The baby cried and cried, and could not be consoled. Langton leaped to his feet. ‘Careful! Careful. Idiot girl! Can’t afford to lose him.’ Not for the first time, I knew he’d gone mad, and felt I’d gone mad with him. I looked him dead in the eye, holding my injured hand.

‘I cannot do this.’

In response, he kissed his teeth. It had never been about what I could do, just what I would.

But, mercifully, the accident convinced him to pause. Give me time. ‘Put yourself back together,’ he said, nodding at the cut on my hand.

Water. Bandages. A tincture, to calm the child. Nothing could calm me.

Afterwards, Langton had spent the afternoon studying Helvetius and Voltaire. Their notes on their own examinations of white Negroes, Helvetius’s speech concerning ‘the little white born to black parents, who displayed a limited intelligence’.

Now he was pulling the infant’s toes apart to squint between them. I’d never seen anything whiter than that baby. Whiter than a frog’s belly. Whiter than a bucket of skimmed milk. Eyelashes pink as gums.

I went over to the basin, scooped some water up to scrub across my cheeks, let it seep through my fingers, numb my face. Stared at him down the long length of the room.

The space was heavy with the smells of lime and gunpowder, the syrupy light of the candles on the table, darkness spilling like water into the space around them. Silence rang loud as church bells in my head. The baby twitched its foot out of Langton’s quivering hand.

I hated his hands. His work-starved fingers. His nails, which I was required to cut. Hated that I’d once stood in that same spot undoing my own buttons yet he’d said not one word about why I should not. How I had hated him for that.

I hated him with my whole soul, but I was stitched to him. Therefore, worst of all, I hated myself.

How he made me look inside all those bodies.

I hated the man named Benham, who had given him the idea.

Now that I look back on it I realize Miss-bella had taught me for spite, but he had finished it for the same reason. That day he made me swallow those pages, he must have known he’d found the very thing he needed, to tempt Benham’s interest.

I went over and lifted the child away. He woke with a startle. I could hear his mother, through the door, trying not to sound angry, trying to sound like she was begging, instead. ‘You took my baby. Thought you supposed to give him back? What you doing to him?’

Hate twisted in my chest. And dread, too. Of the next day, and what would be expected of me. And of the day after that.

Langton said he was going back to the house, told me to keep an eye on the child. I had to grind my teeth not to answer him.