‘You will be able to talk freely about your parents in time. When there is more distance.’

‘Yeah, right, like two hundred years?’ he snapped, unable to censor either his thoughts or his words with this woman.

‘If it takes that long, so be it,’ she snapped back. ‘And, by the way, you are a very impertinent young man.’

‘Sorry. My mind’s not my own these days.’ He raised an eyebrow at her.

Mrs Seacole continued to read. ‘As I grew into womanhood, I began to indulge that longing to travel which will never leave me while I have health and vigour. I was never weary of tracing upon an old map the route to England; and never followed with my gaze the stately ships homeward bound without longing to be in them, and see the blue hills of Jamaica fade into the distance.’ Looking out of the window, she viewed the landscape of barren rocks for the longest while.

Stanley attempted to bring her round. ‘I’m a traveller now. I don’t know where I’ll end up, but the ride can be so exhilarating. It’s like I’m walking on a map of the world and the white cliffs of Dover have faded into memory.’ He’d never seen the white cliffs of Dover, but it was a romantic image and it worked. She turned back to him.

‘A little suffering is necessary, because it can make us search our souls very, very deeply.’

‘Isn’t life funny like that?’ he blurted out, for want of anything more meaningful to say.

‘No, it is not,’ she reprimanded. ‘Life is a very serious matter. Especially when it no longer fills you up from the inside, but has abandoned you to watch it as an observer who can sympathize but no longer empathize.

‘Now, let me continue. How I longed to escape the suffocating restraints of slave society in Jamaica. As soon as it was possible, I left, even though I knew that as a woman travelling alone I eschewed respectability in the eyes of my countrymen. In Panama, where I was fondly known as Aunty Seacole or the Yellow Doctress, I tended cholera victims, surviving all manner of hoodlum nonsense and the ghastly disease itself. I had previously tended the English on Jamaica who were dying from yellow fever. Those poor unfortunates had little resistance to it.’

He interrupted her flow: ‘How could you help those who were there to profit from slavery? They were the lowest form of humanity.’

‘While I do not have to explain myself to you, I will tell you this: it was my duty as a healer to help those who needed me. And you are a very judgemental person, I do believe.’