All through it, Miss-bella stood silent, arms folded, face as smooth as milk. When I looked up it was Phibbah she was watching, not me. Her narrow smile stretched between them, tight as sewn thread. She nodded, made her eyes go small. It was as if some inside part of her travelled across that dirt while she herself stood still, went right out across the yard, and spoke something to Phibbah. In the end, it was Phibbah who cast her eyes to the dirt, looked away first. Swallowing and swallowing, though there was nothing in her mouth. Slowly, the others drifted away. Only Miss-bella still watching.

But it was Phibbah who carried me to the cook-room, set me on my pallet, fetched one of the liniments she made with whiskey stolen from Langton’s drinks cabinet. She clattered down a plate of johnnycakes, but I only stared at them, hunger wrestling pride, then pushed the plate away. I’d trapped my anger, like a bird in a cage. She bent forward over the grill, shoulders going like bellows, held a slab of salted cod spitting into the flame. ‘Harder for me than you,’ she said. I said nothing. ‘She dress you like a doll, now she want train you like a pet. But if Langton catch the two o’ you at it, reading, it’s you going feel it. You hear? Listen, Frances.’ She spat out my name, like another loosened tooth. ‘Listen to me. Not one thing in this world more dangerous than a white woman when she bored. You hear?’

I shrugged. Nothing in my world had been more dangerous than her that afternoon. I could see her fingers trembling on the cod’s flesh, but she didn’t lift them. She was going to blister her hands. Serve her right.

‘But you don’ –’

I got up.

‘Where you going?’

She followed me out. The dogs leaped up, trailed over, their backs curved like ship’s skeletons, looking for scraps. ‘Go on!’ she yelled at them. ‘G’weh!’

She gripped my hand. There was a long silence between us while I let her hold me. When I looked up, I saw her cheek beating, like a heart. ‘You never stop to think why is you get pick. You think is luck? Only you could think is luck.’

‘What’s wrong with wanting to learn something?’

‘Learn to want what you’ve got.’

‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘What I got?’

She stared and stared and I stared back. A smile cracked her face, she started to shake, and then the shaking crawled slowly over her whole body, like molasses on the boil. She threw her head back and laughed and laughed. And then I laughed too.

Chapter Four

I’m trying to write this story as if it’s mine. Yet I look back over what I’ve set down so far and see how much of my own paper and ink I’ve spent on Miss-bella. The trouble is nothing ever happened to me except through her. That’s just how it was. So many in England have said that must have taught me how to hate. How you must have hated them, Frannie Langton! The pair of them! But the truth is not a cloth every man can cut to fit himself. The truth is there was love as well as hate. The truth is, the love hurt worse.