I had to clench my hand in my skirts to stop myself reaching for her. I shook my head. ‘I am a fool for wanting what you cannot give.’

‘What is it that you want?’

To live together in the cottage of stone. To sit hand in hand outside and feel the heat on our faces and to walk together at the seaside, arm in arm. To tend each other, sick or well.

But those words dried inside me, like pressed flowers. She reached for my hands, and I jerked away. ‘You’re a pot of water. Cold, hot, cold.’

‘If I am the water, dear Frances, you must be the stove.’ When I made no answer, she pressed her forehead to mine, took hold of my shoulders. ‘I am trying to coax up a laugh out of you.’

I didn’t reply.

After taking her tray down, I came back to find her waiting for me. There was a letter laid on my pallet. One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love. Forgive me. Ritte. I folded it over once, then again, and again, kept it small, folded until it was small and hard, and tucked it into my sleeve. And I carried it there until the night I was arrested and brought here, when the turnkeys took it from me, in the reception room.

MORNING POST, 18 APRIL 1824

The Battle between Lightning and Sullivan

On Saturday last, Laddie Lightning fought Tom Sullivan at Fives Court near Leicester Square. Men of all shapes and sizes crowded the ring, some holding bullish-looking dogs on leashes, while hundreds of others had been forced to climb onto the surrounding roofs, or hang out of the windows overlooking the yard.

The name on everyone’s lips was that of Laddie Lightning, whom the King himself called ‘the best damn pair of blacky fists’ since Bill Richmond. The ring rose out of the centre of the courtyard like a roped-off temple. The Negro pugilist’s many nicknames followed him as he made his way through the crowd: Mungo, Black Devil, Devil’s Fist, Chimney Sweep, and the men, the dogs – even the ropes! – rippled with the excitement stirred up by the greatly anticipated bout.

Set beside the hulking Negro, Sullivan had a prepossessing appearance, his form compact and muscular. But Lightning’s first punch, a left-hander, made a noise like the slap of meat under a butcher’s fist, and he swiftly blocked the counter-punch. Although his second merely glanced off Sullivan’s cheek, it knocked him back onto his heels, and sprayed blood over those who had thought themselves lucky enough to jockey for their ringside perches. Any advantage Sullivan possessed in superior training was dashed to smithereens by Lightning’s sheer brutality. In their third set-to, the two men locked arms and foreheads and snorted at each other like bulls, white wrapped in black – Sullivan clenched tight in the Devil’s Fist! Lightning’s sixth and final punch left Sullivan reeling, penned to the corner, bleeding from his lip and one shut eye, and unable to come up to scratch, whereupon Lightning, on being declared the victor, mounted the ropes with all the energy he had brought into the ring, and entertained the large assembly by roaring out to them, ‘Black I may be, but lily-white in victory!’