Chapter Forty-Seven

The baby was asleep on the table. I could hear its mother outside, scratching at the door. As if that would tell him she was there. It was a relief when it stopped, but it always started again.

Langton had sent for her as soon as the pair of them arrived. Bought in from Antigua, thanks to Pomfrey. ‘Bring me that pickney tomorrow. You hear?’ Switching to Creole talk, same way he always did with his slaves. ‘I’ll let you sabi when you can come get him back.’

She wrung her hands. ‘How long, Massa?’

Three full days, so far. But I’d seen the papers in his skull-cupboard. He was selling the mother on. Cart was coming for her in the morning, she just didn’t know it yet. He was going to keep the child. For observation, he said.

‘What for?’ I’d asked.

‘To note the limits of its intelligence, identify its capacity for learning.’

Same thing that pair of demons had been doing with me.

He only made me take the usual measurements, to start with, watched me snapping the calipers open, fixing them in place, slapped at them when I didn’t work fast enough. I curved my palm over the span of the baby’s head, the pale frizz of its hair. Protecting it. From him, from me. Startled when he spoke again.

‘Skin,’ he said. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

With the Surgeon dead, I’d had to learn dissection, whether I liked it or not. What would Benham have written about any of this, if I had told him? Certainly not how I quailed, looking down at that child. How I felt my stomach curl. How panic thickened my breath. Ahead of me lay the same two choices as always. Do what Langton wanted, or do what I wanted.

Not this, not this. Please not this.

I lifted the scalpel, set it down again, knotted my hands together.

I would never be able to confess it to anyone. But it wouldn’t matter whether I confessed or not because I would know.

Oh, I stated my objections. The child was too young, should not be separated from his mother; the coach-house wasn’t a place to keep an infant; how did he think he could raise one in there? And on and on. But to no avail. ‘This is the worst thing you’ve asked of me,’ I said.

‘Pickney going hardly feel it,’ he replied.

My head crowded with things he’d said over the years.

Blacks don’t feel pain. It’s what makes them so well suited to the work.

God doesn’t waste good souls in black bodies.

George Benham is forced to come to me, for a change. All this data flowing from colonial laboratories.

Look at you. Even you. Proving that the principal thing you’re made for is following my instructions.

Only God knew what else lay in store for that child, but I didn’t want to find out.

The scalpel had slipped. Plunged into my own hand. Hardly a surprise, the way they shook.