A row of bodies, black bodies. Where there were no bodies at all before. They straggle against the columns, some leaning, some straight. They march down the stairs, jut elbows on the wooden railing, press chins on fists. There are so many of them. They slide onto the benches, nudging people down with their hips. They gawp. Same as everyone else. But their hands are still, their faces are ashen as the marble, and their eyes are all white, blank as paper. Unmoving. They stare and stare. I feel a blink of confusion. But then I see precisely what to scoop out of the stew of my thoughts, like a candle brought into the dark room inside my head, and I tilt my head back, the better to see them. I take in the sight of them. There’s the new-bought Coromantee. I never thought to see him again! He lost his leg under the plough, and his will to live under the Surgeon’s knife. The carpenter. Whittled to bone by yaws, and despair. The milk-toothed boy, hair springing like burrs in grass, mother-smoothed with palm oil. The man who seemed to be all belly, broad and hairy, with curling yellow toenails. Gullah, of the rum-dark eyes. I see them. I see the coach-house. The small arched windows just below the roof. The night like black oil tipped against the glass. Wind muttering against the loose pane. The cadaver, under wetted muslin. The lectern, on which stood Vesalius. De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Me, coughing. Always coughing. The thick flags of smoke from the tobacco burning in pans. And gunpowder in vinegar. The sting of the arsenic solution pumped through the corpse.

I find I can speak, after all. I raise my voice again. ‘You think I am a monster.’ The bodies nod. Heads flying every which way like cotton dolls shaken by a child.

Gullah squints her eyes. Go on.

Confess. Confess. I look down at my hands.

‘Mr John Langton, my old master, brought me to London.’

Go on.

‘He gave me as a gift to Mr Benham.’

Tell them. Tell them what you are. I glance over at the jurors on their benches, and cough. What happens to me won’t have a thing to do with what you or Jessop say, but whether these men like the look of me or not, which is a thing that is already decided: it was decided in an instant, when I was first brought into the room. The rest is only drawn out to make a show for them. And the jurors, the judge, all of you, are men, made loose by balls and bragging, with no earthly notion how tight it can get inside a woman’s skin.

Then the words pour out. ‘Mr Langton owned the Paradise estate, in Jamaica. He owned me. He and Mr Benham made a wager. They’d find a black and train him up. Discover the limits of his intelligence. That’s how Mr Benham explained it.’

One hand twists over the other. ‘Why did they choose me? Neither is here to answer. But Mr Benham once told me Langton wanted a mulatto, not a black. That was part of it. And it could also have been because I was that bastard’s own daughter. His own flesh.’