I twisted my hands into the grass. ‘Well. What were they saying?’

A pause. ‘Nothing kind.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Who? Lightning?’

‘Yes. To her.’

She looked up at the sky, dark as her cigar ash, stars simmering through the trees. Then she brushed down her skirts, sucked her teeth. ‘I never hear any of it.’

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Though it was Madame I craved news of, I learned more about Benham at the School-house than in all the time I lived under his nose. If I think about him now, I think about all those words he wrote, scrubbing his own history sure as Pru scrubbed his floors. And that eulogy, saying that though he might have differed with his great friend on the answer to the slavery question, they were united in seeing it as the cement of England’s fortunes. They agreed that the Negro had a natural place, they simply disagreed about how to treat him while he was in it. Benham himself would be quickest to tell you he campaigned for improvements, let me sit at his own table, cut the cord with Langton, who was despicable in truth (though he let him sit at his table too). But there’s a split in the minds of men like him, because it’s also true that he once told me he might not want to abuse his Negroes, but neither did he want to marry them, and that this world was built on slavery, from pyramids to plantations, that we’re all members of the same human species; nevertheless there is a hierarchy of men.

‘At least,’ Langton used to say, ‘I put my hands right down in that dirt beside a nigger. I walk through that same dirt barefoot beside him, too. Before I make him cut my cane.’

Who’s to say which of them was God, and which the Devil? Or whether they were both devils or both gods. They both owned slaves, and no man can be virtuous who does.

Whenever I write about Benham, I remember something you said about the arsenic, the receipt from Apothecary Jones that Jessop waved at the jurors, how you argued that it was like Cobbett’s red herring, drawn across the path to put the hounds off the scent. But the same could be said of Benham and Langton, too. They were savages, yet it’s my so-called savagery that’s being drawn across the path now, leading everyone away from theirs.

Benham’s eyes had become as raw-rimmed as my own before I left, as if he, too, had fallen under the spell of some drug. Keeping to those night-time hours of his. The truth is, there was less to George Benham than met the eye. Spying on her, asking me to spy too, when all along he was the one who needed watching. Yet nobody was watching him.

I took the newspapers every morning. And Langton wasn’t the only ghost to find his way to me by that route. One morning it was raining, so there was no chance of a walk. I took my bread up to my room, with a scoop of jam, and an apricot fancy for Sal. She brought her little mirror, and propped it on my mantel while she shaved her head. I watched her smooth soap across her scalp, crooning some tune under her breath. Then I looked down at the paper and the shock climbed up into my throat.