She finished up the last row, palmed her hand down over my brow. My scalp tingled under her hand.

‘My old master brought me to England too, you know. I ever told you? Is like them trying them damnedest to make sure we all have the same story.’ Her face moved like water as she spoke. ‘We hardly even reach good when that old bastard cock up him toes. The landlady turn me out, though the rent was paid in advance.’

Before they came, the summer she turned sixteen, he had sold Sal’s children out from under her to pay off some card-game debt. Three of them, the smallest only ten months. She dreamed of killing him. She supposed they were his children too, though he never saw it that way. Then one day he came to her and said he needed to see a man about a dog, in England – something to do with his no-good grown children – and couldn’t do without her.

‘So. We come here. Apoplexy give me my free paper. And there I am. Right out on the streets. I ask myself, What now? And then I hear the answer, plain as day: Sally Beckwith, no more buckra massa going pull you out the cane-piece and fuck you for free and then make you take the shame of it and the blame of it.’

Next morning, I couldn’t eat. My own nerves flavoured the bread sour, turned the coffee solid in my throat. The faces of the other girls danced around the table, wild-eyed. ‘You’ll be all right, Fran,’ they said. Their laughs still came easy. But the truth was, no one knew what would happen to me, and the only reason for them being awake so early was because they wanted to find out. I sat tall, drumming my fingers. Sooner or later everybody’s luck turns bad. Sal reached under the table, patted my knee. ‘You be all right,’ she mouthed.

Mrs Slap was in her library, having a smoke. She laughed, as soon as I went in, flicked a spear of ash into her tray. ‘I see you have gone dark,’ she said. ‘But we’ve had a request, not a complaint. Seems your thirsts quench his. Lucky for you. He wants more of the same, every Saturday, usual time. And try not to kill him.’

She waved a hand; smoke closed around her like fog.

So, far from being turned out, I became notorious. As Sal was fond of saying, I had to beat the customers away after that. (Ha!) Everybody wanted Ebony Fran. The African savage.

Her specialities were the ones who wanted scarring.

Chapter Thirty-Six

After a week or two, I was the only one who still fretted about those minutes, like something that had rolled under a bed. That time when my head had gone dark and filled with blood. What terrified me was that the world hadn’t so much fallen away as fallen into place. That I was the one submitting, even when it was I who wielded the whip. For all those weeks, I lived in terror of closing my eyes. Whenever I did, there was the coach-house, burning to the ground, and me standing inside it, my hands moving, but the rest of me stuck in mud. At Paradise, time began and ended with the scalpel in my hand. In between, it seeped black. And it had been the same blackness with Henry; that very blackness you say I must use now, as the cornerstone of my defence. Telling me to say it must have been the drug, since I couldn’t have been in my right mind, if I killed them as they say I did.