Lucy with her blazing face. Her defiant equestrian neck. Her swaying, working girl’s hips. She is squeezed into a theatrical replica of a gentlewoman’s attire, which makes her look like a moulting peacock. Cream boned bodice with pasteboard stomacher, quince-yellow ribbons threaded through. A green and purple ruffled skirt with a wheel farthingale inside that makes getting through doorways difficult. Voluminous puffed sleeves, fringed with lace, are dusty and fragile as spiders’ webs.

Dry and brittle coconut husk head

braided into cane rows

worked up towards a knotted plait at her crown.

Two clan scars float delicately

down her cheekbone,

like the sapling blades of a paradise palm.

Lucy is distinguished from all the other working girls in no greater

way than the exquisite design on her back.

A circle of cicatrice dots

stamped betwixt shoulder blades,

like a disc of sunflower florets.

An alphabet for clients

to decipher with dumbstruck hands,

as if it holds the secret to her.

A wonderful new hieroglyphics

from the African world over the oceans

only seafaring men can imagine.

Another time. Another place. Another people. Perhaps not fully human at all.

But Lucy has no time for the sentimental longings of an African Albion. Her home over Jordan. Her Jerusalem.

She cannot remember much about her village on the Guinea coast, or the ship Jesus of Lübeck that brought her west in 1563; but she will never forget Lady Margaret Measse of Linton in Yorkshire, who purchased Lucy precisely so she could set her newly freed charge on the villainous, boggy road to London, with enough shillings to pay for inns and coaches and enough money to last a year when she arrived. Not enough for a lifetime, though.

Harlot! Doxy! Meretrix! Lucy Negro, who used to trade outside the Swan, a beershop in Turnbull Street.

A straw pallet is slumped against the wall in the far-right corner of the room. It is like a disgruntled innkeeper with rolls of overlapping fat who has fallen asleep drunk, having discharged semen into her. It has a coverlet of dogswain and a dirty grey bolster at the head. A gentleman’s black cloak is flung upon it.

Lucy bites her bottom lip, wincing when she feels the scab. A warrant from the Queene was recently posted on the streets.

Her Majestie understanding that there are of late divers blackamoores brought into this realme, of which kinde there are all ready here to manie …

Her Majesty’s pleasure therefore ys that those kinde of people should be sent forth of the lande …

The soldiers will hunt her down. This is worse than her worst nightmare: the torture of pilliwinks upon her fingers, the accusation Witch!

She is not alone. Centre stage. William.