Hep Elliot clapped his back. ‘Mr Cambridge! That was a triumph! Plenty to chew on. You are clever.’

His eyes were fierce above his white cravat. ‘Most whites will be impressed with anything that comes out of a black’s mouth, Miss Elliot, if it’s dressed up in plain English. One can never know if one is being praised for being good, or simply for being good enough.’ He sliced his eyes towards Madame. ‘What did you think?’

She grinned. ‘Oh, I thought you were magnificent. I really did. A young black Moses, smashing your tablets of stone!’

Hep Elliot coughed, and Laddie threw back his head and laughed. A bark of laughter that showed all his teeth.

It is impossible to be both black and a woman. Did you know that? No one was asking me to give any lectures. They allow some blacks to impress them. Men like Sancho, Equiano . . . Yet I fail to see what was so impressive about them. They wrote, yes. But thousands could, if someone would bother to teach them. And everything they wrote was written for whites. Petitions. Appeals. It’s another of this world’s laws. Blacks will write only about suffering, and only for white people, as if our purpose here is to change their minds.

All Olaudah Cambridge had done was get himself shipped over when he was too young to be a servant, young enough to be a toy.

Trays of cordial were passed by waiters bearing silver trays. The pair of them stood close together for a long time, in their own private conversation, and I stood in my place near the door, holding my glass, my eyes ticking, like hands on a clock. I was drowning so deeply in my own thoughts that I hardly noticed when Hep Elliot drifted near, looking from me to them. I took a sip of foul-tasting cordial. ‘Oh,’ she said, in her drumbeat voice. ‘Oh. I see. I see. I – Well . . .’ She needled her brows together. ‘Someone should give you a warning, poor girl. Meg’s been spoiled, you see. She’ll only return the affections of those who spoil her in return. And only for a time. See that look he’s giving her? Like a man in church? It’s the way everyone looks at her. That’s the trouble with Meg.’

The trouble wasn’t the way he looked at her. It was the way she looked at him.

On the way back, all she could talk about was how surprised she’d been, how Laddie had carved his own life, made himself his own man, and was to be admired for it. Benham’s old words jumped into my head as I listened to her, and I thought, Where is the sport in chasing something you’re bound to catch?

A hard seed lodged itself in my gut. When she leaned over me at the writing desk later that night, I pulled away.

‘As soon as we leave this room, I vanish. That is all your trick.’ I stood, put us face to face. For the first time I noticed how thin she was becoming. Her head was nothing but a curve of skin over skull, her jaw hard as the air between us. Her eyes had a hot-wax shine. Was it the drug? I’d watched her drink steadily all afternoon. Laudanum might have been one part of her nerves, that evening, but I was worried that the other part had been Laddie himself. I didn’t know which shamed me more – that I had the thought or that I couldn’t manage to voice it.