I press my tongue against my teeth. Look up. The bodies nod. Go on.

‘Just to have the pages of a book beneath my fingers. Fresh air. Early mornings. A view. A mirror. And a bed. People want to see something unusual in what I did there. There was nothing strange about it. That’s what slavery is. Their minds, our hands.’

The judge creaks forward, taps his quill. ‘Mr John Langton is not on trial here, girl!’

‘You might think it was just a matter of one cut after another, like slicing a loaf, but you need all manner of tools to open a man. Scalpels, yes, but also bone-saws and scissors and double-blunt hooks. Forceps and blowpipes and needles. Knives for brains and knives for cartilages and knives for bones. Kept in a wooden chest the Surgeon bought from a ship’s doctor, fastened with two brass clasps and lined in velvet, like a rich man’s coffin. Like a set of dinner forks. Ivory handles.’ The judge is still banging, and I let the words tumble out, racing to finish.

‘I’m the one who wrote out Langton’s manuscript. Crania. He used his own slaves for his experiments. Only the dead ones, at first, for he said the dead can’t complain. But neither can slaves. Soon he decided there was more to learn about living men from living skin. He used fire, pierced their skin with small knives, even the soles of their feet, had vices fastened to their skulls, cut them open awake, sewed them up after they’d fainted. He chose who would be put to bed with whom, so he could write it down, and their offspring would be written down also.

‘He supposed that blacks would breed, not only with other blacks, but also with the orangutan. The two are close kin, he said, and other planters had tried it.

‘Well. He had me write letters for him. Most to skull-hunters, for there are men who will scavenge across the globe for any single thing you want or can imagine you want. He had me write to Mr Leforth Pomfrey, asking him to find one of those creatures, send it to Paradise by ship. That was the worst of it. When that creature came . . . that was the worst of it . . .’ Panic strokes my throat loose. ‘I was his scribe, but I was worse. I did worse. I opened bodies. Many of them. I confess it! I confess.’

I look up. ‘George Benham was just as bad ‒’

‘Enough!’ the judge shouts, his face knitted into the expression of a man straining over his pot. He looks at me, aghast.

Gripping the railing, I pause. ‘Sometimes . . . sometimes I think the whole aim of this entire universe is to force us to admit the white man has stronger magic.’

‘Prisoner at the bar!’ cries the judge. His jaws snap shut. The whole gallery is in an uproar now, benches quaking, some of the men leaping to their feet, waving broadsheets curled into batons.