woman slumped over her bottle, her infant on the ground rooting for its mother’s nipple. We navigated an alley that stank of piss and beer. In it I spied someone—two someones, under a cloak; one straining to get away but the other pressing down…they writhed, guttural.

The Dragonfly was lit inside for a party, all men but for a fat woman lifting a tray of pies. I was the youngest and soon the men started calling me Old Soldier. Then I saw other youths at the front, two girls and a boy. My guardian went off to fetch brandy and I became squashed between officers boasting Admiral Vernon’s triumph in Portobello and Sir Chaloner Ogle’s fleet assembling at Spithead. I felt queasy—I always had a bad stomach even then, and was ashamed to be getting sent home, and the shame made me sicker. I vomited in the pot where an aloe towered behind the buffet that bore slices of boiled tongue and a tureen of coffee.

One of Blakeney’s 27th officers lifted a silver platter high in the air as if it was extremely important though it was empty.

He laid it on the table.

I wondered why it had no sweetmeats or tarts on it. It glittered bare for half an hour while the men made a hubbub that stung my head. I threaded through them to see if the girls and the boy would play with me but the fat woman pinched me and said, Leave them to their work.

The fairest girl had hair of strawberry blond, lighter than mine with a glow like sunset on buttercups. The boy was one of Colonel Halpern’s slaves, shorter than me, and dark black. The other girl was black-haired and fair and she picked the skin round her thumbnails when she thought no one was watching. But all the men in the room were looking at her, though I don’t think they saw her picked fingers.

The men peeped out the corners of their eyes, pretending not to see the girls or the boy. After a while they glanced more directly, but still hesitant or unsure, as if the youths had come in the wrong door and were here by accident and needed showing out to the sweet shop on Broad Street for a lick of barley sugar, which was where I badly wished to be.

Then the girls and the slave started peeling their clothes off. The men stopped talking and set their coffee cups down and gravitated to the end of the room away from the youths, but none took their eyes away. The farther they moved to the end of the room, the more they stared.

Shadows pooled between the girls’ ribs as in wet sand at low tide. Their hair hung down as in a painting my nurse Betty once showed me of mermaids.