‘We might as well give you the blade, too. Since you also cut out their tongues.’

When he came down among them, the men pumped his hands, and the women stared. I stood beside Madame, near the door. I had listened in silence. His words had split me, like a cord of wood, though I didn’t want to show it. They’d made me think of Phibbah. Madame’s eyes roved after him. Hep Elliot appeared at her side. ‘No sign whatsoever of the poor little wretch in your portrait, is there?’

‘No.’

‘A man now. A young black Moses, smashing his tablets of stone.’

‘If you say so.’ Madame laughed.

The crowd surged around us. ‘Thighs like thunder,’ I heard a woman saying, behind us. ‘And a face like thunder, too.’

He moved through the crowd but it was clear he was making his way towards her. He closed one hand around hers, bent to brush it with his lips. ‘Madame Bebbum,’ he said, and she threw back her head and laughed again.

‘That was his old name for me,’ she said to Hep Elliot. ‘No one has called me that in a very long time.’ She turned back to him. ‘Laddie. How very nice to see you. This is Miss Hephzibah Elliot. And my secretary, Frances Langton.’

He caught me looking at his hands and clenched them into a fist beside his jaw. ‘They ugly for true, aren’t they, little mulatta? I’m a prizefighter, you know. The next Bill Richmond!’

‘Is that right?’ Madame said.

I remember how irked I felt. The way he called me ‘little mulatta’, the way he danced around us, bobbing on his toes. His white teeth, his pomade-slick hair. A man who spends that much time on mirrors and tooth-powders isn’t to be trusted. And he was a different man from the one on stage. Rough, coarse. He used the old slave talk only when he spoke to me. With her he would oil up his smile and start to talk white again. Like so many blacks do when whites are around. The ladies looked from him to me. As if this was still part of the entertainment.

‘Your lecture left me wondering, Mr Cambridge,’ I said, feeling peevish. ‘How many years did you spend enslaved?’

She gave me a sharp look. In those days, she liked to have me with her, as her companion, but preferred me quiet, lest I give us away.

‘Not a one,’ Laddie replied smoothly, ‘having been spirited away to England at the age of four. Unless you think it’s enslavement serving as page boy to Madame Benham . . . As her secretary you would be best placed to say.’

They all sniggered, as if he’d made a good jape.

‘In other words,’ I said, cutting him off, ‘you are full of ideas, not experience. Precisely what I thought.’

‘An honest opinion! That’s rare. Where have you come from, Miss Langton?’

‘Jamaica.’

‘You were a slave?’

‘A house-girl.’

He laughed. ‘Precisely what I thought.’