Words came sweeping out of me the same way I’d seen Miss-bella pray, loud and clipped and beaten. I can’t even remember now what I read, but I do remember that when I shunted the book onto the railing, he gestured at it. ‘That’s yours. To keep.’ I didn’t know what he meant, until he dragged me sideways like a lady’s hem, and said I must start tearing out pages.

Swathes of time go dark on us, but it’s not as if we have a say which ones. This whole incident comes back in one long bright line, though I wish I could swallow it down the way he made me swallow Candide. Paper mashing to gristle in my throat. Him tapering above, wondering aloud who’d taught one of his niggers to read. As if there weren’t only two candidates on that whole estate. I ate until it felt the paper was digging a hole in me, then ate until all I wanted was to crawl into that same hole. But then he stopped short, as if something had pricked him, which he’d have to pull out and look at later.

By the time he did, I’d eaten so many pages of Candide, I vomited down my chest. He let me off easy. It was only later I even thought to wonder why.

Chapter Five

Miss-bella was so terrified of sickness she was bound to get sick. On day one, Phibbah had told her the three things she had to do to survive Jamaica. Walk barefooted, so the ground could season her feet; wear cotton instead of wool; and bathe, like it or not. The English hated baths, but no white could survive Jamaica unless they bathed twice a day.

‘To survive in nigger territory,’ Miss-bella used to say, ‘one would be wise to take a nigger’s word.’ Phibbah burned smoke-pots that made all the rooms hazy with smoke and the smell of orange, to keep the mosquitoes at bay; she rubbed Miss-bella with salves and ointments she made herself, and dragged her kicking into the tin bath morning and night. All those years, she guarded Miss-bella’s health as if her own life depended on it.

For Phibbah was a doctoress. She had the knowledge from her mother, old knowledge. So long as you carried it in your head they couldn’t take it away, she used to say. Not like weapons, or food, or clothes. Everyone came to her. Yaws to aching feet, she knew what to do for it. How to use capsicum peppers, prickly-yellow wood, guinea rush, John-to-Heal, which Miss-bella called ipecac. Dirt-scratch medicine, the Surgeon called it. Nigger cures. Barks and twigs and leaves. Simply a monkey scratching around in the dirt and finding something by chance to fix his monkey ailments.

The year after I learned to read, a botanist paid a visit to Langton. A Mr Thomson. Hunched, thin, with a wisp of beard like a goat, a black ledger tucked under his arm. He wore a grey wool coat, even at noon, said he was travelling island to island. Someone next door at Mesopotamia had told him about Phibbah so he drove himself up in one of their mule-carts, said he’d come to see the magic Negress for himself. At dinner, he turned the pig ribs over and over in his hands as if he’d never seen the like, sucked seven of them clean to the bone in dead silence, and only after there was no meat left did the talk pour out of him, lips and fingers oiled by grease, about his travels in Cuba and Haiti, the specimens he’d gathered, the pharmacopoeia he was going to write when he returned to Dorset. ‘These Negro Doctors –’