Chapter Twenty-Seven

Two weeks later, I went to Cheapside on my mistress’s command.

Laddie opened the door himself. His flat was three flights above a bakery on Gant Street. The smell of muscovado and burning sugar seeped out as I drew near to it, reminding me of hot cane juice, of Sukey and her stumps. It was a smell that brought the spittle up, let me tell you ‒ most of you wouldn’t be as mad as you are on sweets if you’d ever caught the smell of a boiling house.

A woman passed me on the stairs, scratched her thigh through her skirts and gave me a hard stare. ‘You looking for Laddie.’ It wasn’t a question.

His room was bare as a stripped bed. The furniture ragged, but scrubbed clean. A soapy smell rose above the ovens’ hot, syrupy breath. A sheet had been pinned over the single window and a thin white candle guttered on top of the table. I saw his black suit slumped off a hook on the door. He narrowed his eyes. ‘What do you want?’

When I said nothing, he went back to studying himself in a sliver of glass, poking his swollen eye, his purple jaw. It seemed I’d caught him in the act of cleaning off a fight. Blood gleamed on the floor. One of his cheeks was pasted with it. He wore nothing but a pair of breeches, wiped his face with his shirt, and spat into the washbasin.

‘I’m bone-tired, little mulatta. I’ll be bedding down in ten minutes, asleep in fifteen. You have five to tell me what you want.’

I made a show of looking around me. ‘Mr African Genius. What would they say if they could see this?’

He raised a brow. ‘Whatever them have to say about it, their concern, not mine.’

I thrust out the letter. ‘I was sent to deliver this. From my mistress.’

‘Which mistress is yours?’ He settled himself on his pallet.

‘You know perfectly well which one,’ I said, and he laughed. I crossed the room, no more than two steps, and set the letter down on his chest. ‘I’m to await your response.’

‘Madame Benham got no footman to deliver her letters?’ He broke the seal, squinted down at the letter and read it aloud.

‘Mr Cambridge,

I have been thinking a great deal about your lecture. Antagonism disguised to amuse. It is a rare talent, to hit dead on the mark, killing off your target before they see the arrow coming. You do for your pleasure what they think you do for theirs.

I am chair of a committee that is organizing a debate sponsored by the Society. The motion is as follows: “What is the purpose of variety of the species of humankind?” Might I interest you in taking part?

Please believe I would be delighted to know you again. Indeed, the entire Benham family would be most gratified, I am sure, to hear how well you have fared since you left us.