‘Well, then, you can’ make no palabber about sitting where you put you-self.’

She waved her hand. ‘Do you really think I chose to put myself anywhere on this estate?’ We watched her slurp at her tea, set it aside. ‘If only my father or my husband would see sense, I’d be down there. On the next fast clipper to Bristol.’

Manso swung past us with his tin pail, crying, ‘Sook! Sook!’ calling in the cows, lifting his feet across the yard like the mad rooster that had only one rolling eye. Near the shed he shook salt into little mounds. The cows shambled over and licked at it with slow tongues.

To this day, I remember what happened then, because what happened then changed my life, for better and for worse. Miss-bella closed her eyes, rested her book on her knees, creeping her fingers across the leather cover. I saw a D nestled into it. A breeze tussling with the pages. Manso whistling his commands to the cows. Come in, come in. The book lay there, just another thing I wanted. Pages white as peeled apples. White as cleaned sheets. There came a wildness in me. How can I explain it? All went quiet, like when an owl flies overhead. Not even the ticking of the fan. I reached up for it, my hand flooding her lap, then realized what I had done, jerked back, snagged myself on Miss-bella’s skirt, scrabbled to my feet. She leaped up also. The book tumbled off her lap and into the water. My stomach pitched, like something tossed onto an ocean.

‘Frances!’

The fan stopped.

‘I’m sorry, missus,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I fished it out and swiped at it with a corner of my frock, fright rattling inside my head. She slapped me. My head like a fish on a line, her hand the hook. Legs flowing to the floor.

That whole island was sun-addled. Heat like biting ants. Light like blades.

I wiped and wiped and wiped. I used my hands, my skirt, shook that book like a mop-head, trying to coax it dry. I wanted to cry but dared not, not while Manso was watching. When I was small he might have given me one of his skewed winks as he passed by, or let me hold the salt on my palm, feel a cow lick, but not any more. House-niggers were the one thing they all hated worse than cane.

I sat by the stables, wiping. I could hear the horses and their whining breaths. Even after the others had gone in from the cane-piece and there was only the mockingbird’s kee-kee-pip to tell me I wasn’t alone, I was still there, wiping. My shadow in the dirt. She’d said I must sit there. ‘Make sure you don’t try to crawl into any shade. I’ll be watching.’

Would she?

She and Phibbah would be in the receiving room, Phibbah setting out the rum. Who knew where on that estate her husband would be?