A year later, I heard that he had sent Pomfrey on the hunt for a white Negro, an albino infant ‘less than four years of age’. I speculated as to what he could want with it. White Negroes are rarer than hen’s teeth. They won’t be found in the usual course of trade, not even on the blackest of black markets, not even by that black character, Pomfrey. There’d been a craze for albinos in the middle of the last century. A four-year-old white Negro had been exhibited in the Paris expositions in 1744, at the Académie Royale des Sciences. Maupertuis and Voltaire made such a meal of their own examinations on that occasion! (Voltaire’s own description, of an animal called a man because it had the gift of speech, memory, a little of what we call reason, and a sort of face ‒ deliciously ironic from the man who wrote Candide!) There have been albinos exhibited in this fair city as well, of course: for example, Amelia Newsham, the white Negress, at the Bartholomew Fair at the end of the last century.

I admit to being torn. No naturalist would pass up a chance to examine such a rare creature. Langton might have seen it as his chance to prove that skin colour, and the other national characteristics, are innate rather than superficial. If the albino were like all other blacks, he would be black in the inner parts as well, in the bile and the blood, and would possess all the other Negro traits. I confess to a momentary excitement at the thought of what one could do with access to such a subject, but not even that would persuade me to join forces with Langton again. I knew he’d long been troubled by the argument that the little blafard exhibited in Paris was proof of a vestigial link between black and white, and even more by the assertion that humans were originally black (for blacks had bred whites but no whites had ever bred blacks). That would smash his polygenetic arguments that the races are in fact two entirely separate species.

Perhaps Langton was simply curious; perhaps he merely wanted one of his own to keep, as Buffon had done with his Geneviève, his ‘high-breasted, sugar-breathed’ Geneviève. But I don’t believe it is possible to be too unfair when it comes to Langton’s motives.

The infant is my best chance of killing all of my birds with a single shot, since I suspect it might be the worst example of Langton’s behaviour. I asked her: ‘About the baby?’

She jumped, her eyes flew up to me.

ADDENDUM

Have been able to glean some additional facts from her. As with all good confessions, it started with one small, mitigating lie. She says it was nothing to do with her, but Langton did obtain an albino, from the Montpelier estate in Antigua. She does not know (said coyly) how this was possible, given abolition of the trade. The infant was already owned, and, she presumed, that was why he could be purchased. Nor did she know what their intentions were. (This last may indeed be true. I don’t think those two Bedlamites knew themselves.)