In the meantime, I remain, yours faithfully,

Mme Marguerite Benham.’

‘Not a love letter, then. Pity.’ He folded the paper into a kite, sent it tripping across the room. ‘That family. They ever gratified? By anything?’ He laughed again, leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes. ‘That woman as crazy as the rest. And somehow I doubt it was my lecture she found fascinating.’

Voices floated in, a woman’s, then a man’s, and bobbed away downstairs, like ash in the wind. I wanted nothing more than to leave that room, but I found myself stuck fast. It could have been the drug, which often weighted my limbs in those days, and made everything thick and slow, including my thoughts. She had been giving me little sips, from her own vial. Laudanum softens everything to the same grey shapes as an English fog. Any feeling – whether hope, anger, or happiness – becomes just a flicker in the dark. It was why I loved it. It leaves nothing sharp except eyes. His peered at me through the haze. ‘No,’ he said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘To the Devil with her. Tell your mistress some niggers happy to make themselves into a bit of sport for bored bluestockings. But not this one.’

I bristled. It wasn’t laudanum that made my feet stick to the floorboards, I thought, but him. Something about him. Watching him was like pricking pins into my own thumb. ‘Is that right?’ I said. ‘There is talk that you were sport for her once upon a time.’

‘Is there? Oh, she won’t like that.’ He licked at his lip, brought his hand up to wipe at the blood. ‘What do you think happens to page boys when they grow up?’

‘You went to Cambridge, that’s what I heard.’

‘They toss you out! With the night-soil. Into the shit bucket. Not even the mercy of a bullet to the head.’

I had a mind to slap him, nick his gut with his little sliver of mirror. ‘Very well. Your answer is no.’

‘You run around like this for her all the time?’

Blood, like a taper touched to my face. ‘I didn’t come here to quarrel with you.’

‘No. You did what you came for, yet you still here.’

Before I left, I found myself turning, blurting out, ‘You not better than anybody else. White men pay you a sovereign a time to hammer your nose in. You monkey up speeches. White ladies paw at you like some cat.’

He shrugged. ‘Every black in London either a maid or a whore or a prizefighter. If you get the chance to do another thing, any different thing, you take it.’

‘Any different thing?’ I tossed back. The words scraped through my throat. ‘Like that doxy who was leaving here when I was coming up? I can sniff out a man who sells women, you know.’

He laughed, loud and long. He sprang to his feet, and gripped my elbows. It was like being banded by a snake. He brought his face close to mine. His skin was still damp, blood-warm. He smelt like meat. His voice came swift and hard.